As a Grade-A class clown, Lucas Zelnick always gunned for laughs. Chanting “asshooooole” at his gym teacher during a fourth grade kickball game and lining up scented eraser bits for roundtable snorting are just two acts of mischief on his list of naughty doings. And yeah, the comedian admits, the jokes don’t necessarily hold up.
“I was a child, so none of it was funny, but it was funny to me,” Zelnick defends, mid-laugh. “Sort of a ‘you had to be there’ kind of thing.”
Now, Zelnick is a verified, touring stand-up comedian – he stops at the Creek & the Cave Dec. 4-8 – with film credits rolling in. His jokes often react to difficult social situations, deprecating the privileged and powerful; he uses his own privileged New York upbringing as a trusty point of reference.
The son of Strauss Zelnick, the former chairman of CBS and the current CEO of video game company Take-Two Interactive (yes, the one that produces Grand Theft Auto), Zelnick pursued an MBA at Stanford before taking a whack at professional comedy. Clips of his crowd work gained traction on TikTok in late 2021.
“I thought [stand-up] was lame, and I was right, but whatever,” Zelnick says. “And I was afraid of the idea of trying and failing and being bad at it.”
He wasn’t bad at it, but the Zelnick family’s brand of blatantly honest humor presented a learning curve.
“In my family, the value is: If it’s true, you can say it, because it’s true. But, it turns out, that’s not true at all,” the comedian explains. “In fact, oftentimes saying something to people that’s true is the most hurtful thing you can possibly say to them.”
Zelnick learned the hard way to dial back on his cherry-tree-honest punchlines. He remembers roasting his classmates in a comedy sketch group for the eighth grade talent show; it was all above board until they really went in on one person and she cried. A lot.
“Bombing is a feeling of going out there thinking you’re about to share a laugh with people, and instead they hate you or think you’re a really bad guy. And that is a familiar feeling,” Zelnick says. “Growing up a class clown taught me how to bomb more than it taught me how to be a good comedian. Learning how to be a good comedian took doing comedy.”
While he’s enjoying the new film opportunities – he just announced roles in upcoming indie horror Offsite and Hulu comedy Untitled BriTANicK Pizza Movie – Zelnick emphasizes how much stand-up has taught him to perform and provides him an outlet to comment on the world through the eyes of a former child jokester.
“The boundaries are definitely a little different in comedy because you get a bit more leeway than you do as a person in the world, which is what’s fun about it,” Zelnick says. “It’s like a cheat code; I can just act as I wish, and everyone seems to like it.”