{"id":649874,"date":"2026-08-21T23:56:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T23:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/649874\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T23:56:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T23:56:11","slug":"julie-klausner-calls-phone-comedy-isolating-and-reductive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/649874\/","title":{"rendered":"Julie Klausner Calls Phone Comedy \u2018Isolating\u2019 and \u2018Reductive\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJulie Klausner<\/a> would like comedy liberated from the phone and returned to the sitcom.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf I want to canvass for one cause, it is for the return of the hard comedy sitcom,\u201d the Difficult People<\/a> creator told a sold-out audience at Televerse in downtown Los Angeles, where The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s It Happened in Hollywood staged its first live episode. \u201cI think that the idea that comedy is for your phone is not great. I think that it\u2019s a little isolating. I think it\u2019s reductive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKlausner joined me for an hour devoted to Difficult People, the cult Hulu comedy she created and starred in opposite Billy Eichner<\/a>. Four clips from the series guided a conversation about its making, its reputation for being ahead of its time and the television landscape that has changed dramatically since its 2015 premiere.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe phone-comedy discussion followed a scene in which Julie Kessler and Billy Epstein, the proudly embittered struggling comedians played by Klausner and Eichner, confront an up-and-coming digital creator.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe face-off was pointed in 2015. Eleven years later, its target has largely won. Front-facing-camera videos and scrolling feeds have claimed an enormous share of comedy consumption, while traditional television has moved away from tightly constructed joke machines and toward dramedies and funny hourlong shows. Klausner cited Succession as an example of how much great comedy writing now resides in dramas.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat she misses is not simply the multicamera format or a laugh track, but the communal and emotional function of a show built around jokes. \u201cSitcoms with hard jokes and heart are beyond comforting,\u201d Klausner said. \u201cThey are a really, really important part of being connected.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe pointed to the enduring popularity of earlier ensemble comedies as evidence that younger viewers still respond to the form. \u201cThere\u2019s a reason why even young people who were born way later than 1996 are watching Friends and Seinfeld and Golden Girls reruns every night,\u201d she said. \u201cWe love and appreciate these rhythms. Shows especially about friendships are really great. They help us connect not just to different worlds, but to each other. And I really, really miss that form.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFriendship was also the protection built into Difficult People. For all the show\u2019s cruelty, one of Klausner\u2019s rules was that Julie and Billy would never seriously turn on each other. Their unconditional loyalty counterbalanced the acid surrounding them, grounding the series in what Klausner described as the special relationship between queer people and their \u201chags.\u201d The rule was broken only in the series finale, when Klausner suspected the show might not return.<\/p>\n

\n\tDifficult People began during the Obama era, a context Klausner believes matters when people call the series prophetic. Its protagonists\u2019 cynicism was then \u201cmore like salt on chocolate than salt on an open wound,\u201d she said. The show mocked sex creeps before the #MeToo movement made those conversations public and treated online snark as something fun before, in Klausner\u2019s formulation, \u201cnuclear fertilizer\u201d turned Twitter into something much uglier.<\/p>\n

\n\tIronically, the series itself grew out of an earlier internet-comedy ecosystem. Klausner was Eichner\u2019s first writer when Billy on the Street expanded from online videos into a television series. Their rapport led Amy Poehler to attach herself as a producer. USA funded a presentation before eliminating its scripted comedy department, and Hulu, then a relatively new buyer of original programming, picked up the show. Klausner remembered having to ask: \u201cWhat\u2019s Hulu?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAt Televerse, the clips demonstrated the series\u2019 density and range. In addition to the battle with the young digital creator, one transformed Julie\u2019s discovery of her Italian American roots into a Goodfellas parody. Another found Julie and Billy serving as court-mandated clowns and tormenting a child. The final selection revisited Julie\u2019s role in a catastrophically bad Woody Allen-created television series.<\/p>\n

\n\tKlausner modeled the show\u2019s intricate plotting on Curb Your Enthusiasm, constructing separate stories that would dovetail at the end of an episode. \u201cIt\u2019s like sitcom ecstasy,\u201d she said of achieving that convergence. She also assembled a cast from New York comedy and theater, including Cole Escola, who joined the writers room and played Matthew, Billy\u2019s workplace nemesis.<\/p>\n

\n\tDifficult People ran for three seasons before Hulu canceled it in 2017, but Klausner has not abandoned the characters. She also revealed new details about an existing route back. Universal commissioned a Difficult People feature screenplay from Klausner and Alex Scordelis, a writer on all three seasons. The pair completed Difficult People: Ahead of Their Time in 2022 and will stage a reading at New York\u2019s Town Hall on election night, Nov. 3<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tChristopher Meloni will play himself in the reading, Klausner said, while Cecily Strong and Michael Urie will portray what she called \u201ca bizarro version of Billy and Julie.\u201d She described the movie as a caper in the tradition of the 90-minute comedies she grew up watching, citing Foul Play, What\u2019s Up, Doc? and Bette Midler\u2019s Touchstone movies.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI hope it leads to something great happening,\u201d Klausner said. \u201cI hope that there\u2019s some opportunity to revisit this world and these characters, in whatever form that takes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA revived Difficult People would have no shortage of material. Klausner imagined Matthew falling into the \u201cClavicular manosphere.\u201d Julie might land a \u201cstreet-casted\u201d role in a Benny Safdie movie, take a dubious weight-loss drug and become \u201cthe first person to die from a panic attack.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ideas suggest that Julie and Billy remain ideally equipped to take on an increasingly surreal era of looksmaxxing, brand integration, nepo babies, prestige dramedies and vertical video. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn other words, we\u2019ve never needed Difficult People more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Julie Klausner would like comedy liberated from the phone and returned to the sitcom. \u201cIf I want to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[268],"tags":[274678,434,152217,18,117,19,17,274679,162188],"class_list":["post-649874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-billy-eichner","tag-celebrities","tag-difficult-people","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-julie-klausner","tag-thrs-original-podcasts"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117136207847553390","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}