Drew Landry’s Mini Special All My Friends Are Dead Is Full of Life-Affirming Laughs

There’s a no-frills attitude about Drew Landry’s mini special All My Friends Are Dead, and his approach is apt considering that his main topic—death—is much the same. We can try to dress it up with prayers and funerals, but at the end of the day someone is gone and we feel their absence with every breath we take and they don’t.

Landry may have a name that makes it sound like he’s a star quarterback, but he’s actually a comedian originally from Baltimore and now based in Los Angeles (in fairness, maybe he’s also good at football, I don’t know). His mini special stands at just under 22 minutes and was filmed at the LA Connection Comedy Theatre in late 2022. He begins by just launching into his set without any fancy introduction building him up. The unassuming start, as well as his excellent first bit about being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, immediately draw in the viewer.

Landry’s been performing stand-up since he was 13, and his on-stage ease is a large part of what makes this special work. Many of us aren’t even comfortable talking about death with our loved ones, while Landry lays bare some of the toughest moments of his life in front of strangers. Over the course of All My Friends Are Dead, he talks about the death of his childhood best friend Tucker at the age of eight, and later Tucker’s twin sister and Landry’s other best friend Ellie, who died in her 20s. Landry also examines the long-lasting effects of grief and how it crops up in strange and unnerving ways. His frank and frankly hilarious discussion of mental health is one of the special’s greatest strengths. Life’s hard and it hurts, but we can still laugh about it.