Comics On The Rise: Raanan Hershberg Doubles Down With New Specials ‘Brave,’ ‘It Could Have Been Better’

deadline.com:

For Raanan Hershberg, this year marks perhaps the most productive of a 15-year career in stand-up. Just a couple of weeks after the release of Brave, his third comedy special self-produced and released via YouTube, he’s taking to the internet today with It Could Have Been Better, his fourth special and his first to be produced by an outside company.

Directed by Jason Katz and James Webb, Brave sees Hershberg riff on the notion of a “brave comedian,” a label that’s been applied to him by some online trolls given his tendency to aim jokes at those on both side of the political spectrum.

If there’s a theme to the special, he says, it’s “the way dogma can keep you from having a more objective sense of reality, and the ways extreme thinking can kind of lock your brain down, and how it’s so important to break free from any ideology.” The best jokes, Hershberg finds — those that perhaps “have more importance right now than ever,” in his mind — are those that “make fun of all ideologies and allow people to come together.” While his Comedy Dynamics special It Could Have Been Better reflects on Hershberg’s Jewish upbringing in Kentucky and his overbearing mother, it’s less thematically driven and more of “a collection of jokes,” a “best of” from his recent catalogue that will hopefully win him new fans — “which is important,” he says, “because I feel like a lot of people still don’t know me.” Though in the past, Hershberg has joked that at age 40, a lot of people think he’s younger because he’s had “so few accomplishments,” he’s in truth one of the sharpest up-and-coming comics emerging from an exceptionally vibrant current New York scene.