@thecomicscomic Published March 10, 2026, 5:30 p.m. ET More On: Stand-Up Comedy The Top 10 Shows On Netflix That Are Most Popular Right Now Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bruce Bruce: I Ain’t Playin’ On Netflix, Where This Stand-Up Vet Still Brings Home The Bacon, If Not Also The Birkin New On HBO Max March 2026, Plus What’s Coming Next (Now with Discovery+) New On Hulu March 2026, Plus What’s Coming Next Derrick Stroup throws it back to the ’90s with a nostalgic set about childhood rituals, pre-internet life, and why cigarettes should make a comeback.
The Gist: A native of Harvest, Alabama, Stroup has been living and making New York City his base now for the better part of a decade. He jokes that New Yorkers don’t believe he’s one of them, even still.
Stroup released his first half-hour special, Yelling My Feelings, through the family-friendly Dry Bar Comedy platform. He has since made a couple of appearances performing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and you may have seen him telling jokes on Nate Bargatze’s Nashville Christmas special.
In his Netflix debut, he went back to Birmingham to joke about becoming a newlywed at 40 with a baby on the way, and how that has him reflecting on how different his own childhood was from the world facing his future child.
What Comedy Special Will It Remind You Of? Nate Bargatze and his Nateland studio produced this debut for Stroup, and the influences are noticeable.
Memorable Jokes: Stroup acknowledges his size and his active appetite without going for easy fat jokes. Instead, he chooses to roast Colorado for the food he saw and ate in Denver compared to his time living in New York City. And while he pokes fun at himself for eating too much salt and not enough salad, he rationalizes it by essentially *waves hands in air* referencing the sstate of the world right now.
“You should be eating whatever you want. The world’s on fire,” he says. “This is ice cream news. Fruity Pebbles news.”
But with a title like Nostalgic, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear a lot of jokes reminding you how things used to be like back in the day.
His more interesting routines, though, reveal keen insights into viewing old habits and trends in a new light. Stroup describes the school bus as the old way of learning and sharing information before the Internet, with the back row of the bus representing the Dark Web. And he reframes smoking cigarettes as not just a form of therapy, but also as a potentially life-saving act, noting with pride that the best review he’s ever earned from his comedy came from a fan who loved this bit so much he didn’t know how it ended. He had to step outside to light a smoke himself.
Our Take: A couple of other bits give pause.
I’m not sure Bert Kreischer’s opinion is the one you want to go with to think your story is different because in the face of legal consequences, you decided to give up driving a decade before you gave up drinking. And he undercuts his closing bit about being “a loud person for a cat guy” with an unnecessary tangent suggesting that cat guys have to be gay.
Nevertheless, being a bigger, louder Bargatze does give Stroup a lot to work with, and his descriptions of him and his Kansas wife trying to adjust to life in Queens and having his first child in his 40s while also working on his emotionally hot attitude could easily become a sitcom pitch. A stand-up’s life turned into a sitcom? Now that’s nostalgic.
Our Call: Stroup certainly doesn’t stand out in a sea of stand-ups by being your everyday white guy, but he’s likable enough that, especially for his fellow Millennials, they’re more willing to go along for the ride. STREAM IT.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
