Kids, cover your ears: The ‘Recess Therapy’ star is talking to grown-ups now

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(CNN) — Julian Shapiro-Barnum is using a lot of new words to describe himself. He’s a “passionate lover” and a “bisexual twink.” He jokes about “cruising” and goes deep on the social etiquette of posting nudes to Instagram stories. He is doing this weekly before an extremely online audience on YouTube, who tune in to see Shapiro-Barnum do everything from asking the elderly for sex advice to getting lessons in the art of thirst traps.

None of this would be very surprising if it weren’t for what Shapiro-Barnum is already known for.

The 27-year-old comedian and performer has become an internet darling with a series called “Recess Therapy” where he conducts sincere, sometimes absurd interviews with kids about life’s big questions: What is the future going to be like? Where does money come from? What is the meaning of life?

Now, Shapiro-Barnum doesn’t want to just be the “Recess Therapy guy” anymore. With a new series called “Outside Tonight,” which launched on YouTube in June, he is revealing a distinctly less family-friendly image. By his own description, he feels a little like an adolescent Disney star — letting his proverbial hair down and showing the world he can hang with the grown-ups, too. “I just haven’t said anything about my personal life in the five-ish years of being on the internet,” Shapiro-Barnum said, perched on a director’s chair in Long Island City in Queens just before shooting the show’s finale. “With the first couple episodes of the show, I wanted to stake my claim and be like, I can be vulgar without sacrificing who I am and my identity.”

He’s not quite vulgar, but he’s more adult than we’ve ever seen him before. The show’s premiere saw him (somewhat clumsily) doing his first-ever keg stand and interviewing a panel of elderly New Yorkers about their sex lives. The second episode, centered on insecurities, featured Shapiro-Barnum questioning if he has had enough gay sex to truly consider himself bisexual.

It’s a sea change for a creator who is, as he says, mostly famous among “moms with strollers.”

“Recess Therapy” launched in 2021, when Shapiro-Barnum was on the cusp of graduating from college with a degree in theater. The videos quickly took off, anchored by Shapiro-Barnum’s own boyish enthusiasm and his young interviewees’ uninhibited, unexpected responses. He’s since launched a second show, “Celebrity Substitute,” that sees him bringing stars like Tom Holland and Quinta Brunson into the classroom to teach a room full of youngsters a lesson of their choosing. It’s a formula that works – and has garnered Shapiro-Barnum millions of views and what he characterizes as a niche fame.

So, why switch up on a good thing?

“I don’t want to do one thing forever,” he said. “Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s like the whole story or the whole picture. It’s been really freeing to like, do a not-kid-forward project, but not abandon that, because I love that and that is me.”

It’s a pattern of reinvention he hopes to follow throughout his career: “I hope to shake it up again and again and again and I think the next thing will be surprising in a completely different way.”

Taking risks

The quest to reinvent oneself has plagued plenty of other public figures attempting to pivot from cute and palatable to edgy and adult. You could say Shapiro-Barnum is in his Addison Rae era. But don’t worry, he’s still making “Recess Therapy” and “Celebrity Substitute” — which makes the balancing act of being both the internet’s favorite playground confidant and a boundary-pushing late night host even more delicate.

“Part of the show is being more honest and authentic about who I actually am,” he said. “‘Recess Therapy’ is totally an element of myself. I am that person, that is the real me. It is not entirely a character, but the way that I’m going to talk to a six-year-old is actually often not how I am when I’m like with my friends around the world.”

The new show was born from his own deep love for late night TV. It’s been years in the making — earlier iterations involved him filming with his parents and interviewing strangers on the street during the depths of COVID-19 lockdowns.

“Outside Tonight” keeps many of the aesthetic trappings of classic late night. The host wears a suit (albeit rakishly sans tie), sits at a desk complete with mugs emblazoned with the show’s logo and is accompanied by a trumpet-forward house band, “The Noise Complaint.” Keeping the “husk” of late night allowed Shapiro-Barnum to experiment in every other way – like by shooting outdoors, in locations that include a roller rink, the Whitney Museum and the park underneath the Kosciuszko Bridge connecting Brooklyn and Queens. His main inspirations are “The Chris Gethard Show” and the early days of Conan O’Brien. “We like shows that feel like they’re throwing something at a wall,” he said.

Even in his experimentation with pushing boundaries, there are still some limits. A joke about bomb threats didn’t make the cut, for example. But a roundtable panel of his exes and a competition to find the gayest dog did.

Story producer Marley Gotterer, herself a hyper-online comedian of semi-absurdist Instagram reels fame, thinks you have to go big these days.

“I think people who are trying to uplift and take risks and be honest is vital in this era of the world, the country, and media, where so many things are being censored and not greenlit,” she said. “You gotta make it yourself.”

‘I own it — no one can fire me’

Part of Shapiro-Barnum’s thesis is that the independence of the internet — which has fostered a new generation of celebrities born outside of Hollywood or the traditional comedy ecosystem — can revitalize the dying late night genre. It’s an independence that feels politically urgent, too.

Speaking of the show, he said: “At the end of the day, I own it — no one can fire me.” Here he references the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s long-running talk show, which fans have widely attributed to the comedian’s frequent criticism of President Donald Trump though network Paramount cited financial pressures, as well as the brief suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” last year.

“These networks own these shows, but the lifeblood of the shows should have ownership over their own work.”

Working outside of the traditional studio system, gives Shapiro-Barnum’s team more agency and the ability to move faster than traditional late night can. But it’s still a much larger production than “Recess Therapy,” with a makeup artist dashing to blot Shapiro-Barnum’s face between segments and a five-camera setup, as well as a few dozen crew. Just because there’s no studio doesn’t mean there aren’t corporations involved. The production is funded by, as he says in the premiere, “brand money”: specifically, advertisements for Amazon and Chase that star Shapiro-Barnum and are embedded in each episode.

If that means he “might not be able to speak freely about” certain brands whose names were bleeped out in the first episode, “that’s the price I’m willing to pay to make this show,” he joked.

Shapiro-Barnum is just the latest creator to try to leverage online fame into something that looks suspiciously like the talk shows of yore. Any performer advertising a new project is now subject to a new junket of YouTube talk shows, podcasts, and vertical video series that might ask them to taste a really spicy chicken wing or offer their hottest take while sitting on the New York City subway.

What makes “Outside Tonight” unique among the internet talk show crowd, according to Shapiro-Barnum, is that it’s a “true variety show.” : Each episode features a monologue, an interview with a guest (including comedians Hasan Minaj, Caleb Hearon, and Gianmarco Soresi) and a guest musical act, along with panels and games, all performed in front of a live audience. Basically, it’s an old-fashioned late night show, just updated for the internet.

Like any show in the internet age, the series is tasked with creating coherent episodes that will also play well as discrete clips scattered across social media.

“I think we’re playing into short attention spans, for better or for worse,” Shapiro-Barnum said. “This whole show to me just feels like this big, beautiful experiment.”

Play time

For fans of “Recess Therapy,” there’s some of Shapiro-Barnum’s open-hearted curiosity and depth sprinkled throughout “Outside Tonight.” In the finale, Shapiro-Barnum interviews his mother and astrologist Chani Nicholas about why endings, including death, are so difficult to process. It’s tender and funny at once.

“This is a comedy show through and through,” he said. “But I think without depth, the comedy doesn’t mean anything.”

The parallel he sees between “Recess Therapy” and “Outside Tonight” is an invitation to be less serious. “I’m like, how can I get adults to come on this show and play and be silly and goofy in the same way as kids are?”

So far, the show’s success is modest.

On YouTube, the channel has reached just over 6,000 subscribers, though the most popular clips on Instagram have received millions of views — a testament to where the audience lives.

The show’s most viral clip so far features Laurie Cooper, Instagram’s iconic New York City realtor of indeterminate age, pledging that she still goes out seven nights a week and saying you’re never too old for love. The clip is funny, heartwarming, and surprising all at once, just like the best moments of “Recess Therapy.”

For now, Shapiro-Barnum isn’t sweating the metrics. “I just make something that I believe in, and I hope that other people resonate with it,” he said.

“And like, if it doesn’t work, at least you can tell we had fun trying it,” he said of the new venture. “It’s daring – and daring can be bad, but at least it was daring.”

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