There Bert Kreischer stood, fully clothed, in the Burbank offices of Legendary Entertainment. He was waiting to meet with producer Cale Boyter, and he was sure about one thing: There was one movie idea he was definitely not going to pitch.
The year was 2019, and ever since his 2016 comedy special The Machine, Kreischer had been trying to sell its namesake story—in which he joins the Russian mafia while on a college exchange program—for a feature-length treatment. But despite Kreischer using the bit as a closing story to every single one of his sold-out comedy shows around the world (under threat of audience revolt if he didn’t), for whatever reason the studios and production companies just didn’t see the raucous tale as something they wanted to put on the big screen.
By the time Kreischer was meeting with Boyter, he was sick of pitching The Machine. There was something different about this meeting: Boyter seemed like a real fan, and the producer had a varied, incredibly successful career that spanned such comedy classics as Elf and Wedding Crashers as well as the dramatic action films Dune and A History of Violence. Still, Kreischer decided to pitch Boyter three new movie ideas.
When he finished outlining his third one, Boyter immediately said, “Alright, I’ll do one! Which one do you want to do?”
“Uhhh, I don’t know, which one do you like?” Kreischer said, caught completely off-guard after so many years of studio rejection.
“I don’t know. They’re all good, and I want to do a movie with you,” Boyter asserted. “You get to make a movie; pick which one you want to do.”
This was it. This was the chance he’d been waiting for all these years. “If you’re going to tell me to pick one, then I’m going to pick The Machine,” Kreischer told him.
“Yeah, I was wondering why you didn’t pitch that!” Boyter replied.
Kreischer then told him about all of those failed pitches. “I don’t know what it is anymore. I’ve pitched it so much, I’m bored of pitching it,” he admitted. “I feel like no one’s going to get it, and honestly, Cale, I feel like if I do make it, I might get kidnapped by the Russian mafia.”
“Sold!”
“What?”
“That’s our movie: The Hangover meets The Godfather Part II,” Boyter said. “We get flashbacks to the Young Bert, like The Godfather, but this is really The Hangover. Sold—don’t say another thing.”
Kresicher left the meeting, miraculously still wearing a shirt, thinking, I have no idea what I just fucking sold!
The Machine, starring Kreischer and Mark Hamill, hits theaters today. The film is a culmination of Kreisher’s yearslong pitch process, and it’s now a crown jewel in the comedy media business that he and his wife, LeeAnn, have been building gradually and fastidiously over the past decade.
What began with Kreischer as a workaday club comedian has grown into The Machine feature; Netflix specials such as Razzle Dazzle, Secret Time, The Machine, and Hey Big Boy; multiple podcasts, including Wife of the Party hosted by LeeAnn; a YouTube cooking show called Something’s Burning; a comedy festival tour; brand partnerships; and more.
Onstage, Kreischer is the shirtless party boy turned fun dad, a lovable goof with tales of insanity and domestic high jinks. On his podcasts, he’s no less ridiculous but more toned down—even circumspect—about his role as a husband and father, and about his own mental health and wellness. But still with a lot of ribald jokes before things get too heavy.
Sitting on a Zoom call in early May from his new podcast studio, on the couch alongside LeeAnn, Kreischer is the same guy his podcast listeners and comedy fans love. Blending frat-boy antics with emotional vulnerability is not an easy needle to thread, but Kreischer is able to do it. What’s more, behind all of that is an incredibly savvy and relentless marketer who, together with LeeAnn as CEO, has crafted Berty Boy Productions into a business flywheel of fun.
The podcasts and social media help promote the comedy tours, which then become comedy specials, and then feed back into the podcast and social media content loop. Last year, it expanded to include the Fully Loaded Comedy Festival, which the Kreischers manage. This summer it will feature comics Mark Normand, Shane Gillis, Tiffany Haddish, Dave Attell, Lewis Black, and more, playing 16 iconic ballparks and arenas around the U.S.
“Hollywood is changing, but I think we’re at the front of it,” Kreischer says, opening up about how Berty Boy, now with a staff of about 12, controls not only its own content but also the business back end, including advertising sales, social media, and tour management. “Even with the Fully Loaded festival, that used to be something you’d put in the hands of the promoter or management company,” he says. “But we took control of that. We wanted to move faster than the pace it was traditionally moving.”
LeeAnn points to Kreischer’s “Hot Summer Nights” comedy tour during COVID-19 as a prime example, when the comedian set up outdoor shows at drive-in theaters so people could watch from their cars. The Wrap described it at the time as part football tailgate party, part comedy club.
“He’s always been at the forefront, even ahead of his agents and managers,” LeeAnn says. “When COVID hit, he was in New Orleans and wanted to find a way to keep touring. It’s not just about him personally, but all the people connected to these shows who weren’t working. If he keeps working, that keeps others working. He had the drive-in movie theater idea, called his agent, the agent wasn’t sure but made some calls and figured it out. So we did this thing that no one had done before. And he’s done that with his podcasting, being so early into it. He knew a podcast fan was a butt in a seat.”
THE MELTDOWN
Kreischer’s career ostensibly began in 1997 during his sixth year of college at Florida State when Rolling Stone magazine profiled him as the biggest partier at the nation’s No. 1 party school. After college, he went to New York to work as a comic and later signed a development deal with Will Smith. Oliver Stone optioned the rights to the Rolling Stone story, and eventually it became National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, Ryan Reynolds’s breakout film. Kreischer, though, had nothing to do with the movie.
He started to get TV work, particularly in the burgeoning realm of reality programming. In 2004, he hosted a Jackass-style stunt show called Hurt Bert, and he competed on Last Comic Standing in 2006. He became a frequent presence on the Travel Channel with such shows as Trip Flip and Bert the Conqueror. The first iteration of The Machine special, which debuted on Showtime in October 2016, bombed. Soon after, Kreischer was fired from the Travel Channel, and had all of his comedy tour dates on Oddball Comedy Festival canceled. Oh, and he found out his best friend—and current podcast partner—comedian Tom Segura was making 10 times as much money as he was on the road.
Earlier this month, Kreischer revisited this moment in his career on the inaugural episode of Hot Ones Classics. Just after his first appearance on Hot Ones in 2016, which now has more than 11 million views, Kreischer says he had a meltdown. “This is when I changed my life,” he said, fighting back tears. “I was at the bottom. I was begging for a job that didn’t want me. My podcast was doing nothing. I wasn’t selling tickets on the road. If you had said to me six years ago that I’d be back here promoting a major motion picture, I’d never, in a million fucking years, believe that.”
He started turning things around by listening to his gut instead of following some preconceived notion of the route a comedian’s career should follow. He put a renewed focus on his social media and his podcast. Two months after The Machine debuted on Showtime, Kreischer uploaded the titular 14-minute story from the special to Facebook and his YouTube channel. It took on a life of its own, going viral over the holidays. Suddenly, his comedy club shows were packed.
The Machine began as a story that Kreischer had told on his friend Joe Rogan’s podcast. Rogan told him that it was a great tale that he should tell onstage, and when Kreischer said he thought it was more of a podcast bit, Rogan told his listeners to request it at all of Bert’s live shows. Kreischer worked on “The Machine” story in his club act for almost three years before recording it. (Kreischer also credits Rogan with pushing him to start podcasting. His first time on Rogan’s pod was in January 2011, and he launched Bertcast the following year.)
Soon Kreischer was learning a lot more about his audience from podcast metrics than he ever knew before. It began influencing where he’d book shows, sometimes to the confusion of his management.
“I remember going into a meeting one time and bringing a list of my top 50 markets for the podcast, and they were like, ‘Bismarck?'” he recalls, referring to the North Dakota capital with a population of about 75,000. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m big there.’ It’s fascinating because there are places I’m big today where a lot of comics just don’t go. Now if you look at my tour, I am littered in the Midwest where some comics don’t do shows. I’m in Mississippi twice a year. It’s all based on metrics and going where the fans are. Ten thousand people: That might not sound like a lot for a podcast, but that’s an arena.”
THE (MARKETING) MACHINE
One area of his business that Kreischer gets most fired up about is marketing. He used to write, film, edit, and post all of his own social and promotional videos—and he loved it. He still orchestrates his creative marketing around the work. Now he just has some help.
“Bert doesn’t look at making these promos as work; they’re like short films to him,” LeeAnn says. “Back in the day, he’d pull me aside and have this idea for me to help him with. He’s like a 9-year-old.”
Kreischer recalls one video in particular, from August 2019, that illustrates how much has changed. He needed to promote three new dates on his “Body Shots World Tour,” so he ran into the house, where his daughters were doing homework and LeeAnn was making dinner, and yelled for everyone to come to the front yard. His eldest daughter, Georgia, was handed the drone. He gave his youngest, Ila, the garden hose. LeeAnn took the leaf blower. As for Kreischer, he was in a tiger-striped Speedo and holding an American flag. The result was lo-fi glorious.
“That is the definition of growth,” Kreischer says. “From me running in and yelling, ‘Everyone stop what they’re doing, Dad needs to make money!’ to Georgia being in college, Ila can come by the office and doesn’t have to hold a hose, but I’m still in a Speedo.”
Two years ago, the Kreischers realized that they needed to start treating Bert’s work as a proper company. The first order of business: move the podcast and everything else out of their 1,800-square-foot home with one bathroom. Bert asked LeeAnn to be CEO—and then went to tour Europe.
“Within a week of being CEO, she purchased a [new] house, with the plan to rebuild the kitchen for Something’s Burning, [add a] podcast studio upstairs, offices downstairs, meeting room over there,” Kreischer says. “Her vision for the company was so clear. I came home from Europe and there’s a full-blown podcast studio built, the kitchen is done. I’m walking around this new house introducing myself to people. There’s a stocked fridge!”
Kreischer has sponsors for his podcasts and is also a brand ambassador for a few brands, but he insists he works only with companies that he genuinely likes and whose products he actually uses. He’s an ambassador and investor in the beverage brand Liquid Death; last summer he shot a 10-minute exercise video for the company. “We had originally written a script, but he fully ad-libbed the entire 10-minute commercial,” Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario said at the time. “He was doing such a good job that we ran with it and just tried to hold in our laughter while we were shooting.”
Kreischer loves Freewaters sandals so much that he persuaded the company to bring back a discontinued style by preselling more than 2,000 pairs in 24 hours. Other partners include Olipop, Manscaped, and Pop-Tarts.
Freewaters CEO Martin Kim says that working with Kreischer has been a blast, sharing that the company has now partnered with him on a house shoe (named the Machine), slide (the Berty), and sandal. “Bert doesn’t BS about what he likes and doesn’t like, and he’s really business-savvy,” Kim says. “He’s got this image as the party guy, but he’s an authentic voice who is driven to make it work for his audience and his family.”
Being authentic is, in fact, “the basis for every brand partnership,” Kreischer says. “I love these flip-flops. I love drinking water out of a can. Olipop tastes great!”
The release of The Machine represents another step forward. Legendary and Sony Pictures have leaned on Kreischer’s promotional talents throughout the production process and leading up to this week’s premiere. He kicked things off way back in April 2021 with a promo featuring him about to jump on a plane to start filming in Serbia, announcing that a grumpy Mark Hamill would be playing his dad.
In March, Kreischer premiered the film’s trailer to his parents as well as 15,000 fans at a show in Tampa. At first the studio didn’t want it leaked, but then encouraged Kreischer to use the reaction shots as a promo. “It’s just an example of Sony and Legendary trusting me,” he says. “They get me, and it’s reciprocal.”
Kreischer has been pumping out content for The Machine for months, including working out with Arnold Schwarzenegger, giving a shout-out to Mark Wahlberg (who responded), and . . . getting a coffee enema. Berty Boy Productions also produced a red carpet livestreaming event on May 25 for the film’s premiere.
Kreischer cites Kevin Hart’s HartBeat Productions as an inspiration for how comedians can take full control of their media. “What I love about what Kevin’s done is how he’s brought everything in-house and says, ‘I want to do business with you, but I want to be in charge of all the ancillary projects.’ That’s our first step,” Kreischer says. “I’d love to work with studios when we’re marketing movies, because we’ve taken steps in that direction and it’s worked well. So the things we’re good at, I want to keep being good at, and then create relationships with networks and studios through that.”
BIG BOY GOES BIG-TIME
A big part of Kreischer’s charm, as his friend Tom Segura once described it to him, is that many of his fans look at him up there on stage and think, I could be him. I’m moderately smart and overweight, that could probably be me.
Kreischer, having launched his first major motion picture at 50 and with the bulk of his mainstream success coming in the past decade, feels that being a late bloomer has helped him remain grounded. “For those formative years where you might get lost in what fame is, we were just two parents trying to pay the bills, up until maybe 2017,” he says. “And when we did buy a bigger house, I fucking had a panic attack.”
If he ever does veer into rich-guy territory, LeeAnn is there. “The other day he asked his assistant to do something and I said, ‘No!’” LeeAnn says. “‘He can do his own laundry. If you do it for him, he’ll think he’s bigger than doing his own laundry, and we’re not doing that.’”
One time a fellow comedian called Kreischer and told him not to post pictures of himself getting on a private jet because it’s unrelatable and his fans will hate him. Kreischer says he thought, “Okay, but when a regular person flies on a private jet, they take pictures of themselves because it’s a really big deal; it’s one of the coolest things you’ll ever do and it doesn’t happen often. The people who say not to post it, they’re the people who probably have changed. Plus, I haven’t had my teeth fixed, so people just need to see my teeth and they’ll say, ‘Ewww, he doesn’t fly on private jets.’”
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