‘Bert Kreischer: Secret Time’ On Netflix Dishes From His Personal Family to His Comedy Family

Bert Kreischer takes his shirt off and throws it into the crowd before he’s even said a word in his first Netflix comedy special, Bert Kresicher: Secret Time.

The audience cheers him on. They cheer and clap again when Kreischer pauses to take a drink.

So what’s the secret behind Kreischer’s success as a stand-up comedian?

For Netflix viewers just getting to know him, here’s what you need to know.

On the big screen, Bert is Ryan Reynolds. Or Ryan is Bert. Either way, Kreischer was the real-life inspiration for National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. When Rolling Stone magazine wanted to write about the biggest party school in America, they sent their journalist to Florida State, and everyone on campus referred that journalist to the university’s biggest partier: Kreischer. And a professional comedy career and legend were born two decades ago.

In recent years, Kreischer has evolved or devolved, depending upon your perspective, from Van Wilder into the Captain Caveman of comedy.

Equal parts storytelling superhero and affable oaf, he describes his new hour of stand-up simply: “We’re just getting drunk and telling secrets.”

Truth is, there are no secrets in Kreischer’s life.

He’ll gladly share how poorly he treats his health as he does his sexual misadventures with his wife, his failure to make his father laugh (with one lone exception), and how his own kids have inherited his foolishness. How else to explain his daughter’s inability to follow basic instructions or her belief system. “You are never going to believe what your moron daughter just did,” he recalls telling his wife after one such incident. “I just watched her not catch nothing.”

In his own life, Kreischer’s actual experiences tend to one-up anything you could possibly imagine. Who would have ever guessed by looking at the comedian that when he was 13, he could not only take part in an elite basketball camp, but also show up legendary college and NBA star Ralph Sampson?! That tale provides the centerpiece for Secret Time.

For all of his crazy-but-true stories, though, Kreischer manages to maintain a relatively normal — or, in comparison, boring — home life as a husband and father with his neighbors.

Worries about the language the kids use don’t turn out quite the way anyone would have guessed.

The most problematic part of Kreischer’s hour, at least for Amazon customers, may be his comedy chunk on his relationship with his Amazon Echo (warning: not safe for Alexa).

In a brief encore, he teases his most famous story. And if you haven’t ever heard that, you’ll definitely want to now.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Bert Kreischer: Secret Time on Netflix