Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Byron Bowers: Spiritual N**ga’ On FX On Hulu, A Comedian Gets In The Ring To Battle Mental Health

FX has sprung into the stand-up comedy game, releasing its first two comedy specials. One comes from Kate Berlant (Cinnamon In The Wind), who comedy fans already have seen in a variety of roles and personas. The other comes from Byron Bowers, who you may not be as familiar with as a stand-up, even if you may recognize him from one of several series or films currently streaming (Irma Vep, The Chi, Kimi, Honey Boy). So this special serves as his proper solo debut.

BYRON BOWERS: SPIRITUAL N***A: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: This hour, filmed in Georgia last fall, evolved out of a 2019 routine Bowers performed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert’s booker, Jessica Pilot, serves as an executive producer on the special. And he’s directed by Alma Har’el, who made her feature debut directing Bowers and company in Honey Boy. His team also includes Honey Boy producers Christopher Leggett and Rafael Marmor, plus veteran stand-up comedy director Jeff Tomsic.
All of which is to say: Expect a more cinematic vibe than a traditional stand-up special vibe. And not just because Bowers performed this hour in a boxing gym in Decatur, Ga.
In fact, the special opens in the California desert, where we see Bowers drive his cuz from the airport out to a home that’s supposed to be largely left vacant by the comedian’s agent. Except it’s occupied currently by an “influencer” portrayed by Alia Shawkat. The three of them take a mushroom trip together, which somehow sends Bowers and his cuz fleeing straight from the desert to Decatur, where he’s expected in the ring for filming at that very moment. His hour talks about how tripping on shrooms allows him to relate to his father’s mental illness, and how we need to destigmatize mental health.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: We’ve seen comedians more willing recently to confront mental health in their stand-up acts and specials (see: Gary Gulman, Maria Bamford), but not as much from Black men in comedy. Unless you count radio and TV host Charlamagne tha God. Or Donald Glover’s Atlanta, which the opening sequence would feel very much at home in an episode.

Memorable Jokes: Even before he gets into straight talk about mental health, Bowers has a straight-up funny take on the Trump crowd, turning his initial confusion about the MAGA acronym into a suggestion that “we should put a hard-R on that bitch…” and call them “Maggars” instead. Complete with a Georgia-centric local tag, telling them to “go back to Forsyth County or wherever you came from!”
There’s also a couple of dark moments where Bowers reveals his past thoughts about suicide, but he manages to coax big laughs out of the silent tension before it lingers too long, inside or outside the boxing ring.
It helps when he can segue into graphic sex jokes. Whether it’s Victorian-era clothing complicating the act of sex in a stagecoach, shaving his privates, or the women who almost killed him accidentally during two different sexual acts. Only one of them he goes on to call his “personal 9/11.”
There’s also something about the sound of this special that forces you to focus a little bit more intently on what he’s telling us. Perhaps that’s by design, or perhaps it’s merely a side product from the acoustics of a boxing gym.

Our Take: This is a deeply intimate hour, not only for his subject matter, but also for the makeup of his audience, which is small but mighty, and mighty eclectic. Killer Mike is there, which makes sense since he’s an Atlanta native and activist along with his rapping career. Susan Sarandon is there, too, which, I mean, her new FOX series Monarch films in Georgia, but the connection is less clear. And then there’s Bowers’s mother, whom he gives a shout-out too near the end of the hour, boasting that he’s not ashamed of anything she might hear him say.
Which is saying quite a lot, considering she and we have heard Bowers joke about his schizophrenic father, Byron’s past with self-harm, his past selling crack, and even a story that suggests he may have been abused as a child.
But he comes correct anyhow.
We can watch his personal evolution even within the hour, as he jokes early about how much more willing he was to watch 40 minutes about endangered sea turtles on TV than he was to look at the homeless trying to survive on the sidewalks of Los Angeles. By the end he’s offering us all the chance to follow his “cheat code” to stave off depression by helping the homeless over the holidays. “We all can be a part of this big collective.”
I only wish fellow L.A. comedian and writer Jak Knight could have held off his depression long enough to hear and act upon Byron’s message.
Our Call: STREAM IT. This is hour Bowers’s mom can be proud of. And you can, too.

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.