For comedian Max Amini, building a dream career meant taking the long road.
“My career has been a long career and a very difficult career in so many ways, in the sense where I’m American, I’m also Iranian. The industry has always had a difficult time understanding what box to put me in,” Amini says in the latest episode of our Comedy Means Business podcast.
An Arizona native who split his adolescence between Iran and Washington, D.C., Amini’s first creative instinct was to pursue a career as an actor. He joined UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television in the early 2000s and subsequently booked roles in everything from Heroes to Mind of Mencia, albeit nothing that offered a breakout moment. Later, he’d even get behind the cameras a filmmaker, though he eventually recognized stand-up as his true calling, first dabbling in the space in L.A. after immersing himself in his university’s improv scene.
“When I understood how powerful stand-up comedy is, when I understood the value of being your own brand, having your own voice, your own impact in the world, and the fact that you can actually have an impact, [as] a performer that’s bringing something to the world rather than just playing somebody else’s lines, I really, truly fell in love with stand-up,” Amini says. “And it became my mission to just mature that voice.”
Even after identifying stand-up as his primary path, it took Amini decades to break through. But he stuck to his “gut feeling” on who he was and where he should be, under the belief that “you are your best captain to guide that ship to the right place.”
As a stand-up, he was always drawn to an off-the-cuff approach involving a lot of crowd work, given his roots in improv. As big as crowd work has become in recent years, it wasn’t considered the fashionable approach when he was cutting his teeth — and remains a divisive topic.
But while “the industry looked down upon somebody who did crowd work,” he says, he “didn’t care.”
“Everybody’s different. Everybody’s brain works different. The world needs all of us, different voices. And so my voice was that way,” he reflects. “I’m very lucky that I wasn’t influenced by the pressure that the industry kept bringing me. I just continued playing my style of comedy… and I built an audience. And the audience is such a loyal, loving audience that I feel extremely lucky for that.”
Indeed, Amini’s persistence, and commitment to his vision for himself, paid off. You may or may not know his name, but his audience as a stand-up puts him squarely in comedy’s top tier.
One of the top creators on Instagram, with over six billion views all-time, Amini last year released the special Randomly Selected and saw it pull in over 16 million views on YouTube, becoming not only the top-performing special of the year across all platforms, but also the ninth-most-viewed on YouTube of all time, per Nielsen numbers we reviewed.
Amini’s digital audience has translated into a powerful touring business: Last year, he performed 150 sold-out shows in 19 countries, moving over 200,000 tickets. And earlier this month, he became the first Iranian-American to headline Madison Square Garden. For his recent accomplishments, we named him as one of our Comics Who Won 2025; you can read that piece above.
For a deep dive chronicling Amini’s journey to get to this place in his career, click on the link above.
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