A Conversation with Hotel Art Thief

If you’re in New York City and like comedy, and if you’re free tonight with cash to spare, then you can’t do better for yourself then heading over to Union Hall to see Hotel Art Thief. You know the group from their brilliant viral videos that transform the vernacular of online culture—heartwarming clickbait, product reviews, influencer 9-5s, inane podcast clips—into sharp and irreverent commentaries on modern life. I know them as my friends Michael Kandel and Joe Miciak (and formerly Zach Tomasovic), who’ve been making comedy for over a decade. Last night I spoke with the duo—who, like many great sketch comedians, are also former roommates—about their latest video, a playthrough of a video game adaptation of The Pitt, as well as their general approach to making comedy online in 2026. 

Find our conversation below, lightly edited for brevity and clarity, and then grab your tickets to their show tonight, featuring Tessa Belle, Karli Marulli, and Surena Weerasekera.  

Tell me about how the Pitt video came together. 

Kandel: It started from The Bear, the video game sketch that we did. We wanted to do another similar animated thing. 

Miciak: Jonathan Van Halem, our friend, made a joke, but also gave the very real advice of like, "Why don't you guys just do that all the time?" Do a popular TV show video game. And we're usually very reluctant to do sequels or second versions of sketches, but The Pitt was so similar, a show people take very seriously that we find very funny. 

Kandel: It was a similar vibe in terms of competency porn and how they handle mental health. And we both watched it, so we're like, this is a good fun show and it's in our wheelhouse.  And Joe wanted to start animating bodies.

Miciak: On one of our video game videos, someone commented, "This reminds me of the Grey's Anatomy video game." And then we watched clips of it and it was so silly. All the game actions in it were like, "You're leading this girl on." When you're playing as Alex Karev, "You're leading this girl on. How do you rip this photograph in half to show that you're done?" And actions like that. So that inspired us, but I was like, I can't do a medical video game without bodies in it. So I wanted to learn how to model bodies. 

Kandel: I think usually we just wait till the last possible moment and then we get it together. 

What's your process—you write together and then Joe goes off and animates?

Miciak: Because I knew this one was gonna be so intense, I wanted to start learning how to make the bodies beforehand. So I did that before it was even—I was sending you Robby pictures before we started writing.

Kandel: Yeah. For The Bear, because Joe had never animated like that before, we had that completely scripted out beforehand. And then there's improvisation with the people we recorded with, and then we updated the script. This one was similar, but it was a little more fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants. We had a slightly better handle on what Joe could do. Joe can just animate way more. 

Miciak: I kind of learn more every time we do a video. Every time, it's like, "How did I do that last video without knowing what I know now?" 

Are there other people doing video game-based sketch comedy? Have you cornered the market on that? 

Miciak: Joe Jonas, honestly. After our Standup 2K25 video game, there was one that he posted that was like a guy drinking too much coffee and having to shit. And it was like, Joe Jonas is really hedging our market.  

That's the perfect segue to my next question, which is I want to know about how that video came together. It did feel like it was made especially for me…

Kandel: Last summer, our friends Jordan DeFilippo and Michelle Gold were doing a Matt Rife-themed comedy show—

Miciak: Rife World at Life World. 

Kandel: And they asked us if we could make a video for that. 

Miciak: It was gonna be very Matt Rife-centric originally. And then as we wrote it, Mike sort of failed the personal fitness plan that I had set up for him to look like Matt Rife from the back. 

Kandel: Just from the back. As we write, things kind of take their winding path. We had, on the back burner for a while, a really old idea to do a Screenwriter: the Video Game-type thing. So we had elements of that, like working on a script in a coffee shop, or—

Miciak: Asking your mom for money. 

Kandel: Yeah, we just kind of cobbled it together and it shifted more away from Matt Rife and toward just what it takes to be a standup comedian. 

Miciak: Even when writing it, we were enjoying getting too niche. Because it was turning out to be such a long video that we were like, "If anybody watches this, it's just people who are comedy nerds." But yeah, that was a fun one. 

Tell me about why you like working with each other.

Miciak: I do just find your turns of phrases so funny. With so much of the linguistic weirdness that we do, Mike is very good at just coming up with very bizarre terms of phrases.  

Kandel: Joe has a lot of skills that I lack completely. Joe's kind of ideal to work with for anybody, which really helps. Early on, even before he started doing any animations, Joe already had a good visual sense and a good editing sense that it immediately became obvious we could write toward. That really informed a lot of our style early on. And as Joe got better and gets better at stuff, we could escalate what we write. 

Miciak: I do feel like it's sort of like a co-evolution where I get better at something and then Mike comes up with something very crazy that I'm like, "I can't do that. " And then I figure out how to do it. But we do also have this hive mind of Hotel Art Thief-speak and that kind of persona that we can write toward. 

Kandel: Just from living together and writing together for so many years, there's already such a rich tapestry that we can draw from, funny voices and things that we've already done and discussed where we're never really drawing from zero. If we want to write something, we're never really starting with a blank page. We always have a well of characters and plot threads that have never even come close to seeing the light of day, but we're intimately familiar with. 

I am about to paint with a very broad brush, but: my sense is that a decade or so ago, shortform comedy generally lived on YouTube and resembled TV—dialogue-heavy, game-driven scenes that usually took place in one or two settings. These days, shortform comedy generally lives on social media, and it seems to me that the most successful work—I'm thinking about you, Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh, the frontcam comics of the early '20s, Conner O'Malley when he's not making intense short films—resembles the visual language and grammar of…  social media. Can you talk about your approach to writing for the form? Is it liberating or constraining, does the ephemerality of it weigh on you at all? 

Miciak: Our first video that had traction was a "day in the life"-style video that was directly parodying other internet videos. So I guess it was certainly that dopamine hit of like, "Oh, this is what people see all day," and then we all have the same context that we're commenting on. We still have times where we'll come up with an idea that's like, "Oh wow, it would be great if we could do an old-school sketch like this where it's just like a weird guy in a situation." I mean, we still could. 

Kandel: Maybe now we can, but early on, if we made something that was like, just an idea we have that we think is funny and it doesn't approximate the language of the internet, no one will watch it. We figured out you have to at least start with some kind of visual reference or parody, or something that is digestible as a thing that happens on the internet, or could mistaken for real. And then you can Trojan Horse into something funny and that you like. 

Miciak: So in that way, it is fun to have a constraint. And because people are so used to it, there's a base reality that we can play with. And then we love doing the turns that make it something completely different. And I feel like people are more game for that now, because they're so used to just twisting and turning in their algorithms. People are down for wild turns, their attention spans are shot. But I guess it is sometimes annoying when we just have a straight-up funny premise that is tough to turn into something that's like, hook-y for the internet. 

How different is your writing process for live stuff? 

Kandel: The live stuff, we get pretty weird. 

Miciak: We both like theatricality. I feel like we let things sit. We do more slow burns onstage. It is harder, especially since we only have two people, to do the escalate-escalate-escalate thing.

The Please Don't Destroy-style straight man sketch where there's the one weird roommate and the two normal roommates. 

Kandel: Yeah, it's hard for one of us to be a guy who is weird if there's just one other straight guy. 

Miciak: We're pretty allergic to doing the two man, straight-man odd-man format, at least for live stuff. Some of the sketches, we start that way and then they just end up becoming peas in a pod. We just enjoy that a lot more. But yeah, I guess we still try to do things that are zeitgeisty for live shows, but sometimes it's more just what makes us laugh. 

Tell me about your day jobs and how they inform your work, if they inform your work. If they don't, we can skip this one. 

Miciak: I'm a personal assistant for an actor, and I read a lot of scripts and plays, and I guess that is partially how I feel like some of our live stuff comes about. I read so many bad plays and bad scripts that I find that really funny. A large part of our high-concept bits is that we like talking over-expositionally. That makes us laugh a lot.

Kandel: That's true. As for me, I think tutoring offers just about nothing.

Everyone's going to want to know about Len Zimmerman and how you found him and what it's like working with him. And I'd also like to know.  

Miciak: I found him. I did a web series when I first moved to New York, and there was a scene where there was just three old men. I was in a poker night with three old men, and one of them improvised a line that was just so funny to me. I can't even remember what it was. And I was like, "I need to get these guys' numbers." So I got all three of their numbers. And then when we first started Hotel, I think we had an idea for—

Kandel: The old men. The biggest regrets in life, I think. 

Miciak: Yeah, as a fake man-on-the-street thing. And I was like, "I think I've got the perfect guys." So he reached out to all three of them, two of them responded. One of them was Len, the other one was like, "I don't like this." But Len loved it and is so down. 

Kandel: Yeah, he's great. And he'll say anything you want him to say. 

He's a really good vessel for those bizarre turns of phrase.

Miciak: Totally. And we'll be like, "That was perfect." And he's like, "If it makes you laugh, fine."

Your videos showcase a regular cast of great local comics, like Rachel Coster and Karli Marulli. Tell me about who you love working with and who’s making good comedy in Brooklyn these days. 

Kandel: Well, all the people we work with. 

Miciak: Rachel Coster—I feel like she always really nails the character, but then also is really good at improvisation, which I feel like Mike and I don't necessarily do when we film just by ourselves. But she slips into the voice so well that we always end up using all of her ad libs. Ash Diggs, Karli—

Kandel: Karli Marulli, love Karli. Who else? Jonathan Van Halem, Michelle Gold, Whitley Watson. Haley Stiel, Victoria Pandeirada, Pierce Campion… there's so many more. 

Miciak: We're big fans of Jeff Braun. We haven't made a video with him yet, but he's a very funny Brooklyn comedian. Jordan DeFilippo—whenever we need an Italian, we always reach out to Jordan.

Can you tell me anything about the script you wrote for Comedy Central a few years ago? 

Miciak: It was based on an idea from a sketch in college I had. My boss had a development meeting with Viacom and they were like, "We're looking for either Christmas movies or stoner comedies." And I called Mike and I was like, "What if we combine them?" So we came up with three ideas. One of them was this old sketch idea of mine. Do you want to pitch the… 

Kandel: It's called I'll Be High for Christmas. It's about two stoners who on Christmas Eve bake a big plate of pot cookies and then Santa comes down the chimney and eats them all and gets too zooted and our heroes have to help him deliver the presents. 

Classic. 

Miciak: So we wrote it for Comedy Central and they loved it. And then everyone we were communicating with kept on being like, "Hey, it's my last day at Comedy Central." And then they stopped making original movies. But it was how we got our manager, because he really liked it. 

Kandel: Then around The Bear, we started cold emailing people and got general meetings. It was funny, every time we met with somebody, they were like, "Wow, one of the funniest scripts, I wish it was 10 years ago. Ten or 15 years ago, maybe 20."

Tell me more about that—how the business has changed over the last 15 years, where there used to be this upward trajectory for internet sketch comedians that just doesn't exist anymore. 

Kandel: This past year we've been loosely shopping around our script and just taking general meetings, and we kind of had the firsthand experience of that Chris Gethard article. Like, understanding back in the day we maybe would have been paid money to develop something, and now that whole pipeline has completely dried up and we're working on stuff on our own. But yeah, it would be nice to be paid for stuff. 

Miciak: It's interesting having come to New York and seeing the people that we looked up to a lot when we first came here flourish. Some really got into the pipeline, and then some are still really funny, but doing independent stuff. It really feels like there was sort of like a last boat out of 'Nam sort of thing. 

Kandel: Yeah. It does feel like the last year or two, we got one foot in the door and there's kind of no one left.

Miciak: Depending on the days, I'd say generally we feel pretty demoralized about that. But making funny stuff is still so fun.

Do you get TikTok Rewards Program money at all? Does anything come from that?

Miciak: We did. And then we got kicked off.

No!

Miciak: They kept flagging our stuff for unoriginal content. I think because we would do video game stuff, their AI would assume that it's like us doing reactions—they strike down anything that's a reaction video. So anytime we had a video game video up, it would get flagged for unoriginal content, and then we got kicked off it. 

Kandel: In general, TikTok probably paid the best. You can make, I guess it was loosely around a dollar per thousand views, something like that. So if something went viral, you could get a couple grand, but the issue was anything that went viral would become flagged. So we never actually really made any money off of it. There'd always be a two day period where we’d go, "Oh, this went viral, we're probably going to make two grand." And then it would get flagged and no money would ever come our way. 

That's fucked.

Miciak: But we're trying to get started on YouTube. We don't really use YouTube that much. We're trying to do, because we've heard YouTube is good for monetization. 

Kandel: Twitter doesn't pay at all. 

Miciak: For all the evil comments we get.

Kandel: We just love all the evil people there. We're there for the love of the game. 

Alright, last question: The phone rings. It's Lorne Michaels. He wants you, bad. What do you say? 

Miciak: You have to kill Ben Marshall. There can only be one redhead. 

Kandel: I mean, we'd love to work. We'd love a job in comedy.

Miciak: Yeah. We would probably say yes.

Oh—where'd the name come from? Whither Hotel Art Thief?

Miciak: So we moved into a house together in Washington Heights and we were coming up with a name. The only artwork we had around was stuff my uncle had made when he was a struggling artist in New York, and he would just sell art to hotels. Uncle Brian, shoutout Uncle Brian. So we were just looking around and we saw hotel art. And we were like, "I guess we're hotel art thieves."