Mandal

Why watch Mandal

Tevin Williams, who performs as Mandal, got into stand-up the way a lot of good decisions get made: by accident and on a dare. He and a friend from Southwest Atlanta started going to open mics together. Then the friend, as Mandal puts it, decided to be a reasonable human being and put his life together. Mandal kept going.

That was the start of about eight and a half years in the Atlanta scene, which he credits more than Los Angeles for making him who he is. Atlanta, in his telling, is full of comics whose only measure of success is whether the crowd laughed. It shows in his act. Mandal is loose, odd and very funny in a way that doesn’t look like it was focus-grouped by anybody.

Before that, he had a marketing degree from UGA and a run of corporate jobs he describes, accurately, as a lot of quitting and a lot of getting fired. One was a sales development leadership program at AT&T. He doesn’t know what those words mean either, which is part of the charm.

He moved to Los Angeles to do audience warm-up on John Mulaney’s Netflix show Everybody’s Live and stayed. Along the way he taped a set for Don’t Tell Comedy, did stand-up on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, played Netflix Is A Joke Fest and made animated shorts for Adult Swim, including Mandal Takes an L and Lil Daddy, a spinoff of his short Buster & TJ with Atlanta collaborator Zae Jordan. Lil Daddy went viral. They’re trying to get a pilot.

His debut release, $$$$$$ (pronounced “dollar sign”), premiered on YouTube on October 25, 2026. It was co-produced by Donald Glover’s company Gilga and the comedy label Blonde Medicine, directed by Khari Johnson and shot to look like a VHS tape from a better decade, with animation and a retro look that matches his taste for late-’70s and early-’80s everything. It’s also coming out on gold vinyl and VHS, because of course it is.

His influences are a fair map of the act: Bruce Bruce and Rickey Smiley from ComicView on one side, Tim & Eric and The Eric Andre Show on the other, and Hannibal Buress, his favorite comedian of all time, somewhere in the middle. Ask him about ambition and he says he’d like to sell out comedy clubs and get Lil Daddy a season. Modest goals. We suspect he’ll miss them by going over.