CAA's Gamble on Netflix Comedy Festival with Marcello Hernandez and Feid Pays Off

When Saturday Night Live posted a video weeks ago promoting its Season 51 finale, it featured star Marcello Hernandez standing alongside comedy star Will Ferrell and Paul McCartney.

The vertically endowed guests may have towered over the 5-foot-7-inch Hernandez, but to NBC and SNL viewers who have made sketches like “Domingo” and “Protective Mom” go viral on social media and YouTube, he fit right in.

In just over three years, Hernandez has become one of the faces of the long-running comedy series, giving it a much-needed diversity boost, and he’s also taken the torch to lead the Latin comedy scene.

His influence was especially felt and seen last month at the Hollywood Bowl, where Hernandez, who is of Cuban and Dominican descent, closed out the Netflix Is A Joke Festival and delivered the iconic venue its largest Spanish-language comedy show ever.

With everything stacked against it—a Latin comedian closing out a major week-long festival on Mother’s Day—the show was a major success, and Hernandez got a little help from his agents at Creative Artists Agency to give fans an experience unlike any of the festival’s other 500-plus events that took place throughout Los Angeles.

Mac Clark, Ryan Fereydouni and Justin Edbrooke formed the thinktank behind the show and booked Colombian reggaeton star Feid, along with standout Mexican comedian Sofia Niño de Rivera, for a night of laughs and perreo.

“This was a big, big risk,” Edbrooke tells Pollstar . “It was the first-ever Spanish-speaking comedy show at the Hollywood Bowl, first-ever reggaeton act to headline the Bowl, and it was a big risk for Netflix to go all in on the anchor show of their entire festival in Spanish, which was wild. To their credit, they trusted us and went along for the ride.”

It was also a significant risk for CAA, which represented all three major acts. It was a herculean task for the agents, who had to figure out how to make the bilingual, physical, quick-witted comedy of Hernandez fit with a genre-bending urbano star and one of Mexico’s top observational, sarcastic comedians.

While the uniquely diverse bill may have seemed like a predicament to some, CAA saw it more as an opportunity to distinguish the show from the hundreds of others that came before it throughout the festival.

“You have 500 stand-up comedy shows, and so how do you do something different? You have someone so special like Marcello—to just be one of 500 didn’t seem to make sense,” Edbrooke says. “It was really important to him to stick to his roots and make a statement in Spanish. And he’s just a diehard music fan, and he’s been a Feid fan forever. Mac and I were brainstorming with Ryan, and to Mac’s credit, he said Feid’s hilarious, he’s amazing, and he would get how cool this is. To Feid’s credit, he totally bought in.

“I cannot stress enough how unorthodox this is for the Netflix Festival, and how much they allowed us to roll the dice and go all in on this, especially at the Hollywood Bowl, their marquee venue on their marquee day.”

It was no easy feat to solidify the bill, but marketing the show was an even more daunting task. How do you sell a predominantly Spanish-language event that features comedic talent and a rapper and fit that within the Netflix Is A Joke model at the Bowl?

“You’re saying all the things that we went through,” Clark says. “At the end of the day, it came down to great teamwork across the artists, the managers, us internally, Live Nation and Netflix. All of this was a first for everybody, so there was a lot of learning on the fly of what was working, what wasn’t working, what we should be doing, and what we weren’t doing.

“There was a lot of information coming. The comedy guys market and price their shows very differently from the way we market and price our shows. So you had to find this common ground that worked for both sets of fans. You didn’t want to alienate someone because of a way you did it on your tour or your comedy show.”

At the time, Feid was doing underplays across the States after selling out arenas in his previous tour, but Clark admitted that there was some apprehension from the Latin urban star in joining a comedy festival, especially because he didn’t know Hernandez personally, but he was ultimately lured by the novelty of an event blending music and comedy—akin to Latin American variety shows like Sábado Gigante, which Hernandez and the SNL cast spoofed in 2024.

“Selling Feid on it became pretty easy because it was like, ‘You’re going to have the opportunity to do something that nobody else has done and be a part of Netflix, but in an organic, authentic way for the Hispanic community,” recalls Clark when talking to Feid about the show. “So you get to be part of this larger Anglo community, but very much your way. And for Marcello, very much the same way, was like, ‘I want to be a part of this, but I want to do it my way.'”

Despite being from different worlds in entertainment, the two quickly bonded like Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Step Brothers . The only thing missing was them quoting the film by asking, “Did we just become best friends?” Feid displayed his own comedy chops promoting the show, with various videos alongside Hernandez, as well as a photoshopped image of the two on the iconic Stepbrothers movie poster, which featured two grown men wearing sweater vests in a Sears photo department-style portrait.

“Truthfully, we put them together, and they came up with this stuff on their own,” Clark says. ” … They had this really special moment after Marcello finished his set and Feid does his thing, Marcello is there to greet him when he comes off stage, and they have this awesome moment and relationship that’s come to be. It just goes to show how much the [Latino] community supports itself. There’s so much love between those guys and what it meant to them.”

Fereydouni knew well how significant it would be not only for their clients but for everyone involved, from the venue to audiences watching clips on social media and feeling FOMO. He recalled going backstage into the green room area of the Hollywood Bowl, which has images of its most memorable shows, and not seeing Latino acts on the walls.

With Hernandez and Feid, CAA was going to rectify that and boost the visibility of Latin culture in both music and comedy. The agency launched its CAA Latino initiative to amplify Latino and Hispanic representation across all media, and it managed not only to celebrate the culture but also to honor the women who help elevate it, with Niño de Rivera opening and Hernandez, whose standup is very much centered on being raised in a household full of women.

“It was really cool to watch them walk through and just be like, ‘Oh, we’re going to be up here. This is awesome.’ That was deliberate,” says Fereydouni, who represents Hernandez and Niño de Rivera. “It was for the culture. Obviously, Mother’s Day is huge in all communities, but especially in the Latin community, and to be able to put something on for the women that are so integral in their life—Marcello’s comedy special is basically a women empowerment hour, for the most part.”

With over 16,000 tickets sold, the CAA agents sigh in relief, knowing that the concept and its marketing worked, sending a clear message to everyone in the industry.

“I don’t speak for Marcello, but I think it’s clear that Spanish-language comedy deserves a seat at the table at the highest level,” Edbrooke says.

Clark also expressed great pride in serving the Latin community and believes Hernandez’s show will “open doors for the next opportunity.” Fereydouni says that it may come soon, as the agency is already exploring similar concepts with other artists.

“I don’t think anybody was really comfortable with this show until we were all standing there while the show was happening and everybody was high-fiving,” Clark says. “… We’re all about breaking new ground and pushing boundaries. Sometimes that comes with being uncomfortable, but great things come from being comfortable.”

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/06/10/agency-intel-how-caas-gamble-to-close-netflix-is-a-joke-festival-with-marcello-hernandez-and-feid-paid-off/)._