For comedian Jeff Arcuri, his Netflix special became a place to reflect on wife Katie Thurston’s cancer journey.
“When we got that offer, we got that special, I was writing about what we were going through at the time. I was writing about how when we got the diagnosis, she was told, ‘Hey, we need to do IVF right away if you ever want kids, we need to do all this stuff,’” Arcuri, 38, recalled during an exclusive interview with Us while promoting his special, Nice To Meet You. “So we were doing that in real time, and then I was going out at night and performing. And there’s no way in hell I’m going to go out and perform and talk about my wife like I’m not doing this every day with her.”
He continued, “I needed to talk about it as a form of therapy almost on stage, and bringing it to people, and I think there’s something kind of unique about the special in that sense — 80 percent of that special was written within the past year, so you’re getting a much more close version of that.”
One year after Arcuri popped the question to Thurston, 35, in Hawaii, the former Bachelorette publicly shared that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2025, Us exclusively revealed that Arcuri and Thurston tied the knot during an intimate backyard ceremony. Since their special day, Thurston has been candid about her ongoing cancer journey and undergoing a double mastectomy earlier this year.
“It’s not a joke I’ve been running that I went through two years ago, it’s something that we went through three months ago when I taped that special — It was, one of the jokes occurred two months prior, or a week prior,” Arcuri explained of his special. “It was very fresh, and as soon as I got the special, I knew I haven’t even written half of it yet because I’m gonna want to talk about this. I’m gonna want to talk about her, I’m gonna want to make the funny in this because I didn’t look at it as a challenge, I just looked at it as ‘This is who we are, and I need to talk about that.’”
He continued, “I can’t pretend like I’m gonna go in there and talk about being a single guy or talk about dating because that was my material before I met her, and then we met, this all happened, and now I’m married with a dog and a house and all this stuff. I also love talking about her. It’s to the point where I think it pisses people off, you know. But I love talking about her on stage.”
Arcuri’s Netflix special premiered on the streaming platform on July 7 and debuted in the top 10 globally, while he is also currently in the middle of a sold-out run of shows. Arcuri recently announced his upcoming tour, The Road Trip Tour, which will span 45 cities in the U.S. and Canada in 2027.
“It is amazing,” Arcuri reflected of the response he has received from fans since the special’s drop. “I was hoping I would do well enough that I could be validated, but the fact that it was like people were sharing it and saying how much it affected them like it blew me and my wife away. We were just really relishing it and just enjoying it right now because it was a lot of hard work and a lot of sweat and tears went into it, so it’s really nice to kind of reap the benefits now.”
Nice To Meet You is out now on Netflix.
