The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Ronny Chieng’s Netflix special gets better with age. Take this already great bit about Amazon Prime and how it encapsulates America, and remember, he wrote and performed this pre-pandemic. As I wrote back in December: Chieng delivers a brilliant analogy early on in his hour, observing how the Internet is …
“It seems like, over the past couple of years, we’ve developed this amazing ability to get mad at anyone for any reason.” That’s how Michelle Wolf opens her HBO special. Wolf would know. Last the nation saw her all at once, she was tearing up the White House Correspondents Dinner …
As I wrote in Decider when Dan Soder’s HBO special debuted: Born in 1983, Soder lands right in the middle of Venn diagram between Generation X and Millennials, which places him in the sweetest spot for both cynicism and self-confidence. It also means he grew up along with the Web. …
Eddie Griffin held down a Las Vegas residency before the pandemic hit, and filmed his most recent stand-up special there for Showtime. The looseness of his late-night shows in Las Vegas shows here, too. As I wrote last year: This feels more like a night out at the comedy club …
Tiffany Haddish celebrated her 40th birthday in 2019 with a “Black Mitvah” comedy special on Netflix. And she’s more than willing to dish about past gigs gone horribly wrong. As I wrote last year: Even though Haddish began her comedy career as a teenager attending the Laugh Factory Comedy Camp …
Mike Birbiglia’s 2019 Netflix special enjoyed a successful run on Broadway first, with an epic showstopper moment. But as I wrote last year: Birbiglia has created a show designed to stop you in your tracks multiple times to take stock of your own love life and your own priorities. He’s …
Preacher Lawson first got nationwide attention a few years ago on America’s Got Talent, and in 2019, premiered his first full stand-up special on BET’s premium streaming platform. As I wrote then: Lawson puts a smile on everything, despite moving some 20 times as a kid, and not having a …
I love that Lil Rel chose to shoot his HBO comedy special in a school gymnasium in the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles, as the sun set through the open windows. He spends the bulk of his set talking about how his relative fame has impacted his relationships with his …
For her fifth Netflix comedy special, Iliza focused on her wedding, deconstructing the whole process for laughs. As I wrote last year: Having gone through the process of getting married, Iliza knows firsthand that nobody wants wedding advice, and yet as a comedian who has already “written four f—ing Netflix …
You probably recognize Jeff Garlin from the TV thanks to his two long-running roles, on ABC’s The Goldbergs and/or HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. But this Second City product also has a long history with stand-up, too; in fact, his first hour, Young and Handsome, directed by Bob Odenkirk, originally streamed on …
