Kathleen Madigan was a good show, as was Rodney Carrington.

I was disappointed by Louis Black, but I'm guessing he wasn't really in the mood to bring his A-game to Salina, KS.

Jim Breuer was a suprisingly good show as well.
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Chapelle is amazing. Probably the best ever at keeping it real while simultaneously being laugh out loud funny. In the same league as Pryor when it comes to that. The Chapelle Show was pure genius.

The next guy on my list is Norm McDonald.
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Haven't heard this kind of dry sense of humor since Bob Newhart. Nate is great !!

Love Sebastian Maniscalco and Christopher Titus as well.
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For those who may have heard of him but never really saw anything of his, I noticed Comedy Central put Mitch Hedberg's big 'name-making' special on YT for free streaming recently


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I fell out of keeping up with the standup game many years ago. I want to start listening again and identifying people that I like. I just haven't done it due to other priorities.

One thing that mystifies me about standup comedy is when people talk about stealing jokes or plagiarizing jokes. Obviously you don't want people stealing original work, but it seems like it would be impossible to not accidentally have two people come up with the same joke independently. How does a comic even know that some other comic hasn't made the same joke? There are a million of them out there.
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I keep trying to watch female comedians and they all suck. Nikki Glaser spends all her time talking sex and stupid shit that is so overdone. Her and Whitney Cummings try to outdo themselves being dirty for just beng dirty. They both suck.

No female comedians I know can tell funny life stories. Sarah Silverman comes close.

Ellen DeGeneres and Wanda Sykes are the last great female standups.

Does anyone know a single FUNNY one?
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Sebastian Maniscalco
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One of the all time greats, and absolutely worth a watch.
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I love Michelle Wolf. I also find it funny that someone who openly admits on a football forum to paying for hookers gets a little uncomfortable when women talk about sex. That’s comedy gold in itself.
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That's a stupid comment. I don't get uncomfortable with any sex talk, I just expect it to be funny when delivered from a comedian. :-)
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Iliza Shlesinger was funny when she first getting national attention after winning Last Comic Standing. Seemed like she took a step back or ran out of jokes after releasing a few comedy specials. I haven't seen anything of hers lately to see if she's rebounded at all or not.
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Being funny in standup is a niche and very particular way of being funny.

It's one person commandeering the attention of the entire audience to consume their creative output with no feedback except laughter.

I still find a good deal of standup enjoyable, but it's increasingly, exponentially increasingly, rare that I find it 'funny.'

Sometimes it's to the point where I search my memory to find and think back on sets I did actually find funny, as opposed to interesting and amusing.

They say of Lorne Michaels that he rarely if ever laughs at anything, which might strike you as odd from the premiere gatekeeper of comedy for half a century. But they also say that if he softly says 'that's funny' in an audition, you likely have the next Ferrell, Belushi, or Hartman on your hands. Since I heard that, I find that's how I actually assess standup most of the time, . . . Maybe 2-3 times a decade a standup set will ACTUALLY make me laugh. More that I quietly note 'that's funny, I need to remember how funny that was.'

I laugh, actually laugh, a lot more at improv or conversation like you find on SuperEgo, Comedy Bang-Bang, Teacher's Lounge or Conan Needs a Friend, than I do with standup these days, and there are plenty of solid contributors in those arenas.

Tina Fey, Andrea Savage, and Jessi Klein are great writers with a great ear for dialogue and absurdity.

Mary Holland, Julie Klausner, Janet Varney, Nicole Byer, Nicole Parker, Lauren Lapkis, . . . there are TONS of funny conversationalists and improv-ers out there,

In standup specifically, Ali Wong, Esther Povitski, Michelle Wolf, Taylor Tomlinson, and occasionally Fortune Feimster seem to me the current best at 'the craft.' That is focusing on the timing and phrasing calculated to elicit laughs. . . ie, and working travelling live standup like one would expect when going to the local Chuckle Hut for an evening of laughs.
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Never been a big stand up guy other than Carlin or Burr. However there was a couple acts by John Leguizamo that I enjoyed. Dana Gould was pretty good the one time I watched him HBO as well.
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Tom Segura is really good these days
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Kathleen Madigan
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