The Comedians You Should and Will Know of 2025

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The old comedy ways are dead. The waning relevance of longstanding career springboards such as HBO, Comedy Central, and late-night TV means there are fewer pathways than ever for emerging comics to find new audiences. In their place is the attention economy, a dystopian marketplace of slop merchants, brain-rot peddlers, AI scrapyards, and extortionate big-box streaming services with junk on the shelves, all haggling for your time and money. Cutting through all that noise to find the good stuff can feel endlessly overwhelming, so we have done the work for you with 2025’s list of Comedians You Should and Will Know.

This year’s list features comedians who approach their craft from a wide variety of perspectives, originally hailing from places as disparate as Lebanon and Estonia abroad to U.S. cities from Harvest, Alabama, to Detroit to Seattle. They specialize in musical comedy, clowning, pitch-perfect parodies of the deranged nuances of TikTok, and interrogating politicians, and they play to invested audiences consuming podcasts, watching on social media, attending solo-theater shows, and packing venues on national tours. More than one comedian on this list has a recurring role on a TV show — a testament to how topsy-turvy the industry is that they’re still seen by the mainstream as “emerging” rather than “established.”

To compile 2025’s list, we reached out to over 200 of the top tastemakers and gatekeepers in the country — including comedy-club bookers, production-company executives, major-network talent scouts, streaming-service curators, comedy record-label owners — to ask which comedians still make them excited about going to work each morning, who they wish more people knew about, and who is on the brink of greatness. We whittled their recommendations down to the 21 best.

Meet the Comedians:

Nataly Aukar | Tessa Belle | Comedian CP | Rachel Coster | Esther Fallick | Jimmy Fowlie & Ceara O’Sullivan | Adam Friedland | Adam Gilbert | Zainab Johnson | Ray Lau | Ismael Loutfi | Julia Masli | Taylor Ortega | Eric Rahill | Amita Rao | Paris Sashay | Sahib Singh | Derrick Stroup | Jo Sunday | Jacob Wysocki

“No one ever believes me when I say I went through war, because I don’t have war vibes,” Nataly Aukar says in her 2023 Don’t Tell Comedy set. It gets a laugh because “war vibes” is an unlikely phrase, but it also speaks to the compelling dissonance at play in Aukar’s material. The Lebanese-born comedian is a deft if typical American stand-up, tackling relatable topics such as men’s resistance to taking care of their health and pretending to enjoy watching her boyfriend play video games in a sardonic, deadpan style. So when she digs into her backstory and blends the personal with the political, it takes audiences by surprise. While she was a war refugee in 2006, that’s not even the worst thing that happened to her in Lebanon, she goes on to say in that 2023 set. That distinction goes to the time her brother caught her sitting on a guy’s lap at 19 years old and told her mom. “War — it makes you tough. It makes you intriguing, interesting,” she says. “Getting shamed makes you, how do you say, bad at sex!” She grows increasingly paranoid and frenzied. “I am bad at sex. I am bad at it. I’m not trying to be cute. I’m not fun. I’m not present. I’m everywhere else. I am freaking out the whole time. I’m like, ‘Can your neighbor see us? Turn the curtains off. Turn the lights off. Don’t look at me. Don’t touch me!’”

Aukar’s most recognizable credit to date is her 2022 Netflix Is a Joke Introducing … set, but she’s well-known for her popular crowdwork clips on social media, where she gently dresses down audience members with the cutting energy of a cool high-schooler. She’s opened on the road for comedy megastars like Ramy Youssef, Mo Amer, and Gad Elmaleh and has parlayed her online following into headlining shows internationally. She does all of this, it’s worth noting, in her third language.

Two Quick Questions With Nataly

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue,
audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
I once got escorted through the back door of a comedy club because a group of drunk audience members wanted to fight me for mentioning Trump in a joke. I cried the whole way home thinking about how I had just risked my life for a $20 paycheck in New Jersey.

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing,
audience, trends you want to kill or revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
I wish I could kill social media, or at least make it inaccessible to comedians. It seems to help us in a way, but the fact that it’s there for us to use has completely switched our approach and prioritizations in regard to the work. It’s also made the industry lazier and more reliant on us to wear all the hats. (Sorry, industry, don’t be mad at me, I know you’re also just a girl who’s afraid of AI.) And we’re worse off comedians for it. That being said, my opinions change every day and anything I say one day I end up disagreeing with the next, so take whatever I just said with a handful of salt; I have a weak personality.

“A lot of people project onto femininity that it’s really stupid,” Tessa Belle declared on the podcast Exploration: LIVE! in 2023. “Actually, it’s extremely academic and collegiate.” The real-life Yale graduate breathes new life into the tired stereotype of the “dumb blonde,” repurposing it in her own image as a Gen-Z Goldie Hawn type and weaponizing that presence to tackle the toughest issues facing the iGeneration. Those include bisexuality (“I’m bi. You can just say that now. No one checks.”), armchair-psychology definitions of “abuse” (which is when a guy doesn’t like you back), and men overcompensating for the stereotype that they can’t pleasure women (“Now guys are coming over and literally drone-striking my clit”). Her ditzy, flighty stage persona is heightened by her Avant-Zara outfits, which push the “hot girl” image far past its logical end point. She’ll pair a tube top emblazoned with the words “tube top” with a miniskirt emblazoned with the words “miniskirt,” then twist her outward-facing sexuality into disturbing contexts — like in one joke about her male twin. “I’m a twin but my twin is a boy, so it’s kind of a different dynamic, because when twin is girl-girl it’s like, ‘Best friends!’ But when twin is boy-girl it’s, ‘Will they or won’t they?’” Belle coos with a too-flirty smile and a nervous side-to-side bop. “My brother hates that joke, and I’m like, ‘Yeah … I stole your hat!’” Then she giggles as she runs around the stage with the imaginary hat: “Stop chasing me!”

The sensibility is serving her well. The born-and-raised L.A. comic, who currently lives in Brooklyn, co-wrote and stars as a “bimbo-coded” blonde in the short film Sister! that played at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. She’s a staple on trendy local shows, increasingly appears on buzzy comedian podcasts that raise her profile (like when she accused Charli XCX of being the new Judd Apatow on StraightioLab), and hosts the regular comedy show Body Count at Union Hall with Jo Sunday.

Two Quick Questions With Tessa

What’s the biggest financial hurdle you’ve encountered since becoming a comedian?
There used to be comedy outlets that would take a risk on a small-town girl like me (I’m from L.A.). Comedy Central was basically a welfare program for at-risk comics in your area. But now the norm is posting to your personal social-media feed, so you have to pay for everything yourself with no institutional support. (My motto: When they go low, we go indie.)

I haven’t financially recovered from the short film I made a calendar year ago (I still can’t buy raspberries without a guarantor). I once wore a dress onstage with the tags on and tried to return it (allegedly), but it was sent back because it “smelled too bad and was definitely dirty” (again, allegedly).

It’s kind of loco-bananas that we are expected to be writers, performers, production companies, PR firms, stylists, and mothers! But “you gotta spend money to make money,” I say, as I take a $30 Uber to a stand-up show that pays in drink tickets.

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill or revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
What if TV/film comedies were actually funny and contained, dare I say, jokes? [I’m shot in the head with a gun.] We should hire comedians to act in and write comedies instead of stunt casting famous people who are humorless to the bone. [I’m burned at the stake like a teen witch.] Girls, gays, and trans people are super-talented and you can hire more than one at the same time. [They fill my pockets with rocks and sink me in a river, Virginia Woolf style.] All love of course!

It takes a lot of time and work to be as ridiculous as Comedian CP. It’s not just a dumb joke here and a goofy voice there; the L.A.-based comic possesses monumental silliness. Onstage, he really goes after it, pushing a wide range of premises — from big booties to family members with substance-abuse problems — as far as possible. Take the bait and switch he performs at the top of his debut stand-up special, Sunday After Six, which premiered on streamer Veeps in 2025. Stand-up is his art, he says in a reverent tone, and as an artist, he wishes the audience applauded the way they do when he first arrives onstage. “Every artist has to go up against that audience who doesn’t want to clap for them. It happened to me. It was at an amputee conference.” It’s a stupid-in-a-good-way joke, but even stupider is how this joke tees off ten minutes of material fantasizing about the lives and struggles of people with no arms. He imagines how annoying an armless boyfriend would be to a woman driving him in her car. “Is my heated seat on? My back and ass is hotter than a motherfucker,” he says while shimmying back and forth on his stool. “So you don’t hear the seatbelt sign? Put my damn seatbelt on please!” It’s so absurd, annoying, and weirdly fleshed out. There are shades of early Dave Chappelle in the way CP maintains interest and excitement in extended flights of fancy.

CP’s perspective is rooted in his experience growing up in Detroit, a city where “a lot of serious things are happening,” as he told the Detroit News. “It’s a place where people need to laugh, but it wasn’t necessarily the easiest avenue for comedy.” So it makes sense that CP first went viral with the video Shit Detroit N- - - - - Say before meeting fellow Detroit native Tim Robinson in 2013, a relationship that would mark the next stage in his career. Three years later, when making Detroiters, Robinson and co-creator Sam Richardson hired CP to their writers’ room. During an early table read, CP filled in for the always-hustling security-guard character, Ned, and made everyone laugh so much he was cast for the role. This opened doors for him both as a writer and performer, including most recently as a co-producer and scene-stealer on Natasha Rothwell’s Hulu comedy series, How to Die Alone. Thanks to his consistent rise in success, soon CP won’t need to steal the scenes; he’ll own them.

Two Quick Questions With CP

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
The best comedy advice that I’ve ever received was just to enjoy the moments that you’re getting to be what you always wanted to be. I think that when you let money, status, fame, and all of those different things play a part in how much you validate your progress, it loses a little bit of the magic that makes us who we are. The best parts of this whole career have been making the friends that I’ve made and just working through material and being onstage. I think that we forget that as we are under all this pressure to be the most rich and famous people in the world. Sometimes it’s really about the fact that I know the fourth-grade me who was the class clown would be so happy to know what we have become.

The worst advice I ever got is to hold on to material. The more you hold on to material, the more you stifle your creativity. Your brain needs to be flowing like a freeway. I’m always working on new material, because my job is to be a comedian; my job is not to say one set for the rest of my life. That puts you into a creative mind-set of always coming up with new stuff and always trying your best.

What’s the most earnest goal you have?
My goals are pretty simple. I really just want to be happy, I want to be creative, and I want to have fun. I think that those are the core principles of any real happy life, or just a good life in general. I want to have a job that I love, I want to have fun as much as I can, and I want to enjoy my days on this earth living in my purpose of bringing laughter to the world and leaving my mark.

Rachel Coster can’t help but giggle her way through a set. Luckily for audiences, her laugh is infectious. It also conveys a sense of delighted surprise: at herself, at the small joys and humiliations of life, at being onstage at all. The 29-year-old Brooklyn-based comedian talks about all of the usual suspects — dating, friends, sex, her mother — but employs a nonstop monologue cadence that implies she could go on for hours. Her stand-up takes the audience through her loopy way of understanding how the world works, like when she says, “I’m going on an airplane. Do you know how many of them are crashing? Most of them.” Her solution? “I got prescribed Lorazepam from my psychiatrist. It’s a drug that she invented to keep airplanes in the sky.” The most mundane topics, such as finding a “really normal” finance guy to marry, take turns for the whimsical as she grins and confesses, “I know that I’m good enough at sucking dick that I can convince him to have a steampunk wedding, which is my biggest dream in the world.” In the midst of a shaggy-dog story, she’ll throw in a disarming punchline, like when she describes dating an older guy (“maybe like 6, 700 years old,” “gray hair, beard down to his knees or whatever”) and going to his bathroom after sex. “If there’s a scale in the bathroom, that’s my Chekhov’s gun. If there’s a scale in the bathroom, by the end of Act III, I’m gonna shoot myself in the head.” It’s tossed off like one of a million asides, yet it’s such a masterful joke I want to print it on a T-shirt with Garfield on it.

If you haven’t seen Coster’s stand-up, you may have encountered her as a panelist on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! or on her wildly viral “Boy Room” series on TikTok and Instagram, wherein she dons an oversize suit jacket and delves into some of the most disgusting adult men’s bedrooms in America and serves as a cross between an HGTV host and reporter in the rubble of an active warzone. In the series’ early months, the 90-second episodes didn’t even end in a transformation; the payoff was simply going on the journey with Coster, and still the series racked up millions of views. By the end of 2024, Amazon Prime sponsored actual makeovers; it’d be stupid not to green-light an even more robust version of the show.

Two Quick Questions With Rachel

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
First advice I received is to record all my sets, which is really good advice because its helpful to remember what I said specifically and to keep track of jokes and stuff. But secretly it is amazing, because when you think you did a horrible job, sometimes you listen back, and you did great, and you just couldn’t hear the laughs because you were in a mind torpedo of fear.

The best advice I’ve gotten is always that people are running their own race, and that if you compare yourself to others, you will become sick and insane with jealousy and bitterness, and it will twist your insides and rot your brain and make beauty, creativity, and joy impossible to access. I am constantly relearning that one.

The worst advice was from a guy I hooked up with in college who said I should get really drunk for my college-improv auditions, which I didn’t do because I suspected the boy with six weed-themed tattoos might be misguided, respectfully.

What’s the most earnest goal you have?
I am sorry to say it, but my secret ultimate goal is that I want to be an amazing theater actress on Broadway. I love theater more than anything on earth because I am annoying as fuck, and the theater is a haven for people with that affliction. I think the best way for a girl who is not a natural triple threat to make it in theater is to become extremely good at other stuff until it’s just so clear that she needs to be stunt cast in like Chicago or something awesome like that.

I also want to write a perfect song. No clue what genre, it just feels completely possible, and maybe there is only one inside me, but I am searching for it in my soul.

“Everyone talks about trans kids in sports. But no one is talking about the closeted trans women cleaning up in the drama department.” This joke is the perfect introduction to Esther Fallick, who delivers comedy as politically charged and surprising as it is personally revealing and wrapped up in theater-kid swagger. In some ways, Fallick is a comedian perfectly suited for today — her perspective is biting and irreverent (when she gets arrested at a protest, she mines it for laughs) and rooted in the joys and difficulties of being a trans woman — but the structure is all classic, throwback Borscht Belt. Talking about getting bottom surgery, she puns, “It gave me a new hole perspe— sorry, a whole new perspective.” She shines best in her musical comedy, where she takes hackneyed musical-theater tropes — the fresh-faced small-town kid with big-city dreams, the villain’s lament, the Newsies rallying number, the jazzy out-on-the-town song — and infuses them with queer double entendre, industry satire, and tight scansion.

Fallick’s songs all find thematic cohesion in her one-woman show, Esther Updates Her Book, in which the comedian, having transitioned and freed herself from a potential doomed future of auditions for Josh Gad types, forges an entirely new oeuvre of showtunes for female roles. A highlight is the Vaudevillian “Look Who’s Mommy Now,” in which she dons a Tessie Tura accent (“There’s so much that I’m loinin’ / Have you hoid of Sapphic yoinin’?”) and pulls from a literal bag of tricks. Since she debuted the show in 2022, she’s performed it at venues like the Bell House, Joe’s Pub, and 54 Below. She can also be found on her podcast, Having Fun With Esther Fallick; hosting a monthly variety show and political “teach-in” at C’mon Everybody; and popping in to pull eleven-o’-clock numbers on lineups around town.

Two Quick Questions With Esther

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
The first bit of truly helpful comedy advice I received was from my friend Michelle Gold, a brilliant comedian and director here in Brooklyn. I had really just begun writing stand-up and was moving from telling jokes to telling stories. She taught me about the importance of using rhythm in storytelling to signal to the audience when it’s time to laugh. It’s not a revolutionary concept, but it got me thinking about the craft behind translating my experiences to the stage. Rhythm is everything to me. It’s why I love musical comedy so much.

The worst comedy advice I received was when someone I knew from high school DM’d me and told me I should move to Austin for a year. Like, bro.

What’s the most earnest goal you have?
I want to be on Broadway. I want to star in an original musical comedy, then a revival of a classic musical comedy. I want to remind people why they love musical comedy. Also, I want to make art that’s so full of love and joy and life that it makes fascists realize how empty their souls are and makes them spiral.

Every generation has its breakout Saturday Night Live character: Debbie Downer for the lib hopelessness of the Bush years, Wayne and Garth for late-’80s manchild burnouts, the Blues Brothers for … whatever boomers’ problems were. In 2024, Gen Z got their own with prodigious Latin lover Domingo, and they have Jimmy Fowlie and Ceara O’Sullivan to thank. Alongside fellow SNL writers Sudi Green and Allie Levitan, the duo dreamt up this original sketch, featuring bridesmaids performing a too-revealing song about their friend’s romantic indiscretions with a sex god named Domingo (Marcello Hernández), as an excuse to make host Ariana Grande sing poorly. It was a silly kernel of an idea that led to what’s now the most popular clip on SNL’s TikTok (109 million views and counting) and has spawned multiple sequels, as well as Hernández appearing as Domingo during Sabrina Carpenter’s world tour.

This viral hit was a long time coming for the pair, who joined the SNL writers’ room in 2022 and developed a reputation for crafting sketches that jump on pop-culture trends with a fluency in girls-and-gays online fanspeak. Their 2023 M3GAN sequel-trailer parody was so on point (“It’s like Bros, but for gays”) that it all but predicted the real M3GAN 2.0’s marketing two years in advance, and their brilliant “Weekend Update” segment, “A Guy Named Ethan on the 2024 Oscar Snubs,” written with Celeste Yim gave Bowen Yang one of his greatest bits to date. In all their work, Fowlie and O’Sullivan display such a clear, Pop Crave-steeped comedic voice without ever veering too inside baseball. “Domingo” is co-worker humor, something that anyone who’s ever been to a cheugy wedding — or frankly, turned on the radio in 2024 — can understand.

In this way, they might be inheritors to the legacy of Sarah Schneider and Chris Kelly, the former SNL co-head writers who went on to create The Other Two. Fowlie wrote on that show and stole scenes as the demon Instagay and “Property Daddy” Cameron Colby, the kind of no-thoughts-head-empty beautiful fool who hears a semi-funny comment and says, “You’re literally Jimmy Fallon!” He also delivered one of 2024’s funniest line readings on FX’s English Teacher as an oversharing waiter who sits next to Langston Kerman’s character and says, totally unprompted, “I literally have COVID.” These are the sorts of characters he’s perfected since his early Groundlings days in Los Angeles, where he created and starred in the web series Go-Go Boy Interrupted in 2014. 

O’Sullivan first broke out on TikTok during the pandemic, where she excelled at delivering the snappy, instantly identifiable character comedy — chill moms, out-of-touch bosses — that was so prevalent during lockdown. Her ability to tease out the subtleties of millennial-speak led to over 25 million views and half a million followers. She also co-hosts the Petty Crimes podcast with Griff Stark-Ennis, wherein they give non-crimes the true-crime treatment. Soon, Fowlie and O’Sullivan will make their feature-film writing joint debut with Roommates, a college comedy featuring Natasha Lyonne and Nick Kroll and starring Sadie Sandler, of being–Adam Sandler’s–daughter fame.

Two Quick Questions With Jimmy and Ceara

What’s the most earnest goal you have?
Ceara O’Sullivan: Growing up, my aunt Sarah was the family member that could make the whole dinner table laugh. I’d watch her tell stories that would make my mom wheeze. I remember thinking, I want to be funny like that! My parents came to a play I was in in high school where I played an old maid (did my own age makeup, duh) doing tea service really slowly. I looked out and saw my mom wheezing in the audience. I was elated! So yes, my most earnest and perennial goal is to make my mom laugh. Also, I would like the 92nd Street ASPA to reconsider my application to foster Alvin the geriatric Great Dane. I know he prefers a household without cats, but I really think we could make it work!

Jimmy Fowlie: To get a brand deal that’s not sex toys or HIV medicine.

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill or revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
C.O.: Uh-oh! I have a few:
• Making art is core to what it means to be a person. AI needs to be regulated.
• Remakes are great, but we need more original stories in film and TV.
• Crowdwork is pretty easy.
• If you’re really scared or embarrassed to try your new material, that’s probably a good sign!
• I hate when performers tell the audience they’re “bad” or give them a hard time for being quiet. They came out to support a live show! Focus on your own performance.
• More love for emerging comedians in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, please!

J.F.: I would love to see more big, dumb comedies that waste people’s time. Remember Weekend at Bernie’s? There was a whole movie where a dead man danced for 90 minutes. Let’s get back to that. (I checked on the rights and they are available — 20th, please hit me up! I have a take and a title: Weekend at Bernadette’s.)

Forget what you’ve heard about the “millennial Jon Stewart” or “Joe Rogan of the left.” Adam Friedland is this era’s Rodney Dangerfield, if Dangerfield trained his sights on politics and had a ravishing head of hair. The 38-year-old got his start in Washington, D.C., in the late 2000s, where he deferred law school, opened a DIY venue called Subterranean A, and performed stand-up around town. In 2014, he moved to New York and gained a following as co-host of the podcast Cum Town, where he leaned into playing the eternally put-upon nebbish of the group constantly teased by co-hosts Nick Mullen and Stavros Halkias. It’s no wonder that Friedland introduces himself in his self-released 2024 comedy special, Two Nights in London, as “one of the most cyberbullied Jews on the internet.” He excels when he plays up his insecurities in order to goad audiences into laughing at risqué material. “Israel is a toughie. It’s a little bit of a Woody Allen situation,” he jokes in his 2024 special, “because people bring it up to me like I did it.” Friedland punches down (he sometimes revels in juvenile stereotypes) as well as up (billionaires and politicians), and he gets away with all of it because he also punches in, at himself, right in the kisser.

This self-effacing quality is what makes him such an effective interviewer on The Adam Friedland Show. The YouTube series started in 2022 partly as a joke, but after an early-episode run of podcasts, which included a highly controversial Matty Healy episode that made Friedland Enemy No. 1 of the Swifities, the series blossomed into an anti-Fallon wherein Friedland pulls fascinating reactions and responses out of politicians (Anthony Weiner, Ro Khanna, Ritchie Torres); new-media figures (Hasan Piker, Dave Portnoy); and an assortment of musicians (Jadakiss), actors (Sarah Jessica Parker), and nepo children (Chet Hanks). In some episodes, he plays up a performative amateurishness and mocks himself to catch guests off guard. In others, he leans more Eric Andre Show–ish, with more prodding of and fucking with them. He’s a former debate kid, and it shows when he pushes a guest on their politics, controversies, and reputations. In the recent episode with Torres, he drops all shtick and gets emotional about the Gaza genocide; clips of the exchange have garnered millions of views across Twitter and TikTok. All this success may have been the result of a jokey attempt to pose as a “public intellectual,” but in the process, Friedland’s become the real thing — even though he’d hate that argument.

Two Quick Questions With Adam

What’s the most earnest goal you have?
If I could have one joke that inspires Israel and Palestine to knock it off.

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill or revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
Musical comedy gets too much crap. It’s funny when songs are funny.

Adam Gilbert never lets his audience get too far ahead of him. “Let’s just get this out of the way,” he says at the start of a recent Zanies set. “This is what I’m gonna sound like the whole show.” His voice — high-pitched with a flat midwestern affectation — is, as he describes it, that of a tattletale. Gilbert tests it out for the audience: “It was him, officer! Get him! Get him!” he shouts. But then, like any classic Gilbert bit, he sneaks in one more joke. “I’ll get in the car too,” he posits saying to the cop. “We have a lot to talk about.” Through this head-on approach, Gilbert is a master of upending audience expectations. In most of his sets, he addresses his physicality (referring to himself, for instance, as a “teeny-tiny guy”) right at the start — a throat-clearing that both leads into material and plays with the crowd’s preconceptions. In his April 2025 Don’t Tell Comedy set, he compares the rarity of seeing people who look like him with seeing a peacock: “If you see more than one of us in the same day, you’re like, What is going on?” The joke is solid, but Gilbert finds the laugh in his own hapless bafflement as he plays out the audience’s thoughts. Much of the 31-year-old comic’s material revolves around getting by in an increasingly stupid world — half-hearted attempts at self-improvement, if not self-preservation. Recently sober, he’ll often riff on the guys he wishes he could have been (a tough drunk who rocks with Punisher stickers and a jug of booze labelled “XXX”) with the guy he really is — someone who got too good at drinking prosecco.

A Fort Wayne native who developed in the Chicago alt scene, Gilbert presents himself as “Midwest nice,” which is to say, affable and a little mean. (Harley Quinn, he argues, is “Beyoncé for women with ankle monitors.”) Since he made Just for Laughs New Faces in 2022, the Brooklyn-based comedian has performed in major cities and popped up on a bevy of podcasts where he does bits with Stavros Halkias or gives Chris Distefano mushrooms. Gilbert takes that which comes to him in stride — his height, his cheapness, his working-class upbringing — but while he’ll gladly make a joke about himself, he’s not a self-deprecating comic. He excels when he’s facing outward, holding a room with a wide-eyed gaze that never lets the audience off the hook.

Two Quick Questions With Adam

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
Best advice? Probably the time Tim Northern, a fantastic comic from Tennessee, said, “Let a joke take you places.” I’ve thought about that phrase so much over the past decade. It’s a great piece of advice. You aren’t forcing a joke somewhere, you’re trying to find it, and you use the audience as a metronome. It also forces you to reflect on your approach in a way that can lead to a way more creative act-out, or, like Tim said, just let it take you somewhere.

Worst advice? “Dude, you’ve got to go on Kill Tony.”

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
When I was 20, I bombed on a show in the lobby of a theater in front of the box office, while people were lining up for tickets to a completely different show, and that sticks with me to this day. I was so confident! I put on a sport coat, I invited people. When the comics got on the makeshift stage, hardly anyone was even looking at us. It was broad daylight, and we were supposed to just do stand-up for people waiting on line to see a play. I got up there and just choked. I don’t even think any sound was coming out of my body. Just sweat. We were all supposed to do 15 minutes, but I actually got cued off by the booker. But you need that, I think, early on. Eventually you fail in funnier and funnier ways until you’re actually doing pretty good up there.

Because Zainab Johnson has such a masterful sense of poise, the initial impression of her comedy is of high-polish professionalism. That’s most true of her 2023 Amazon Prime special Hijabs Off, an hour in which she explores her identity as a Black Muslim woman. As Johnson delves into her childhood in New York City, conflict within her family, and traumatic events from her youth, she tackles challenging material with zero timidity or desire to play it safe. A seemingly benign observational joke about how giving candy to kids makes them more resilient against offers from kidnappers (“You got to arm your kid against the enemy”), for instance, takes a sharp turn when it shifts into a terrifying story about a time when Johnson herself was lured into a dangerous situation by a stranger. Like much of her material, it’s comedy woven into intensely ambitious and personal storytelling, all delivered with a level of discipline and elegance that makes other comedians look like they’re just clowning around.

That initial impression is true. Hijabs Off is a masterful special that Johnson’s career has been building toward for years. She was on Last Comic Standing in 2014, was named a Just for Laughs New Face that same year, and in 2016 appeared on HBO’s All Def Comedy. She also has a long résumé of game-show hosting and acting roles, most notably in the Prime series Upload. Just in the last two years, she’s also released a YouTube crowdwork special and performed a Fringe show called Toxically Optimistic (about the right to own a gun). But some of her most magnetic comedy happens when she punctures that veneer of control. She’s not a natural fit for a crowdwork special, but by the end, Johnson builds up to a story about how frightened she was during a recent earthquake. “How did a truck get to the back of my house?!” she yells, baffled and annoyed. Her collectedness collapses as Johnson turns the joke into a physical act-out, becoming almost insulted that this earthquake dared to frighten her. Another joke from a casual set at Flappers begins with the importance of having a gay friend who hypes you up, veers into the perils of feeling too empowered, then finally morphs into a joke about the price of all that planning and self-restraint: “It’s lonely at the top …with your frozen eggs!” It’s self-deprecating and revealing, and for a moment, it looks like Johnson has fully relaxed. But her signature cackles always give up the game. She, too, is tickled by her own sense of perfectionism, and those glimpses of vulnerability were a form of self-control all along.

Two Quick Questions With Zainab

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
My worst show ever was probably the first time I did a main spot at the Comedy Store. It was year one, and I was ambitious. I’d been doing five-minute spots to warm up the show, and I thought now that I’m doing a main spot (15 minutes), I needed all-new material. I went up after Jerrod Carmichael, and I watched him turn a bomb to a win, so I thought I’d have the same luck. No! They didn’t boo, but the silence was deafening. The friends in the audience who came out to support me were confused and embarrassed. I was lit early because I clearly didn’t have the confidence or experience to get through the bomb, so I thanked the audience and said good night. When I tried leaving the stage, the host was nowhere to be found, so I just had to stand there in awkward failure.

What’s the biggest financial hurdle you’ve encountered since becoming a comedian?
I did have to get very comfortable in the beginning asking people to pay me what they said they would. I was under the impression that if you tell me you’re going to pay me, you’ll just do it. But I learned very early that if you don’t speak up, people will not offer it to you.

Before Ray Lau was a comedian, he was president of his fraternity, Theta Delta Chi, at the University of Washington in his hometown of Seattle. Superficially, Lau is very much the “cool comic” this implies. He says “bro” a lot, drops in and out of AAVE, and carries himself with a self-satisfied bravado. But he’s just as willing to puncture this persona with a committed act-out or a whimsical turn of phrase as he is to play into it. He’s not a tough guy who challenges people to “come catch these hands,” as he says in one joke, daintily waving at the audience like a posh old lady greeting her friend at brunch. In another bit from his 2024 Don’t Tell Comedy set, he jokes that all it takes to trigger a parent worried about their kids’ future is to say the phrase “Well, with social media these days …” He launches into a deranged and feral impression of a parent repeating this phrase over and over like a violently malfunctioning robot, which goes on for almost a full minute before he draws attention to the apparent seizure he’s performing onstage. “I hope that looked good on camera,” he says.

Lau developed this high-energy style on Zoom, which became the default setting for open mics during the pandemic, just months after he started comedy in L.A. in 2019. Without the luxury of a live audience, he learned to sell his jokes harder to make an impression, and he’s maintained this hustle mentality both onstage and off. He found success starting out by working doors in exchange for stage time and by producing shows with his friends rather than relying on comedy-club bookings. Following his breakout Don’t Tell Comedy appearance, he taped a set for Netflix Is a Joke’s Introducing … series in 2025, and on TikTok and Instagram, he intersperses snippets of his material with the types of crowdwork interactions the algorithm rewards. He’s just a viral clip or two away from genuine stardom. Hey, you never know with social media these days.

Two Quick Questions With Ray

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
My first year doing a hometown show was a big deal. Invited all my friends and family. Really stressed out for this big event. Sold-out crowd — it had to go perfect. Turns out the venue double booked us. They booked my show, and then right next to my show they booked, I swear, a vampire rave. Right outside our little show room with thin walls, there are 50 to 60 people dressed up as sexy vampires — leather, spikes, fangs, lipstick, nets. One lady was being pulled by a rope.

It was 7 p.m., and my mom came in. She was so scared because she thought these were all my friends. Loud house vampire-blood music was playing outside throughout the entire show — very distracting. At one point during the show, one of the vampires sticks her neck into my show. She looks around and asks “… What is this?” I say “It’s a stand-up comedy show.” She says “Oh, wow, that’s soo … random.” I flipped out. Random?? Girl, you’re a vampire!

What’s the most earnest goal you have?
I’m a big believer that we should not pin all our hopes and dreams on one big goal: “Once I get that Netflix special, I’ll be happy!” The truth is once we get that goal, it is cool for about two weeks, and then soon we’ll be onto the next goal. And then all that tunnel vision will have caused you to miss out on the cool journey. Instead, my goal is to grow my comedy career at a pace that is fulfilling, then keep doing that until I die. Along the way I hope to make good friends, have fun adventures, be creatively satisfied and proud of my work, and feel the joy of overcoming challenges.

Ismael Loutfi is constantly threading several needles at once. The Los Angeles–based comedian is explaining Islam to American audiences whose only knowledge of it is rooted in stereotypes. He’s referencing his Syrian background without positioning himself as a poster child. And he’s talking about whatever else a nightclub comic might discuss (Donald Trump, being divorced, the challenges of dirty talk, etc.) while fully aware that, even if he walks the first two tightropes perfectly, audiences might still look at him as an ambassador for the Muslim Arab American experience. He manages it all by filtering his material through a sensibility of wry irreverence reminiscent of David Cross. Nothing is that serious, even when it is.

Take the way he summed up the country’s political mood during a 2017 set on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, his first television appearance: “I think we can all agree it’s been a tense year ever since the dude became the thing.” Elsewhere, in his 2022 Comedy Central half-hour special Sound It Out, he discusses Muslims’ tendency to administer purity tests within their own community. “I bet you don’t pray five times a day,” he recalls one Muslim man challenging him after a show. “He was basically like, ‘You’re Muslim? Name four of their albums.’ Other religions don’t do that. I don’t think Catholics are walking up to each other like, ‘You’re Catholic too? Bet you wouldn’t fuck my son.’”

Outside of his stand-up credits, Loutfi is an accomplished writer who has worked on Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj, #1 Happy Family USA, After Midnight, and Netflix’s upcoming animated series Mating Season. Currently, he’s channeling all his stand-up and writing experience into his solo show Heavenly Baba, which just received rave reviews at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It’s a true story about Loutfi’s father’s quest to convert his home state of Florida to Islam by turning the family car into a mobile billboard for the religion. One-man shows can be tricky to pull off without being schmaltzy or moralistic, but if anyone has practice nailing an impossible balancing act, it’s Loutfi.

Two Quick Questions With Ismael

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
Best: When I was first starting out in Gainesville, Florida, an older comic saw me perform one night and afterward said, “You give a shit. Keep giving a shit.”

Worst: I once wrote on the hit CBS late-night show After Midnight. Other than writing games and chuffa, one of the duties of the writers was to serve as a sherpa for the different comedian guests who’d come on. One day, I was working with a pretty huge comic. He came in stoned out of his mind and refused to wear shoes. Eventually we sort of bonded in a way, and he looked me dead in the eyes and said, “If I can give you any advice, Islam” — not my name — “it’s this: Be undeniable.” And then he stared at me, completely serious, as if he just blew my fucking mind. Then he went on TV and took off his shirt. It was the stupidest moment of my life. I’m talking to a barely sentient half-naked blob who’s parroting something Jim Gaffigan famously said years earlier as if he came up with it himself.

My advice to anyone starting out: Be deniable. The internet is all that matters now, and the best way to get the internet talking is to get them to deny everything you say and believe in. Make people mad, say something racist, interview a drunk girl outside a Chili’s about anal.

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill or revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
None of us deserve success — selling out tours, writing jobs, pilots, Netflix specials. I have health insurance through the Writers Guild — am I so good at writing that I deserve to go to the doctor while other comics don’t? Of course not. It’s a brutal, unfair, unsustainable scam. If you’re experiencing success, you better be humble. If you’re struggling, take solace in the fact that the rich shall not enter the Kingdom of God.

Julia Masli’s 2023 one-person show, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, became an international phenomenon by offering something unconventional for a piece of comedy: help. In every performance, Masli comes onstage dressed like a Martian tarot-card reader, enters the crowd with a microphone attached to a mannequin leg that serves as her left arm, asks audience members “Problem?,” then tries to solve their issue.

Tired? She’ll have you lie down on a chaise longue for the entire show. Color-blind and insecure about your ability to put together an outfit? She’ll have you stand up while the rest of the crowd tells you how fantastic you look. Lost a loved one? She might get quiet, ask about your loved one, or find someone else in the audience who recently lost someone so you can talk to each other about it. Don’t have any friends in a new city? She’ll organize a house party where everyone in the audience is invited. Have too many books to read? She’d deem that problem insignificant, and you’d become a participant in the show’s recurring bit where, instead of offering to help you, she’d force you to help her by fixing a broken chair onstage. One time, in New York City, this person was David Byrne.

Driving the show is Masli’s sincerity, childlike wonder, and background in clown. She traces her journey to the art form back to her moving from Estonia to England when she was 12, which resulted in her learning how to communicate nonverbally and being cast in nonspeaking parts in school plays. Years later, her heavy accent made it difficult to apply to drama schools and pursue her goal of becoming a serious actor, so she moved to France to learn from Philippe Gaulier, the clown teacher under whom Sacha Baron Cohen, Emma Thompson, and Helena Bonham Carter have studied. After Masli graduated from this prestigious school in 2016, but her struggle to find work continued, which led to an 18-month period of severe depression when she stopped performing entirely. The longing for connection during this period inspired ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Masli brought the show back to Edinburgh this summer and will take it to the Pasadena Playhouse this fall. Based on audience response so far, it’s just as likely to lead Masli into a career as a successful performance artist as it is a future as a benevolent cult leader.

Two Quick Questions With Julia

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
The worst show ever was when we canceled our opening night because 30 volunteer students who work for the venue couldn’t make a microphone work.

What’s the most earnest goal you have?
To make my audience cry.

Most multi-hyphenates wind up having to choose a lane, but Taylor Ortega has spent the last decade navigating every lane the industry has to offer. This spring, she was cast in a forthcoming Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott Netflix crime comedy Big Mistakes alongside Laurie Metcalf, and in the announcement of her casting, Levy said he’s ready for Ortega to become a “household name.” For many Gen-Z bisexuals, the New Jersey native might be recognized for her turn as Shego in the 2019 live-action Kim Possible movie, but her body of work extends far beyond Tumblr GIF sets.

On the short-lived Fox sitcom Welcome to Flatch, she played wise fool Nadine Garcia-Parney, a precocious local historian who is sort of like if Donkey Kong’s Mayor Pauline came to life. Ortega imbues the role with sincere enthusiasm; there’s no wink when it comes to Nadine’s regular humiliations. Elsewhere, Ortega’s 2024 Instagram series “Long Lost” — an improvised series in which she goes to meet different half-siblings played by fellow L.A.-based comedians — lets her embody an HGTV-ified type of straight man named Junie with a toothy smile as she submits herself to whatever game the comic she’s with has set. She’s a regular on the comedy-podcast circuit, complaining about people’s boyfriends playing Cards Against Humanity on StraightioLab or telling Caleb Hearon why she’d be incredible at politics. “I just kind of talk to talk,” she posits in rapid-fire pitter-patter, “and I don’t really feel one way or another about what I’m saying.”

Ortega turns yapping into an art, whether it’s speeding up, slowing down, or yelling (which she defends). But what’s most consistently impressive is watching the comic think on her feet. She brings an unexpected gravitas to her dramatic reading of a website’s cookies disclaimer on After Midnight, which is equal parts Meredith Grey and Meg Ryan, and displays profound command and control over her voice, pitching up and down to show off even the most modest shifts in disappointment or pride. When she speaks, she evokes screwball heroines — maybe that’s why she played a ghost from the 1940s on Ghosts –– who bluster, riff, and gab through scenes until they’ve won their haughty love interest over. Watching Ortega fall into her rhythms is the real fun of her work. Like a skilled drummer, she knows what the room needs.

Two Quick Questions With Taylor

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
Once, at an open mic, a guy I never asked told me my set would be funnier if I said “fuck” more. And I feel like I say “fuck” kind of a lot. So I ignored that advice.

The best advice I ever received was from an improv coach who told our team some version of, “You’re not trying to be a comedian, you’re already doing it. You’re already here, performing in the biggest comedy city in the world.” Because, yeah, if you’re waiting to get paid or be recognized by certain people or institutions before you call yourself a comedian, you’re cheating yourself. You’re already doing it.

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill or revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
Bring back the 2012 improv boom.

The internet is full of influencers without anyone to influence — wannabes posting to their sub-thousand-follower networks of high-school friends, former co-workers, and aunts while replicating the patterns and rhythms they’ve seen from their favorite creators. They monologue lifestyle content directly to camera, but it’s never exhibiting a particularly aspirational lifestyle. They desperately want to feel seen, and Eric Rahill sees them.

Rahill is the master of male-loneliness epidemic comedy, and his best work absorbs the collective unconscious of the internet’s aimless single dudes who sermonize to their phones from front seats of cars in dead mall parking lots, then spits it back out as a ridiculous reflection. In one entry, from a trip to London (“Every step of the city feels like it was designed by an angel in heaven”), Rahill poses in bed with a bottle of Glenlivet and muses with a self-satisfied smirk, “Liquor is so delicious these days, isn’t it?” Another, from 2023, unfolds in the vernacular of hopecore, the social-media trend from that year that paired serene and optimistic imagery with hazy, soothing music. Here, he deploys the format against itself in a montage of the mundane and ugly: a two-star hotel pool, ennui at the hibachi place, a disturbingly shaky camera shot of himself ordering pad Thai. In one video, he says, “What do you do when your world is falling apart? When your industry is being shattered by greed? When the unthinkable happens every day? Where do you go? I go home. I go to where the music is. Wanna join me?” Then he launches into a sad acoustic cover of “Hey Ya!” It’s elevated cringe comedy — the kind that understands that cringe is just the clown-spawn of pathos.

Rahill was raised Evangelical Christian in Washington state, and that influence — from the childhood anxieties it spurred to the hypocrisies of Christian content creators — is all over his comedy; he often satirizes the shallowest Christians, the kinds of dudes who give props to the big man upstairs and think they look good in vests. In his 2023 short film, Seth’s Prayer, he plays an aspiring male model for the Lord who also wants to be a youth pastor to the stars. “I was reading about butterflies the other day. Apparently, they’re worms,” he says in voiceover prayer. “My whole life, I felt like a worm.” It’s like if Zoolander joined The Righteous Gemstones. Rahill drops the act on his podcast with Jack Bensinger and Nate Varrone, Joy Tactics, where he spits enough material off the dome to fill a full stand-up special. Last year, he co-starred in Conner O’Malley’s Letterboxd-lauded feature Rap World, where he played an aspiring rapper. Earlier this year, he appeared as one of Tim Robinson’s weirded-out co-workers in Friendship (Rahill had worked with Robinson before in a small cameo role in season three of I Think You Should Leave). Most recently, he wrote and performed in the ensemble of Peacock’s new Office spinoff, The Paper. He plays Travis, a low-level toilet-paper company employee, which is downright high status compared to most Rahill characters.

In pain pic.twitter.com/iRWXOq98Nr

— Eric Rahill (@ericrahill) June 12, 2023

Two Quick Questions With Eric

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
When I was 24 I worked for the Second City on a cruise (the Norwegian Breakaway … an amazing ship) doing improv and sketch comedy. One of my first weeks there, I got faded off about 1.5 bottles of grocery-store white wine and contraband Jim Beam that one of the guys from the musical snuck onboard. I woke up the next day hospital-level hungover and had to do three shows that night. I was throwing up between every show and was praying that God would let me pass away instead of having to do another round of freeze tag in front of four NJ-based civilian contractors on their way to the Bahamas.

What’s the most earnest goal you have?
If they ever make a Galaxy Quest 2, please let me be in that shit. I cannot recommend Galaxy Quest enough. So funny.

A successful hangout sitcom creates fandoms within the fandom. Each individual character spawns their own stan following, fancam edits, out-of-context YouTube compilations, and more. FX’s Adults, which premiered in May, has inspired its fair share of this, but the correct person within the ensemble to get behind is Issa, played by Amita Rao. She plays Issa’s brash, liberated, youthful self-obsession with a knowing wink, conveying that the character is 100 percent this person, self-aware of the absurdity, but also entirely indifferent to how she’s perceived. This, in combination with her keen timing and delivery — honed onstage at the Annoyance Theatre and the Second City in Chicago — allows her jokes and physicality to play on multiple levels. Consider the first scene of the pilot, in which Issa notices a man on the subway masturbating in her direction and takes justice into her own hands when no one does anything to stop him. “Is this the world you want to live in, sir?” she says as she starts masturbating back at him, literally getting off on her own righteous fury. The intense concentration on her face shifts to horror, then to renewed determination, as she realizes the man is enjoying it.

Beyond her Adults breakout, Rao has had a busy year. After guesting on Hulu’s Deli Boys, where she got a lot of mileage out of her character, Nandika, being an underachieving cosplay freak, she starred in a short film, Sick Day, in which she flexes previously unseen dramatic chops by playing an at-wits’-end office assistant and absolutely nailing an on-camera cry. And she continues to perform live in Chicago alongside sketch-and-improv group Gag Reflex, which she joined at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. What she demonstrates across all her work is complete and total commitment to character. That’s true whether she’s playing Belle in the Realistic Beauty and the Beast screaming about her arm being ripped off, or a mother who is in a sexual relationship with the mouse Stuart Little. Rao appears poised to build on this momentum; she was recently cast in the upcoming comedy movie Wishful Thinking alongside Randall Park, Kate Berlant, and Eric Rahill.

Two Quick Questions With Amita

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
By far the worst show I’ve ever done happened while I was touring with Second City when we went to perform for a wealthy all-boys boarding school in a rural county. Prior to the main performance, we did theater and improv workshops with small groups of the boys — who like any other teenage boys were brash, insecure, and quietly desperate to connect. By the end, they were having fun.

However, when we did a show for the entire campus, it was truly horrible. It was full Lord of the Flies. To their credit, we were doing kind of horribly uncurated material for their age group (e.g., Comcast jokes and suburbanite political humor), but to our credit, they literally wanted us dead. We did our first blackout (the unfortunate, aforementioned Comcast joke) and there was a beat, and then the entire auditorium filled with this tribal and violent booing, jeering, and heckling. It consumed the whole hourlong show. I had never seen anything like it. All the teachers sat silently next to the crowd, completely incapable of controlling them.

Afterward, a semi-traumatized teacher offered to drive us home, congratulating us on “how well we took it.” Then he proceeded to tell us a story about how they’re working on behavioral issues with the boys and how it’s been a real problem since the pandemic. Apparently, the previous month they had brought in a theater company to perform, and during a scene that depicted domestic violence, the boys wouldn’t stop cheering. “So,” the teacher said, “we’ve just been working on that.”

What’s the biggest financial hurdle you’ve encountered since becoming a comedian?
I would say the fact that you have to front all the overhead costs yourself — like transportation to shows, promotional materials, the props and costumes that you can’t borrow from a theater or friends, headshots, travel and lodging for festivals, travel and lodging for “generals,” and that’s not even counting all the incidental costs that naturally come up when you’re moving around that much. There are all these overhead costs you just have to accept and justify without really seeing consistent tangible returns on them in a career sense.

There are a few moments where you get those tangible returns, like when you sell out a big show or reach a milestone, but honestly, outside of getting an agent/manager or one of those big showcases like Just for Laughs, most of those “industry” milestones feel kind of invisible when they’re happening, because they’re really random and chance and rarely provide immediate benefit to your career. Like for me, getting a manager was a huge Milestone™, but my life stayed virtually the same afterward, and it still took a year until I even booked anything.

Sashay’s comedy is a blunt-force attack. She uses “I just want to be gay in peace” as a frequent transition between jokes, but the jokes themselves are anything but calm. There are flurries of frustration, sexual desire, and a fair number of enormous dildos in her material — phalluses that Sashay says have to match her skin tone, because she read that “dick skin and knee skin supposed to be the same complexion.” (“I needed moisturized-kneecap brown.”) Her whole comedic persona is predicated on the idea that she’s doing her audiences a favor by even agreeing to perform for them. She has a fondness for studded leather and habit of wearing huge glasses that obscure her eyes, and those glasses are not for the benefit of the crowd; they are for her.

Sashay is a Comedy Cellar regular from Washington, D.C., who has become the kind of comedian other comedians will namecheck. She’s collaborated with people like Roy Wood Jr. and Wanda Sykes and appeared on Comedy Central, BET, and HBO’s Pause With Sam Jay. She was named a Just for Laughs New Face in 2018, and she recently hosted its showcase in New York. Sashay isn’t a cuddly crowdwork type, and her fascination with the gendered breakdowns of queer relationships often embraces grumpy, truculent queerness. When girls she dates assume she’s “the boy” because of her short haircut and love of Jordans, she turns the stereotypical expectations back on them: “You got the smaller titties. You closer to being the boy. Bitch, get the check.” Sashay’s sets are not a comfortable corporate-Pride-style approach to identity. Her stand-up is so appealing precisely because she does not beg for approval or make a show of politeness. Sashay’s other trademark, beyond the glasses and the perpetual sense of exhaustion, is her endearing, distinctively scratchy voice. It’s high yet filled with gravel, and when she laughs, it’s like if Janis Joplin swallowed a dog toy. It’s a perfect complement to her material; it communicates that Sashay will entertain you but has no patience for any of your nonsense.

Two Quick Questions With Paris

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
The worst comedy advice I ever received was “Women aren’t normally funny, so be grateful every time you get booked on a show, and make sure you stand out because they didn’t have to book a woman.”

The best comedy advice I ever received is that if you are nervous, no matter how big the room is, if you look straight to the back — normally where the stop sign is in the back of the room — it will look like you’re looking at the entire room, and it’ll give off that you are making eye contact with the entire crowd. And also be funny onstage but also be likable off-stage! And of my favorites from Roy Wood Jr.: “Don’t leave any meat on the bone” when it comes to a topic. He said rather than talking about ten different topics, you can literally talk about one topic until you got everything out of that topic that you can.

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill or revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
In comedy, no topic is off-limits as long as the joke is funnier than it is offensive. I believe that anything can be funny, but some people offend rather than be funny, and that’s what makes people feel like some topics are off-limits. But if the joke and the ignorance are equally yoked, people will laugh.

Also, I believe people should bring booing back! I think with the oversaturation of comedy, booing would remove the comedians who don’t take the art form and craft seriously!

The typical Sahib Singh character exists on a continuum from swagger to insecurity. One second, he’s crushing it at a game night with his friends. The next, he’s frantically asking ChatGPT, “Is it okay for men to enjoy board games?” He’s a righteous crusader outraged by so-called “socialist” women who discriminate against “poor” men who don’t have bed frames. Then he’s a typical fuckboy pleading to watch Netflix on their accounts. They’re dudes who have fallen down the wrong internet rabbit holes, or, in the case of his recurring podcaster character, dudes who are digging those rabbit holes deeper. They’re overcompensating in the pursuit of modern masculinity, and Singh knows how to make a meal out of the moments when their masks fall.

With over 1.5 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, Singh, who grew up in Baltimore and currently lives in New York, is best known for these sketches, which routinely rack up millions of views. But he’s also a successful headlining stand-up who’s been featured on Just for Laughs’ New Faces and opened for Nimesh Patel on the road. Onstage, he is a “dumb” guy who speaks one beat too slowly and uses this persona and timing to sell plainspoken non sequiturs. (One joke about how he amuses himself on LinkedIn by endorsing people for skills he knows they don’t have: “I used to smoke meth with this kid, Emilio, growing up. I just endorsed him for ‘leadership skills.’”) He’s more reserved and less ambitious than in his short-form videos, but ultimately, this is just one more type he can play in his wide arsenal of bro characters.

Derrick Stroup can work himself into a lather about anything. He treats even the most benign subjects, like hiking as a first-date activity and the stagnation of dog-poop retrieval technology, as fodder for fire-and-brimstone fury. “I wish I got worked up over things that mattered,” he jokes in his 2023 Dry Bar Comedy special. This performance style is not a put-on: As a Harvest, Alabama, native bewildered by the customs of non-southern cities like Denver and New York, and a ’90s child who can’t fathom the lives of kids today, he’s full of fish-out-of-water observations where his confusion manifests as anger. The generational gap inspires one of his best jokes about “earning” a DUI purely by living in an era before Uber and Lyft. “If you’re under the age of 28, you don’t know what it’s like to be stranded,” he says. “You get to go home when you want. Kings and queens of the Irish good-bye! You’ve never been stuck in a kitchen going through a stranger’s pantry before — because you couldn’t leave, because you’re stuck! We didn’t drive drunk because we wanted to …” He pauses to plead for empathy. “Look at me! We drove drunk because we wanted to see our families again!” Hidden in Stroup’s fiery tirades is a poetic flair and penchant for storytelling reminiscent of Kyle Kinane.

While Stroup has been featured on a number of mainstream platforms including The Tonight Show (twice), Comedy Central’s Stand-Up Featuring, Don’t Tell Comedy, and Just for Laughs’ New Faces, his biggest opportunities have come courtesy of Nate Bargatze, who featured him as a performer on his CBS Christmas special in 2024 and often features Stroup as his opener on tour. Continued exposure to a massive audience like this is an invaluable chance to make an impact, especially when a crowd expects Bargatze’s subdued energy, then Stroup comes onstage and screams at them about dog poop.

Two Quick Questions With Derrick

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
This is tough, because you really try to bury these memories. I have a few to choose from, but Rawlins, Wyoming, sticks out. The show was in a banquet hall attached to a gas station that moonlighted as VFW. It was the only audience that didn’t really laugh — instead, they just yelled like a rodeo yell after each punch line. I already yell onstage, and the more I yelled, the more they yelled back. It became insane. I got offstage, and this guy that looked like he was drawn by a western-cowboy cartoonist came up and said, “Don’t be mad at ’em. They don’t get out much.”

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill or revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
Don’t tell a comic they had a good set if they didn’t. You don’t have to tell them it was a bad set, but no need to send them further into delusion or give them a bad read on what they just did. There’s too many of us anyway, and it’s partly because everyone says “Great job” after some guy just walked 11 people. Nobody says “Good shot” when someone slices it off the tee box. So we gotta clean this up. There’s ways to soften the message, like “How’d you like them?” That’s a classic, and it doesn’t sting. Leave the ball in their court. But we can’t keep lying to people about what just happened up there.

Jo Sunday is like a forest nymph plucked out of an idyllic wood and thrown onto a Gowanus stage. Their boysenberry mane and bouncy physicality create an aura that’s intensified by their sing-song cadence, which allows them to buck comedy rhythms and zip onto punchlines that are genuinely surprising. “I come out as this feminine, adorable character to disarm the audience with my charm and my wit, and then I’ll surprise them with the darkness that lies within,” they told Refinery29 in July.

That approach stems from a tendency to question the foundations upon which conventional wisdom is built. “I like to walk home [alone] because I like to cause drama and strife to my friend group,” they say in one bit. “People hear that, they see how I dress, they tell me, ‘Get home safe.’” Sunday repeats the instruction as if it’s a foreign sentiment they’re encountering for the first time: “It’s not … up to me … necessarily.” Then, they smile at the danger: “When someone says, ‘Get home safe,’ what I hear is, ‘Tonight might be your last, so good luck out there, slut!’” That sensibility was put to good use in July on SubwayTakes, where Sunday earned a coveted “100 percent disagree” along with over 2 million TikTok views. (Their take? “I think introverts are morally weak.”) They were chosen as one of 2025’s Just for Laughs’ New Faces and co-host the Union Hall show Body Count in Brooklyn with Tessa Belle.

Across their work, Sunday often weaves in their experience moving to the U.S. from Ghana when they were 3 years old, and they delight in poking holes at common immigrant narratives. “Immigrant kids, I feel like we all say the same stuff: ‘Oh, I come from a culture that’s so intense and so success-oriented,’” they claim. “And I wonder, Is that the truth about your culture, or is that the truth about your parents, the country’s top two narcs who left that culture due to their friends and family did not like them there?” The slightly off grammar, the literal shaking in their boots, and the choice to wade into murky, identitarian-politic-filled waters render Sunday a little scamp; they’re rewriting shared myths then flitting off to the next topic with a smirk.

Two Quick Questions With Jo

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
I bombed at an open mic at Hannibal Buress’s new comedy club. I wasn’t planning to attend that night. I passed by it on the street and thought, Let me show these people a thing or two. I had just opened for Hannibal in Boston, so I was feeling some swagger. During the bombing, I said, “I’m not too worried about this because I have other stuff.” Afterward, someone asked me, “What other stuff?” and I had to leave.

What’s the most earnest goal you have?
Well, my big reveal is I denied a med-school acceptance to pursue comedy. I wanted to be a surgeon, so if I can make this comedy stuff feel as intense or as fulfilling as the operating room might have, I’ll be pretty happy. My decision was pretty confusing and painful to my family, which I get. They gave up a lot to bring me to the U.S. and chase after stability, prosperity, prestige, fence, lawnmower, etc. — classic immigrant stuff.

I’ve realized lately that one of the most special gifts they gave me is the ability to choose. I didn’t grow up worrying if I’d have power in my house or clothes to wear to school. I had my material needs met (and the local library’s summer-reading challenge to beat). I got to dream. My most earnest goal is to make the most of that gift.

Jacob Wysocki has been booking roles in Hollywood since 2010. He’s played sad teens in indie movies like 2011’s Terri and unheralded goofballs in college comedies like 2012’s Pitch Perfect, but it wasn’t until the emergence of Dropout, the independent-streaming service that grew out of CollegeHumor, that he could fully showcase his comedic point of view. Since 2022, Wysocki has established himself as social media’s favorite cast member on Make Some Noise, Dropout’s game show in which contestants are rewarded points for improvising scenes based on comedic prompts. It’s the perfect use of his formal improv background, which includes time at ComedySportz and the Upright Citizens Brigade in L.A.

Onstage, Wysocki is broad and sweethearted, as if Chris Farley were a curious SoCal stoner, and he has a similar knack for fleshing out characters that could easily be one-note. Take the time he played a libidinous houseplant reveling in being overwatered. “Mmm, I’m feeling it in my roots,” he grunts. He could stop there, but he also expresses this plant’s horniness by doing a British accent and breaking out into song. It’s this ability to go big that made Wysocki such a crucial member of the Dropout Improv tour that played large theaters around the country earlier this year.

Wysocki’s Make Some Noise success has spilled into other Dropout shows. On the streamer’s biggest hit, Game Changer, a competition show in which the premise changes every episode, Wysocki has managed to nurture intense parasocial bonds with Dropout’s fans by showcasing his personality as a chillass wandering spirit. The most Wysockian moment on Dropout arrived during the most recent Game Changer season premiere earlier this year, in which he was challenged to bring a standee of the show’s host and Dropout CEO Sam Reich to the most remote location possible over the next year. Wysocki made a short documentary of him road tripping in his van to a town of abandoned mines in central California, where the one person who lives there helped him bury the standee 900 feet underground. The resulting clip garnered over 4.8 million views across Instagram and TikTok. Look out for a potential travel show at Dropout, for which his fans have begged for months.

Two Quick Questions With Jacob

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
Truthfully, I’ve walked away from so many shows feeling like that was probably the worst show I’ve ever done, only to be quickly proved wrong by sucking even harder somehow in a more dog-shit show the next week. However, one show in particular sticks out to me. It was the first time I ever got booed by an entire audience. This was in my “college team” days over at ComedySportz in Hollywood. We were backstage buzzing because we had the rare opportunity of performing for a sold-out show! No one gave us the heads-up, but that sold-out crowd was comprised of Italian high-school students visiting from abroad. Oh baby, you better believe these kids didn’t speak any English!

It was dead silent for the entire first half of the show. I remember we tried to switch tactics and leaned heavily into physical comedy or bits without much dialogue. Most devastating was the moment when I wound my body up as much as I could and performed the pratfall of all pratfalls, and when I hit the ground expecting a laugh, I was met with the most bone-chilling cacophony of  Italian boos. I gave it my all, and they fucking hated it. We never got them on our side. I think every comedian should have to eat shit like that, though.

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
Best: “You are enough” or “Weird is your weapon.”

I had this great improv mentor named Natasha Arnold who, aside from being a fiercely funny improviser and immersive coach, had an extremely nurturing Chicken Soup for the Improvisor’s Soul approach to teaching. She’d run these workshops that always culminated in her presenting these uplifting idioms to her students. I feel so grateful for this tenderness, especially early on in my comedic pursuits. It wasn’t about racking up skills as fast as possible; it was about building the confidence to believe you were an artist with a voice worth developing.

Worst: One time I had a coach say to me, “There’s a devil on your shoulder, and you let him win every time.” I always felt like they meant it in a negative way, like this was something I needed to regulate. But deep down inside I was like, Yes, thank you for seeing me! I’m so happy you’re understanding why it’s so fun over here.

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