The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland met in high school in Maryland and have been making magical two-handed theater shows ever since. Now based in New York City, they have taken three shows to the Edinburgh Fringe since 2022, winning The Scotsman's Fringe First Awards for writing for each of them: And Then The Rodeo Burned Down ; What if They Ate the Baby? ; and A Letter To Lyndon B. Johnson or God, Whoe...

Jono Zalay began his standup career in Boston while simultaneously earning his Doctorate in Neuroscience, where his research work included giving cocaine to rats. Since dropping his science hobby to pursue comedy full-time, Jono has done standup for The Late Late Show on CBS, Netflix is a Joke, and LMAOF on OnlyFansTV. He also has worked behind the scenes as a story producer or consulting producer...

Jamie Linn Watson is an NYC-based actor and comedian. You may have seen her as Joanna Roscoe in season 5 of What We Do in the Shadows , a judgy church girl in Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain , or as the Sprintern in many national commercials for the company formerly known as Sprint. Watson performs with the Upright Citizens Brigade on one of their house character teams, with f...

Saaniya Abbas grew up in New Delhi, attended an all-girls Catholic school in the Himalayas, and only discovered herself once she found herself divorced in Dubai and starting a new life as a stand-up comedian. She amassed a half-million followers on Instagram hosting live videos in the pandemic, and as a comedian has toured the UK and India, and took her first one-woman-show, Hellarious , to the 20...

Lou Wall is an Australian comedian whose two most recent shows were both nominated for Most Outstanding Show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.   Wall has appeared on Australian TV panel shows, and also appeared in the ABC Australia and Netflix series, Fisk . I've seen and reviewed all three shows Wall has taken thus far to the Edinburgh Fringe, from their breakneck breakthrough perfo...

Chanel Ali   is a stand-up comedian, writer, and actress based in New York City. You may have seen her on MTV's Girl Code , TruTV's Laff Mobb's Laff Tracks , Starz's Night Train with Wyatt Cenac , or two showcases she did for Comedy Central in partnership with Refinery29. She also released a full special for Unprotected Sets , available on MGM+. Deadline named her as one of their 15 Comedians to W...

A San Fransisco native who's based in both New York City and Los Angeles, Dylan Adler is a musical comedian who performed and wrote for The Late Late Show with James Corden . Before that gig, Adler was named a Comic to Watch by the New York Comedy Festival and a Comedian You Should and Will Know by Vulture . He took his solo hour, Haus of Dy-lan , to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025, and sat down with...

Britt Migs is a stand-up and sketch comedian based in New York City who was named a Creator to Watch at the 2024 New York Comedy Festival for characters such as her Italian publicist for the Pope. Migs manages Cracked magazine's social media and runs the Cracked Comedy Club showcases. In addition, she also has written for Reductress , co-hosts Sunday Sauce monthly at Union Hall with her Meat Cats...

Grace Helbig is a legendary YouTuber, etched officially into the VidCon Hall of Fame earlier in 2025. The comedian and actress who began documenting her daily life in 2007 through solo videos, two-hander sketches with her college bestie and Brooklyn roomie Michelle, and then DailyGrace on MyDamnChannel, eventually went on to write two New York Times best-selling books, and hosted her own talk show...

Ismael Loutfi is a comedian and TV writer currently working on the animated series Mating Season from the makers of Big Mouth. His previous credits include writing for After Midnight , Ramy Youssef's #1 Happy Family USA , and Netflix's Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj . As a stand-up, he has a half-hour on Comedy Central to his credit, along with appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Bill Burr's The R...

Tamara Yajia's family immigrated to America from Argentina twice before she became a teenager, and the second time prevented her from becoming potentially Argentina's version of Britney Spears, for better or for worse. Yajia documents it all in her new memoir ,  CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA: My Life as a Failed Child Star , and she sat down with me to talk about how she dealt with the pangs of life not m...

Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, Veronica Osorio moved to New York City after spending her teen years clowning and acting in South America. Once in America, she joined the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where she performed on house sketch teams with Kate McKinnon, Nicole Byer, and Natasha Rothwell, among others. In New York and Los Angeles, she has started and/or hosted all-Spanish and all-f...

I spoke with comedian Nimesh Patel when he thought he had licensed his new hour, Instant Karma  to Netflix. Shortly after our chat, Netflix decided to film a brand-new hour with Patel instead later in 2025. So our chat found him at a crossroads — Patel had just filmed an episode of CNN's Have I Got News For You , and subsequently performed a second time on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon ....

The comedian James Tom now jokes about having told they/them pronoun jokes as far back as 2013 quote-unquote "before most non-binary people were born." Back then, Tom felt alone in the world and in the comedy community. But now, living and performing as a gay trans man, Tom told me over Zoom that he feels more like "the estranged father of the non-binary transmasc comedy community." We also spoke...

Rory Rosegarten started his career as a comedy manager by the time he was 20 with a whopper of a first client: the already legendary Robert Klein. More than four decades later, as founder and still president of The Conversation Company, Rosegarten manages a small but highly successful comedy clientele — his longtime roster includes both Brian Regan and Ray Romano, his newer client Tom Green recent...

Mike Drucker   is an Emmy-nominated and WGA-winning writer and comedian living in New York. Drucker's comedy career really began with an internship at Saturday Night Live , where he later contributed to SNL's Weekend Update as well as The Onion before leaving the city and the East Coast for a gig writing for video games with Nintendo of America. So it makes sense that his memoir, Good Game, No Rem...

Fooling media outlets into thinking she created the Netflix series  Emily in Paris may have won the comedian and Fordham grad Abby Govindan  plenty of new followers on Twitter in 2021, but it didn't go a long way in making her the pride of her Indian American family back home in Houston. It's just one of the stories Govindan shares in her debut Off Broadway one-hander, "How to Embarrass Your Immig...

Brad Alexander composes music for television and musical theater, whose notable works include the music for   See Rock City & Other Destinations , which won the 2011 Drama Desk Award, Richard Rodgers Award and BMI Foundation's Jerry Bock Award, and more recently served as lead composer for the PBS/Amazon animated series, Clifford The Big Red Dog . I remember seeing and hearing Brad as a piano whiz...

What's in a name? Since its launch in 2016 by comedy managers Ryan Bitzer and Damion Greiman, along with founding members Ian Adkins and Anthony Leo, 800 Pound Gorilla Media has grown from a small record label into a king kong of comedy distribution, working with everyone from Kevin Hart's LOL Network to Bill Burr and Al Madrigal's All Things Comedy, and releasing a cool 100 comedy specials on the...

We did it, comedy fans. We withstood another year of craziness, hundreds upon hundreds of comedy specials, and have gotten my friend and colleague in comedy criticism, Jason Zinoman from The New York Times , to join me for another December to Remember and try to make sense of it all. 2024, a year that started with a fake AI George Carlin and a captivating Katt Williams performance on Club Shay Sha...

Kelly McCaughan is an actor, writer, comedian and clown whose show, Catholic Guilt , was nominated for Best Newcomer by the 2023 ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and then brought back the following Fringe, where her show received a Best Show nomination from the 2024 ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Originally from outside of Pittsburgh, McCaughan went to college with fellow renowned clown Natalie Palamide...

Chad Daniels is a Minnesota stand-up comedian with more than a billion streams to his credit, and in July 2024 released his 10th comedy special and first for Netflix, Empty Nester , marking his freedom from raising two kids as a single dad in small-town Minnesota. Daniels sat down with me over Zoom to talk about how he balanced it all in his early years as a stand-up, what he learned from working...

Kyle Ayers is a comedian from Missouri currently based in Los Angeles who hosts the popular podcast and live show, Never Seen It , where comedians rewrite famous movies and TV shows they've never seen . You may have seen Ayers perform his stand-up on Conan or on the OnlyFans comedy showcase, LMAOF . Ayers also created and hosted the live comedy show, Boast Rattle , which as it name suggests is the...

The state of the comedy industry, like most everything else in 2024, feels very much in flux. Danny Frenkel and Alex Dajani have seen firsthand how technology and social media have changed the relationships between performers and fans in the 21st century, and have set about finding a better way for them to connect today. Danny worked at Facebook since 2010 in various aspects of marketing and data...

Ashley Gavin is a comedian from New York City who studied computer science and helped craft the curriculum for Girls Who Code, before deciding to embark on her own path in comedy in 2012. Gavin says she became Carnival Cruise Line's first openly gay performer later that decade, and when the pandemic shut down that gig, she pivoted to podcasting and social media, where she has found even greater su...