The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Tom Rhodes has been obsessed with stand-up comedy since he was 12. As a teenager in Florida in the 1980s, he performed with fake IDs to get into the comedy clubs and won a contest that allowed him to perform at 19 at The Comedy Store in Hollywood. After stops in New York City and San Francisco, Rhodes became the first comedian signed to a deal with Comedy Central, and starred in his own NBC sitcom...

Haley Joel Osment was just a kid when he made his movie debut in Forrest Gump, racked up TV appearances as Jeff Foxworthy's sitcom son and the Murphy Brown baby growing up, and earned his first Oscar nomination at the tender age of 11 for seeing dead people in The Sixth Sense. He's also worked with Stephen Spielberg, starring in A.I., and paid it forward in Pay It Forward. After graduating from NY...

Chris Hardwick is probably hosting a TV show or podcast as you listen to me introduce him here. Four nights a week, Hardwick hosts the comedy game show @midnight on Comedy Central. Sunday nights you can watch him Talking with Walking Dead cast members and everyone else on AMC. He also hosts a primetime game show for NBC, The Wall. Hardwick currently serves as founder, CEO, and creative head of Ner...

A comedian, actor and writer, Jim Jefferies has established himself as one of the most respected comics of his generation with a controversial and belief-challenging stand-up style that continues to surprise and entertain audiences around the globe. He recently wrapped an international stand-up tour, "The Unusual Punishment Tour," to rave reviews which came on the heels of releasing his second Net...

Tom Shlllue can be seen on FOX News, where he hosted the late late-night comedy panel show, Red Eye, and still appears regularly in other hours, offering his homespun comedic values to the day's news. Shillue has been featured on Comedy Central's Broad City, and he can be seen and heard from time to time on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon as a member of Fallon's celebrity barbershop quartet...

Mark Lonow is an actor, producer and talent manager, but he's perhaps best known for something else he did offstage -- going into business with Budd Friedman to save the Hollywood Improv and help oversee its expansion as the first major comedy club chain. But there's a lot more to Lonow's story, from his job as a teenager at the legendary Pip's in Brooklyn, to the improv/sketch trio he performed i...

Lavell Crawford is best known for his portrayal of Huell, the bodyguard for Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad and now Better Call Saul. Originally from St. Louis, Crawford rose up the comedy ranks from Showtime at the Apollo to Comicview to Def Comedy Jam to runner-up on season five of Last Comic Standing. He since has been seen multiple times as a panelist on Chelsea Lately and The Nightly Show with L...

Scout Durwood grew up in the Kansas outskirts of Kansas City with dreams of becoming the next Julia Roberts. Instead, after first playing soccer and then becoming a cabaret singer, Scout's first major screen credit came in the MTV reality dating stunt, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. Durwood shook that off to remain entrenched in New York City's cabaret and burlesque scenes as a funny singer, ta...

Norm Macdonald is Canada's most-famous play-by-play golf commentator on Twitter. Of course, you know and love Norm Macdonald even more for his years anchoring Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1990s, followed by The Norm Show on ABC. He's also much beloved by David Letterman and many other comedians for the way he breaks down jokes to their humorous essence, whether it was his memor...

Aunty Donna is an Australian sketch comedy group that includes no aunts and no Donnas, but instead one Mark Samual Bonanno, Broden Kelly and Zachary Ruane. They burst onto the comedy scene Down Under with their first show in 2012 at Melbourne's comedy and fringe festivals. They produced a new show each year since, taking three of them to the other side of the globe at the Edinburgh Fringe, and the...

Eddie Pepitone has been called "The Bitter Buddha," which also is the title of the 2012 documentary about the comedian, a New Yorker by birth who has called Los Angeles his home for the better part of the twenty-first century since landing a role in the hit movie, Old School. You've seen and heard him in many TV shows over the past decade, including The Sarah Silverman Program, Bob's Burgers, Maro...

Joe DeRosa started his comedy career in the urban rooms of Philadelphia, and not long after he moved to New York City he earned a spot touring with Dave Chappelle. With Bill Burr and Robert Kelly,DeRosa co-wrote and starred in a short film called CHEAT, which they also turned into a book. DeRosa also has written for TV shows including The Pete Holmes Show and Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of...

Americans may know Aziz Ansari, Hari Kondabolu or Russell Peters, but Vir Das is the biggest Indian-born comedian and Bollywood actor back home, where he hosted up to four shows at once on Indian television. Das first came to America for college, and he's back now on an American tour promoting his first Netflix special – TENT – which he filmed in both New Delhi and New York. His 2017 tour also wil...

Ian Harvie came out to his family three times in Maine, as gay at 19, as transgender at 22, and as a stand-up comedian at 33. Now a trans man in his 40s, Harvie produced one of the best stand-up specials of 2016, Seeso's "May the Best Cock Win." In between, he met Margaret Cho thanks to MySpace, eventually becoming her opening act across North America, taking his own solo shows to the Melbourne co...

Jimmy Pardo and Matt Belknap are some of the funniest comedy pioneers around. Matt Belknap was an aspiring screenwriter when he launched a message board for Tenacious D fans that became something larger, ASpecialThing.com. Around the same time he decided to start his own record label, he also convinced stand-up comedian and host with the most Jimmy Pardo to launch a weekly podcast. Never Not Funny...

Jay Chandrasekhar has spent the past two decades writing, directing and acting in film and television. With his group Broken Lizard, he has co-written, co-starred and directed their feature films, Super Troopers , Beerfest and Club Dread . He's also directed the big-screen version of Dukes of Hazzard , small-screen episodes of Arrested Development , and appeared in a memorable stunt for Jackass 2...

Jim Norton is a best-selling author and comedian you've seen in multiple stand-up specials on HBO and EPIX and in recurring roles on Louie and Inside Amy Schumer . But you've likely also heard him for almost two decades now every morning on the radio -- first as the third mic with Opie and Anthony, then second mic with Opie, and now co-hosting his own SiriusXM program weekday mornings with Sam Rob...

Gina Yashere first came to the attention of Americans in 2007 when she appeared on season five of Last Comic Standing (the first international season, which also featured finalists Amy Schumer, Doug Benson, Lavell Crawford and winner Jon Reep). But Yashere already had plenty of successful experience with comedy contests in her native England, a finalist for the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year a...

The child of Afghan immigrants, Fahim Anwar grew up in Seattle, went to the University of Washington and got a job at Boeing in aerospace engineering to make his parents proud. But Anwar had a different dream, and no, I don't mean the dancing machine Lance Cantstopolis. He took a job in Long Beach so he could drive to stand-up open mics in Los Angeles, and he was able to quit the day job once gigs...

The Umbilical Brothers aren't actually brothers, but the comedy bond between Australians Shane Dundas and David Collins has lasted for three decades and taken them all over the world with their dynamic duo act that mixes mime, slapstick and stand-up. They've performed on late-night for Letterman and Leno, after James Brown at Woodstock '99, for the Queen of England, and most recently on The Late S...

Kate Berlant and John Early are unique characters in stand-up comedy, and yet you almost always see them together, whether it's in each other's half-hour specials for Netflix's The Characters, in their joint project for Vimeo, 555, or on the bill together on shows from New York City to Los Angeles and stops in between. Berlant was one of Variety magazine's 10 Comics to Watch in 2015, filmed separa...

Emmy-nominated actor and comedian Billy Gardell starred in the hit CBS sitcom, Mike & Molly as Officer Mike Biggs for six seasons, and you can see him still in syndication there, as well as in his other previous recurring roles on Lucky ; Yes, Dear ; and My Name Is Earl . He now co-stars as the colorful Col. Tom Parker in the CMT series, Sun Records . But it almost didn't happen for the journeyman...

Ritch Shydner had quite a run during the comedy boom of the 1980s, making multiple appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Late Night with David Letterman , playing Al Bundy's co-worker on Married With Children , appearing in small roles in big movies such as Roxanne and Beverly Hills Cop II , and writing for Roseanne , The Jeff Foxworthy Show , and  The Mind of the Married Man...

Jo Firestone can be seen on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Chris Gethard Show , and heard on WFMU. Jo was recently named a New Face at the 2016 Just For Laughs Festival. And if you like puns, check out Punderdome: A Card Game for Pun Lovers, based on the live show she started with her father that's been written up in The New Yorker . Jo has carved out her own charming niche in come...

Scott Aukerman got his first big break as a writer/performer on the HBO cult classic, Mr. Show with Bob and David . But he's responsible for many more big breaks, not only as host of the Comedy Death Ray and Comedy Bang Bang live shows at M Bar and the UCB Theatre, but also as host of the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast and TV series on IFC, as well as the co-founder of the first major comedy podcastin...