The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Mike Royce was a stand-up comedian and audience warm-up guy for The Maury Povich Show and Spin City before he broke through as a writer for the Sklar Brothers and their MTV series, Apartment 2F. He later helped his friend Ray Romano on a book and eventually his hit CBS sitcom, Everybody Loves Raymond. Since then, Royce has gone on to run the shows for Louis CK's Lucky Louie, TNT's Men of a Certain...

Matt Iseman was a jock when I first knew him as a college classmate of mine at Princeton. After graduation, Matt went to med school to become a doctor, only to diagnosis himself as a comedian. Since then, he has shared an Emmy win for the cable show, Clean House, hosted Sports Soup and Scream Play on E!, and appeared in TV ads and Transformers 2. But you know him best now as the host of NBC's Amer...

Caitlin Barlow, Katy Colloton, Cate Freedman, Kate Lambert, Katie O'Brien and Kathryn Renée Thomas met in various Chicago improvisational theaters, and with a shared name and a dream between them, formed The Katydids . They've sold a sitcom to NBC and a feature film screenplay, but none of that might have been possible if their independent web series hadn't caught viral fire first with the right p...

Colin Quinn is the godfather of contemporary New York city comedy in more ways than one. After his first TV break as the sidekick on the 1980s MTV game show, Remote Control , Quinn helped usher other comedians onto TV as host of Caroline's Comedy Hour on A&E, then a generation later as host of Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn on Comedy Central. In between, Quinn wrote for In Living Color , co-wrote an...

Laurie Kilmartin produced one of the best stand-up specials of 2016, "45 Jokes About My Dead Dad," streaming exclusively on Seeso.com. Kilmartin is a writer on Conan , a former finalist on Last Comic Standing , and the New York Times best-selling author of "Sh*tty Mom." You can hear her on the Nerdist podcast, The Jackie and Laurie Show , with Jackie Kashian, where they talk about their lives as w...

Jason Zinoman is the comedy critic for The New York Times , and has written a new book about David Letterman which will come out April 2017. But first, Zinoman joined me once again to close the book on 2016. Who was the Most Valuable Performer in comedy in 2016? Who were the stand-out stand-ups? We discuss the year's work by Amy Schumer, Kate McKinnon, Jeff Ross, Maria Bamford, Tig Notaro, Donald...

Nina Conti is the only child of actors – her father, Tom, is a Tony Award winner and Oscar nominee. As for Nina, she began her career as an actress at the Royal Shakespeare Company before her mentor Ken Campbell convinced her to become a ventriloquist. Nina won the BBC New Comedy Award in 2002, best show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2008, and has performed in many British TV s...

There's only one Sinbad the Sailor in fictional lore, and only one Sinbad worth knowing about in the funny business. There really is nobody quite like him, and we've seen it since he broke through in a big way on Star Search in the 1980s, through his role on the NBC Cosby spin-off sitcom, A Different World , through hosting It's Showtime at the Apollo , through four separate HBO specials in the 19...

Kevin McDonald is one of the original founders of The Kids in the Hall, the legendary sketch comedy troupe that started in Toronto, then became internationally famous over five seasons in the late 1980s and early 1990s thanks to HBO and later CBS. McDonald 's recurring characters included The King of Empty Promises, and Sir Simon Milligan, the host of the horror-themed TV show, The Pit of Ultimate...

Jessica Kirson has a captivating stage presence that bowls you over with laughter, whether you're a schmuck in the front row or one of the so-called celebrities on NBC's Celebrity Apprentice. Kirson has a featured role onscreen and behind the scenes in the new Robert DeNiro movie about an aging insult comic called, The Comedian . She has also appeared on The Tonight Show , Last Comic Standing , T...

One of the all-time greatest cast members of Saturday Night Live , Dana Carvey found his comedy greatness early, winning the San Francisco Comedy Competition when he was 22, then co-starring in a sitcom with Mickey Rooney and a young Nathan Lane, and a bit part in This Is Spinal Tap . Carvey joined SNL at the age of 31 and revolutionized the show's impersonations by becoming President George H.W....

Yousef Erakat has upward of 10 million YouTube subscribers for FouseyTube and won the 2016 Entertainer of the Year honors at the Streamy Awards, and yet he said during his acceptance speech at the Streamys that he might also be the most hated personality on YouTube. And still, he reads the comments. Yousef sat down with me to talk about how he went from theater classes to vlogging to prank videos...

Dan Levy started comedy at the age of 9 and was competing at the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen while still a college student at Emerson College. Levy has toured with Aziz Ansari, John Mulaney and Whitney Cummings, and his 2012 album for Comedy Central, "Congrats on Your Success" debuted at #1 on iTunes. He co-starred on HBO's Enlightened, and has hosted two shows in the past year, the sta...

Before we ever heard about Trevor Noah in America, Loyiso Gola was the star of his own TV satire in South Africa, Late Nite News with Loyiso Gola . He appeared in a PBS documentary in 2014 hosted by The Daily Show 's Hasan Minhaj called Stand Up Planet , and now in 2016, Gola is ready for his global close-up. His first stand-up special, Live in New York , is the first solo comedy special presented...

Rory Albanese joined The Daily Show with Jon Stewart shortly after graduating from college in 1999, and rose from the ranks to become executive producer by the time he left in 2013, and was the showrunner for The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore , also on Comedy Central, where you also started to see him more in front of the camera as a contributor and panelist. He released his first half-hour stan...

Nicole Byer first captured the comedy world's attention as part of the improv group, Doppelganger, which also featured future Saturday Night Live player Sasheer Zamata. Byer co-starred in a late-night sketch show on FOX produced by The Lonely Island called P arty Over Here . She's also appeared on Lady Dynamite , Transparent , 30 Rock and the movie, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates . Nicole's rela...

Norman Lear is a television legend. Writer, producer and creator of all-time classic sitcoms of the 1970s – including All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Maude. Lear made satire tackling race, class, and gender inequalities and things that matter to people, at a time when nobody else on TV dared to do so. At one point, he had five of the top nine...

You first saw Joe Rogan on the classic NBC sitcom NewsRadio , then later as host of the competition show Fear Factor . Now not only can you see him commentating on UFC fights, but also hear and see him on his hit podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience . His latest stand-up special, Triggered , is exclusively out now on Netflix. Rogan recounts the key moments in his career, from making the leap of teach...

Miranda Sings has been telling Haters to back off since she first uploaded a hilariously bad cover of Aretha Franklin's Respect in late 2007. Since then, she has accumulated more than 7 million YouTube subscribers and one billion views of her videos – more than 5.1 million Instagram followers, 3.67 million Twitter followers and 2 million Facebook fans – and just launched an eight-episode series ca...

Derek Waters is the co-creator and star of Drunk History , which has won both an Emmy and a Sundance Film Festival award and is now in its fourth season on Comedy Central after appearing on Funny or Die and HBO. A fifth season is forthcoming. But Drunk History wasn't even the first successful webseries from Waters; he previously collaborated with Bob Odenkirk and The Big Bang Theory's Simon Helber...

Cue the bugle sounds and put your puns where we can see them, because Andy Zaltzman is my guest today. Zaltzman is a critically-acclaimed comedian in the UK where he has been performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe since 1999 and collaborating with John Oliver since 2001 — they created the hugely popular podcast, The Bugle, in 2007, only stopping earlier in 2016 when it became acutely apparent...

Today's guest, Tony Hendra , began his career at Cambridge University with the famed Footlights as the comedy partner of Graham Chapman, and starred in the annual revue with Chapman and John Cleese. He came to the United States as a duo act with Nick Ullett, appearing multiple times on The Ed Sullivan Show and Merv Griffin , before splitting up and taking a job as the first editor hired by the fou...

With the 2016 election careening toward Judgment Day, Lewis Black is back on Broadway this fall, giving voice to the grand majority of Americans and citizens worldwide perplexed at our politics and our political discussion. Black is performing "Black to the Future" Monday nights on Broadway, and heading out on the road for tour dates across the country in between, delivering his comedic rants and...

Gary Owen is the only white comic to host BET's Comic View , and many years later, he's bringing his whole family to the network in the reality series, The Gary Owen Show , debuting in October 2016. Not something you might have expected from a kid growing up in a trailer park with an abusive stepfather in southern Ohio. Gary always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, but he enlisted in the Navy stra...

Hosting duties are nothing new for Ben Gleib . He's been doing that since he was a teenager, rubbing elbows with Hollywood stars and their children in Beverly Hills High School. Gleib 's college talk show became a national sensation thanks to The National Lampoon, eventually scoring him a TV pilot on FOX produced by Lorne Michaels. After appearing hundreds of times on panels with Chelsea Lately an...