The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Erica Rhodes is an actress and comedian who got her start at the age of 10, performing on the nationally syndicated public radio hit, A Prairie Home Companion . Rhodes began her stand-up comedy career two decades later, inspired by a bad audition. But things have looked up for her since then. She has guest starred on such sitcoms as New Girl , Modern Family , and Veep , put out her first comedy al...

Maronzio Vance has appeared on Wanda Sykes: Wanda Does It , Jamie Foxx's   Laffapolooza , Last Comic Standing , and The Tonight Show , and put out a half-hour special on Comedy Central, back when those credits seemed to mean something. Vance has released a double-album of comedy called  20, out on Blonde Medicine, laced with his understated style and cutting wit. The album's title refers to the 20...

Ester Steinberg started performing stand-up on the lunch tables of her high school in Tampa before attending NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. While living in Los Angeles before the pandemic, she produced and hosted a regular comedy show in the Kibitz Room of Canter's Deli, co-starred in the Oxygen reality series Funny Girls , and got New Faces at Just For Laughs Montreal in 2015. She has since appe...

Eric Andre may just be America's, if not the world's greatest prankster (with all due respect to Britain's Sacha Baron Cohen and Canada's Nathan Fielder). After first rising on the comedy scene as a stand-up, Andre first made waves in TV with appearances on Don't Trust the B— in Apartment 23 , 2 Broke Girls , and Man Seeking Woman . But it was his chaotic Adult Swim anti-talk show, The Eric Andre...

Danny Jolles is a stand-up comedian best known for his role acting and singing as George on The CW's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend . His other TV credits include Hulu's Ramy , Comedy Central's Corporate , Netflix's Aunty Donna's House , and Quibi's Royalties . As a stand-up, Jolles was a New Face at Montreal's Just For Laughs in 2017, and followed that up with a performance on The Late Show with Stephen Col...

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, RushTix provided special ticket offers to subscribers for live events including comedy shows, concerts, and theatrical productions in the San Francisco Bay Area. The lockdowns across America in March 2020 changed everything. Jill Bourque pivoted RushTix to become a provider solely of live-streaming comedy shows centered on allowing fans to interact with their favorite...

Christina Anthony is an East St. Louis native who came up through the Chicago comedy scene. Anthony joined The Second City, where she performed with e.t.c. and the touring company, and co-wrote three award-nominated sketch revues for the legendary comedy institution. But she almost never got the recognition she deserved in Chicago or Los Angeles, and was ready to hang up her acting career before r...

Gary Anthony Williams has been improvising since the 1980s, when he was part of an Atlanta troupe called Laughing Matters. You've seen Williams on TV shows such as Boston Legal , where he played a crossdressing lawyer, or as Abe on Malcom in the Middle . He also co-starred on The Soul Man on TV Land, and provided voices for animated shows from The Boondocks, American Dad!, Doc McStuffins, and Bles...

Dan Ahdoot is a stand-up comedian who has performed on The Tonight Show, and developed TV shows with FOX, CBS, NBC and Freeform. But Ahdoot is enjoying his greatest success now, with recurring roles on not one but two Netflix hit series — as a car salesman for "Karate Kid" Danny LaRusso in Cobra Kai , and as an engineer working for The Crew with Kevin James. That's not quite what his parents had i...

Identical twins Keith and Kenny Lucas were born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, separating only to attend different law schools at Duke and NYU. They reunited after both quit the law to pursue a comedy career together, with a stoner persona that eventually got them a Netflix special in 2017, The Lucas Bros On Drugs . They've also enjoyed writing and performing with the sketch group Friends of Th...

A comedian, actor, and writer, Patton Oswalt has been making people laugh professionally since his late teens. He first became known to millions as Spence on the sitcom The King of Queens , and brought the alternative comedy scene to the screen thanks to The Comedians of Comedy tour, which begat a 2005 movie produced and distributed by Netflix, and a Comedy Central series. Since then, you've seen...

Erin Jackson had quite the 2020, starting it by performing on Late Night with Seth Meyers , and ending it by filming a set for Netflix as part of the second season of Tiffany Haddish Presents They Ready , alongside the likes of Tony Woods, Dean Edwards and Godfrey. Jackson came out of the D.C. comedy scene in the early 2000s, had Ellen DeGeneres encourage her to quit her day job, and previously ap...

How are we supposed to make any sense out of this year in comedy, 2020? There's only one way I know how…that's by reuniting with Jason Zinoman of The New York Times , the Siskel to my Ebert in comedy criticism, to hash out 2020 and give some shout outs to the most valuable players in comedy…so let's get to it! Among those shouted out: Dave Chappelle, Conan O'Brien, Eddie Pepitone, Beth Stelling, M...

Michael Kosta is a Senior Correspondent on  The Daily Show with Trevor Noah . Prior to  The Daily Show , Michael co-created, produced and starred in the E! network's  The Comment Section , guest-hosted G4's  Attack of the Show  and co-hosted  Crowd Goes Wild  on FOX Sports with Regis Philbin. He also served as a correspondent on  The Soup  spinoff series  The Soup Investigates . Kosta has made the...

Kansas native Jeremiah Watkins trained at both The Second City and The Groundlings, and has become a fixture at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles as part of several trademark shows; among them, he was one-third of "The Wave" for Roast Battle as it developed and grew from late-night Tuesdays to multiple seasons on Comedy Central. He's still the bandleader for Monday's Kill Tony. And for more than a d...

Colin Quinn seems to have his finger on the pulse of stand-up comedy and America just about as well, if not better, than almost any other comedian in America these days. His most recent solo stand-up special, 2019's Red State Blue State , poked holes in how united Americans could be in this digital era where everyone's opinions can carry equal weight, no matter how outlandishly crazy or off-base t...

Sam Reich was 21 when CollegeHumor hired him as its first Director of Original Content in 2006. In a few short years, the success of in-house webseries such as "Hardly Working" and "Jake and Amir" got Reich and CollegeHumor a sketch comedy show on MTV. While that show didn't last, Reich helped executive produce, write or direct several others. Among them: Adam Ruins Everything for truTV, Hot Date...

Negin Farsad began her comedy career while advising campaign finance policies for the city of New York, and over the course of the 2010s, she has mixed social justice and comedy on stage and on the road. She made and performed in a road-trip documentary across America in 2012 called "The Muslims Are Coming!" She has delivered multiple TED Talks, one based on that documentary, and another on her bo...

Melinda Hill moved 27 times as a kid before making her biggest move from Kansas to Los Angeles to make it as an actress. She studied with The Groundlings, where she performed as a tooth fairy alongside Kristin Wiig. She starred in a Creed music video. She competed on America's Got Talent . She performed on Adventure Time, Lady Dynamite, The Late Late Show , and Reno 911!  She made a webseries for...

J-L Cauvin is a native New Yorker who started his stand-up comedy career in Washington, D.C., while going to law school at Georgetown. His first big break came in 2007 when he performed on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, but J-L has found many more fans and followers thanks to his uncanny impersonations, whether they're of people he has been told he looks like, which includes Barack Obama,...

So much has changed in the world since the last time I caught up with Lewis Black in September of 2016. But last things first, obviously: Black managed to film his last live show before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down live stand-up comedy, recording his March 13, 2020, performance at Four Winds Casino in Michigan and releasing it in October 2020. It's called, appropriately enough: "Thanks For Risk...

Adam Conover is a comedian and writer best known for the truTV series Adam Ruins Everything, which   he created and hosted from 2015-2019. Conover's comedy career began while still a student at Bard College, where he was part of the sketch comedy group, Olde English, along with future Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg. Olde English performed at the HBO Aspen comedy festival in 2007, and...

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything in March of 2020, thousands upon thousands of comedians suddenly experienced the existential dilemma that comedian Mike Birbiglia had depicted in his 2016 movie, "Don't Think Twice." Birbiglia himself didn't think twice, however, quickly starting a nationwide fundraising campaign called Tip Your Waitstaff, with proceeds going to the employees of come...

Calise Hawkins is a stand-up comedian and writer based out of Jersey City, where she raises her daughter, Asha. You may have seen her stand-up on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (NBC) , Russell Simmons Presents Live At The El Rey (Comedy Central), Stand Up in Stilettos (TV Guide Channel), and Nick Mom's Night Out (Nickelodeon). She was a cast member of Oxygen's Funny Girls and has written for multipl...

Beth Stelling grew up in Ohio before moving to Chicago to study with the Steppenwolf Theatre, after which she began pursuing her career in stand-up comedy. She was named best stand-up in Chicago the year before she got New Faces at Montreal's Just For Laughs comedy festival, then moved to Los Angeles. She has released two comedy albums, "Sweet Beth" and "Simply the Beth," performed on Conan and Ji...