The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Joe List began his stand-up career in Boston in 2000 after graduating from high school, rising up the ranks in Boston's heralded comedy scene before moving to New York City. He has toured with the likes of Louis CK and Nick DiPaolo, and since 2013 has co-hosted the popular podcast Tuesdays With Stories with comedian Mark Normand. List's singular credits include performing on The Late Show with Dav...

The world knows Stephen Glover as Steve-O, a daredevil famous for his stunts with the Jackass crew on MTV, a spin-off series Wildboyz , and four Jackass movies. It's landed him on Dancing with the Stars and a Comedy Central Roast. When I met Steve-O in 2010, he was newly clean and sober and pursuing a second life as a stand-up comedian. We reconnected in the summer of 2020 over Zoom in two separat...

Sebastian Maniscalco met Pat McGann in the early 2010s, when Mansicalco was headlining Zanies in Chicago and McGann was the house MC. They eventually became friends and working partners, with McGann warming up the audience for Maniscalco's Showtime special which taped in Chicago, and then traveling with Sebastian on the road for the past several years as his opener or feature act. All while Manisc...

Discussions of racial representation and onscreen depiction of the police both hit home for Carlos Alazraqui . Born to Argentinian parents, Carlos has spent the most time onscreen as Deputy James Garcia on Reno 911!, which aired from 2003 to 2009 on Comedy Central, spawned a movie in 2007 and has returned to mobile phones courtesy of Quibi in 2020. You may recognize his voice from a multitude of a...

Jamie Kennedy still may be best known for playing Randy Meeks in the big-screen Scream franchise, but Kennedy has enjoyed a wild and varied acting career since he broke out of background work in the late 1980s. His credits include Romeo + Juliet, Bowfinger, Enemy of the State, As Good As It Gets, Three Kings, and his own vehicle, Malibu's Most Wanted. On the small screen, he recurred on both the d...

Smosh became the first popular YouTube channel in 2005 and has remained among the most popular channels on YouTube ever since. It would take almost 15 years, however, before Smosh followed other YouTubers by embarking on its first live tour in February 2020, which ended just as the coronavirus pandemic was sweeping the globe. As of June 2020, Smosh had earned more than 25 million subscribers to th...

Greg Warren grew up in St. Louis the son of a wrestling coach, and enjoyed a successful high-school and college wrestling career himself before he discovered stand-up comedy while still a student at the University of Missouri. Neither stints at West Point or Proctor & Gamble could sway Warren as much as stand-up has, a career he has pursued, consistently touring comedy clubs on the road for the pa...

Ramy Youssef is the son of Egyptian immigrants, growing up in New York and New Jersey, who jumped into sketch comedy as a teenager. It paid off for him initially with a role on the Nick at Nite sitcom See Dad Run . Youssef took what he learned there, as well as his work on shows such as Mr. Robot, and friendships with the likes of truTV's Friends of the People and NBC's The Carmichael Show , and a...

Rhys Darby is an actor, writer, podcaster and stand-up comedian from New Zealand. North American audiences first got to know him as Murray the manager from  HBO's Flight of the Conchords  and more recently as Nigel the guide in the Jumanji movies. His other film and TV credits include Y es Man, The X-Files, Wrecked, What We Do in the Shadows , Hunt for the Wilderpeople . His sound-effect skills an...

When I sat down with Fred Willard in February 2020 inside his home in Southern California, he was noticeably weak — I held his microphone for him throughout our conversation — but his mind and his sense of humor was quite intact, and he was still working. In fact, Fred received a phone call during our interview inviting him to the Modern Family wrap party, and talked to me about being ready and wi...

Josh Thomas is an Australian comedian, actor and writer who broke out on the scene as a teenager, winning best newcomer at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2007 for his first solo show, "Please Like Me." Thomas went on to stage his stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe and Montreal's Just For Laughs before developing his first TV series, also called "Please Like Me," which documented his...

Over the past 25 years, Judy Gold has starred in her own half-hour stand-up specials for HBO, Comedy Central and LOGO, has won two Emmy Awards for writing for The Rosie O'Donnell Show , and appeared on numerous daytime and late-night talk shows. Gold has written and starred in two Off-Broadway solo shows: The Judy Show – My Life as a Sitcom , and  25 Questions for a Jewish Mother . Her recent TV c...

Dan Whitney had a pretty good comedy career, including a TV appearance on A&E's An Evening At The Improv . But Whitney's career as Larry the Cable Guy has been far more lucrative and longer-lasting, going on some three decades since he first started calling into radio stations as the character who still says, Git-R-Done! Larry became the breakout star from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour and its subse...

Maysoon Zayid is an actress, comedian, and disability advocate, who has attracted more than 16 million views to her 2013 TED talk, "I Got 99 problems…palsy is just one." A decade before that, Zayid co-founded the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival. Her past credits include contributing to MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, appearing in the Adam Sandler movie, You Don't Mess with the Zohan...

Lane Moore   is a comedian, writer, actor, and musician. She hosts the show Tinder Live, swiping through dating profiles and baiting potential suitors, with a panel of funny people and a live audience to guide her. She also fronts the band, It Was Romance. And as a writer, Lane Moore has published jokes in The Onion, and offered sex and relationship advice as an editor for Cosmopolitan magazine, w...

Comedic actors  Jonathan Braylock, Jerah Milligan and James III host their own podcast,  Black Men Can't Jump   (In Hollywood), examining the problems of racial diversity in show business through reviewing movies of the past which featured actors of color. They also have firsthand experience with the topic. In 2014, they became part of the first all-black house team at the Upright Citizens Brigade...

Tammy Pescatelli lost her agent and manager back in 2016 after she spoke out about joke stealing and parallel thinking, but that's not the first time in her career that Pescatelli did something her reps disapproved of — years earlier, Pescatelli continued performing in comedy clubs and theaters while more than eight moths pregnant, long before it became popular for women in comedy to do so. But Pe...

Justine Marino is a comedian who joined The Groundlings shortly after moving from Denver to Los Angeles, and found herself working as a tour guide at Universal Studios while also performing stand-up at night. Her first big break came in the Jenny McCarthy comedy special, "Dirty, Sexy, Funny" which came out on EPIX in 2014 and also featured a then-unknown Tiffany Haddish. Later that year, Marino go...

Born in Taiwan to Taiwanese and Japanese parents, Atsuko Okatsuka is a stand-up comedian, actress and writer. Since putting out her first hour comedy special in 2018 as part of Hulu's Comedy InvAsian series, she has made the shortlists of comedians to watch by both New York Magazine's Vulture site as well as Time Out LA. Atsuko also has written for two different series on Adult Swim, The Eric Andr...

In 2020, Tom Papa released his fourth stand-up comedy special, and first for Netflix, called You're Doing Great!. And Tom Papa is doing great. He's a regular performer on NPR, starring in his own segment on the weekly syndicated show, Live From Here, as well as a recurring role on the panel for NPR quiz show, Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! He also has a weekly SiriusXM show and podcast featuring his fu...

Lizz Winstead is a Minnesotan through and through, even though she has spent the better part of the past three decades in New York City. Winstead first moved to New York to pursue her stand-up comedy career, became a segment producer for The Jon Stewart Show in 1995, and while that talk show ultimately didn't last long, Winstead found herself getting offered her dream gig by Comedy Central a year...

Derek Gaines grew up outside of Philadelphia, and moved to New York City with his "6 Foot Nothing" crew after cementing his status as one of Philly's Phunniest. After performing as a New Face in Montreal at Just For Laughs, Gaines began scoring TV credits, hosting MTV's Broke A$$ Game Show and delivering jokes on cable outlets from truTV to VH1 to AXS-TV.   Since 2017, Gaines has steadily appeared...

David Wain has been on the cutting edge of digital comedy since the turn of the century, making short films for his live comedy shows with Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, debuting a webseries ( Wainy Days ) on the streaming platform My Damn Channel in 2007, helping Rob Corddry take his webseries  Childrens Hospital  to TV with Adult Swim and winning multiple Emmys for it, and adapting his...

Joe Pera is a Buffalo native who studied film and began his stand-up comedy career at Ithaca College. After college, Pera moved to New York City, where he started a regular showcase with his childhood friend Dan Licata and Charles Gould called the Dan, Joe and Charles Show. Pera's comedy voice made the leap to late-night TV in 2016 with the animated Adult Swim infomercial, "Joe Pera Talks You to S...

In an email to me on Jan. 3, 2020, Chloé Hilliard proclaimed "This is the YEAR of CHLOE!" and she may well be right. Hilliard already kicked off 2020 by releasing her first stand-up comedy album, "Big Dick Energy," and has followed that up with the publication of her first book, "F— YOUR DIET: And Other Things My Thighs Tell Me," from Simon & Schuster. Hilliard, whose TV credits include The Tonigh...