The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

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...

Godfrey was born in Nebraska to Nigerian parents who had fled that country's civil war in the late 1960s. Godfrey grew up in Chicago, which is also where he started pursuing comedy – despite his pre-med psychology degree at the University of Illinois – and where he filmed his newest hour of stand-up comedy, Regular Black , for Showtime. You also may have seen Godfrey in memorable roles on the big...

Ms. Pat's early career sounds a little bit like the role Sally Field's in the 1988 movie about comedy, Punchline, except only Ms. Pat grew up in a bootleg house in Atlanta, became a mother of two by the time she was 15, sold drugs, was shot twice, and arrested multiple times all before she met her future husband at 19. Her husband brought her stability. Her comedy brought her joy and a newfound pu...

Bert Kreischer is my special guest today, in an episode recorded in front of a live audience at the 2016 Just For Laughs festival in Montreal. He literally is the "Life of the Party." That's the title of his 2014 memoir — it describes how Bert's life changed as a sixth-year senior at Florida State University when Rolling Stone magazine visited and profiled him. That magazine article became the bas...

Variety magazine named Cameron Esposito  one of the 10 Comics to Watch in 2016, and there already has been a lot to see of Esposito this year – from her appearances on the big screen in Garry Marshall's final film, "Mother's Day," to the small-screen on IFC's Maron, performing stand-up on The Late Late Show with James Corden, and her first stand-up special, Marriage Material, on SeeSo. She's got t...

Hari Kondabolu and I go back to the scene of his very first big break, showcasing for the 2007 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen and HBO, how that all happened, and how he managed to take a year off afterward to earn his master's degree from the London School of Economics. Kondabolu since has enjoyed time writing and performing for late-night TV with Totally Biased , and just this summer launched...

Of all of the characters in Mike Birbiglia's wonderfully true and funny film, Don't Think Twice, Chris Gethard's runs closest to his own. Gethard began taking improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade when he was only 20, and quickly became a darling of the UCB community, eventually starting a beloved improv team that saw one of its members — his friend Bobby Moynihan — leave for Saturday Nig...

Christian Finnegan co-stars in a new weekly show on A&E with Sherrod Small called Black and White, where over the course of the first eight episodes, they'll deconstruct today's headlines through the prism of race relations. Finnegan and Small cracked wise about less serious matters for years as part of VH1's Best Week Ever. Christian talks to me about finding his way into stand-up comedy, how Jim...

The annual Del Close Marathon brings the founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade together along with thousands of performers from around the world, celebrating their late improv guru Del Close by improvising comedy shows around the clock for a three-day-and-night weekend. In its 18 th year, the UCB4 – Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh – opened the proceedings with a legitimate...

Here's what I know about Yannis Pappas. He's a native New Yorker. He's gotten shot. He's a sneakerhead. He's Greek. In fact, so Greek he has performed in character as Mr. Panos, which is not to be confused with when he performs as a Puerto Rican transsexual named Maurica (More-eeesa). Pappas moved to Miami to help launch the Fusion cable network as co-anchor of the TV station's live primetime news...

Robert Kelly plays the Heathens drummer Bam Bam on Denis Leary's FX series, Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll, which begins its second season this summer, and popularized the double-meal deal, Bang Bang, playing Louis CK's brother Bobby on the award-winning FX series, Louie. He hilariously chastised me for combining the two things, Bam Bam! Bang Bang!! More importantly, though, Bobby caught me up on how he got...