The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

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...

As we put a bow on 2019, it's time once again for me to sit down with New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman to look back on the year's best and brightest moments in comedy, and which comedians brought out the best. We couldn't help but discuss cancel culture, and whom that actually applied to this year. We also talked up the big years for Sebastian Maniscalco and Tiffany Haddish, the greatnes...

Becky Robinson grew up in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, and studied business at San Diego State University before she threw her everything into show business. A video she made of a McDonald's wedding proposal gone awry went viral in the summer of 2015, leading her to multiple gigs, first going undercover as an on-the-street correspondent for Funny or Die, then as herself showing off her freesty...

Abby McEnany stars as a fictionalized version of herself in the new Showtime series Work In Progress. On Showtime, Abby is a 45-year-old overweight queer dyke from Chicago who plans to commit suicide in 180 days if her live doesn't get any better. Can she become a work in progress before it's too late? In real life, McEnany is still queer and based in the Windy City, but a little bit older and hap...

Jeff Garlin is a comedian and actor who honed his chops in the 1980s with The Second City, alongside the likes of Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris. You know him from playing Larry David's friend Jeff Greene on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, as well as playing the patriarch of the ABC sitcom family, The Goldbergs. You've heard his voice in such Pixar classics as Wall-E and Toy Story 3 and 4, and he has...

Erik Rivera got heavily involved in comedy in the wake of 9/11 while studying at Pace University just blocks away from the World Trade Center. Rivera's TV credits include performing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Last Comic Standing, his own hour special, "I'm No Expert," as well as a season of reality TV with his wife on Oxygen, "Living With Funny." In November 2019, Rivera stars in h...

Elliott Morgan is one of the members of The Valleyfolk, a crowd-funded Internet comedy troupe that won the inaugural season of NBC's Bring The Funny in the summer of 2019, winning $250,000 and an invitation to perform at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. That's a long way from central Florida, where Morgan grew up and got married at a young age. Morgan grew up in comedy online thank...

Celeste Barber had appeared on Australian television as a regular on the hospital soap opera All Saints in the late 2000s, but that wasn't translating into fans or followers on social media. Then Barber decided she'd have fun re-creating the outrageous photo shoots of celebrities and models, and posted her results on Instagram with the hashtag #CelesteChallengeAccepted. Eight months after she took...

Matt Besser is known as one of the co-founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade, which began as a sketch comedy group in Chicago, moved to New York City, got a TV series on Comedy Central, and opened up theaters and schools teaching improv and sketch comedy in both New York and Los Angeles. Besser also created and starred in a second Comedy Central series, the parody debate show, Crossballs, and ov...

Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe are an award-winning writing and directing team based in Los Angeles. They became friends and collaborators while performing together in New York City on an Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre sketch team called Onassis. They formed Gulp Splash Productions in 2015. Since then, they have written and produced three short films, which have appeared in more than 70 film fes...

Josh Gondelman is a writer and comedian who currently writes and produces comedy for  Desus and Mero  on Showtime. Before that, Gondelman spent five years at HBO's  Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,  earning multiple Emmys and other awards for his work on the writing staff. Much before that, before his comedy career took off, he taught preschool in the Boston area. As a performer, you've seen hi...