By the fall of 2023, the year of comedy specials has started to come into focus. There are some striking, notable specials from comedy veterans like Maron and John Mulaney, and Mo’Nique, and a few highlights from other established names. Mae Martin’s special tightens into a frustrated public-service announcement; Wayans gets raucous; Kyle Kinane wanders through a glorious story about a van in the desert. Many of 2023’s comedy specials, though, feel like effective but unsurprising tour updates — hours taped in order to tape an hour, not meant to indicate career mastery or wild innovation. It’s made specials from newcomers like Chris Fleming especially welcome. At a time when many hour-long specials aim for familiarity, new voices become all the more exciting.
All specials are listed from newest to oldest.
Like all the best comedy specials, Hell is like entering an immersive world built out of all the strange detritus and intense obsessions that fill a comedian’s brain. In the case of Chris Fleming, that world is particularly bizarre and delightful. Fleming can begin with relatively familiar ideas, like hipsters with children or the mannered interview style of talk-show hosts, and quickly drive those premises off a cliff to somewhere entirely unanticipated. The highlight of this is a song where Fleming points out that a hamster costs the same as a carton of raspberries and proceeds to compare these two purchases as though deciding which one to buy is a common, relatable dilemma. Hell accomplishes what every first big special should do: It makes Fleming’s perspective both irresistible and unmistakable.
Read Kathryn VanArendonk’s review of Hell.
Part sketch, part stand-up, part concert documentary of a fake cover band, John Early’s Now More Than Ever gleefully puts its tongue in several nested layers of cheek. It’s an ode to millennial exhaustion while being a screed of exhaustion with millennial culture. It’s a portrait of grossly egocentric performance, and Early spends most of the special center stage, egotistically and enthusiastically performing. It mocks sincerity and glibly copies the recent trend of musical-comedy specials by including the perfect falseness of highly sincere cover songs between segments of Early’s stand-up. The whole thing is absurd, and it’s almost certain that there are one or possibly a dozen too many ideas in here that are all shoehorned into the concert-documentary conceit, then undermined by the cynicism of the entire production. Nut it’s easy to excuse the few moments of slippage, because mostly, Now More Than Ever is clownish and buoyant. Cynicism never felt so fun.
Read Kathryn VanArendonk’s review of Now More Than Ever.
It’s an unusual gambit to pitch a comedy special as a direct sequel to one that came before, in part because most comedy specials are sequels in a more implicit way: I told you what was going on in my head a few years ago. Now here’s an update. But Ali Siddiq’s first The Domino Effect told stories from his childhood in carefully connected ways that (as suggested by the title) gradually added up to the person who was now standing, and often sitting, onstage. Part 2, in the same general mode and style of the first, picks up with stories from Siddiq’s later adolescence. Once again, Siddiq is expansive and deliberate with stories that tend to turn on his observations of his own absurdity in the middle of intense yet mundane circumstances. There is — and I mean this in the most complimentary way imaginable — something a bit like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon in these specials: a portrait of a distinctive Americana, hilarious and tragic and not often visible from the outside. But Siddiq is more original and arresting, and by the time the special winds its way around to the story he promises from the beginning (about being duct-taped and thrown in the back of a car), it’s hard to remember why he’s not one of the best-known comics working today.
Read Hershal Pandya’s analysis of The Domino Effect Part 2: Loss.
It is a guarded special that insists it is a vulnerable one; it’s a return to form for a comedian who is arguing that the core of that form is actually different now. But John Mulaney is still one of the strongest and most culturally influential stand-ups of the last decade, and Baby J is a solid, striking piece of Mulaney comedy. Although the body of the special is a retelling of key points from the last three years (his drug addiction, intervention, and time in rehab), the special’s best and most fascinating joke is the one he uses to open the show. It’s a joke about Mulaney’s childhood realization that he could leverage real tragedy for attention, and how much he wanted a tragedy to happen solely for the attention it would bring. The suggestion inherent in that joke becomes the subtext for the rest of the special, and it makes Baby J pricklier and better as a result.
Read Kathryn VanArendonk’s review of Baby J.
Five years after accusing Netflix of trying to pay her significantly less than comedians who were her peers, Mo’Nique’s Netflix special is a funny, bracing, furious, and intricate celebration of her own strength and joy and how she has gotten to this point in her career. It’s an indictment of the many systems that have tipped the scales against her — there are stories about her years as a special-education student, the racism she’s encountered throughout her life, and how hard she’s worked to get where she is. But the special is a demonstration of Mo’Nique’s ability to turn that lens on herself. Her strongest jokes are the ones that come from many perspectives at once, balancing her self-confidence with how she imagines herself being seen from the outside. The special’s back half, which focuses on Mo’Nique’s marriage, is where she’s on her strongest footing, telling the same story from multiple sides and finding new, hilarious, and surprising joke beats each time.
Read Craig Jenkins’s interview with Mo’Nique.
Mae Martin’s SAP is a special full of delightful weirdos: themself, their parents (especially their moon-loving, hippieish dad), a mailman who steals all the mail, a silly set of characters in the Edinburgh Dungeon. But Martin’s main interest is in describing the way each of us presents ourselves to one another. The signature joke of SAP is about snow globes and a vision of human interaction where we all hand one another our beautiful little self-contained anecdotes and hope they’re received with care. The snow-globe joke turns all of those stories of oddball characters into a ticklish and sweet literalization of precisely the theme Martin’s most interested in: Martin shares their own snow globes. At the end, as Martin shifts into a more serious mode to talk about gender and their teen years, the snow globe is a reminder of how hilarious — but also how fragile — those stories can be.
Read Kathryn VanArendonk’s review of SAP and Hershal Pandya’s analysis of Martin’s snow-globe joke.
Kyle Kinane’s specials are not built to drive cultural conversation or to reinvent any wheels. They’re generally unflashy productions, featuring a collection of jokes that don’t speak to some heartfelt personal issue or life-changing revelation. They are not really-more-of-a-one-man-show specials. That’s not the point. The point is that Kinane is a comedy bloodhound — he has one of the keenest noses for where to find every stray bit of a joke, and Shocks and Struts is a demonstration of his superhuman ability to stand on a stage and use words in bizarre, fascinating ways. A joke about pillows slides backward through the inherent gayness of 17th-century trade routes. His cruise-ship material conjures a nightmarish, hedonistic carnival. His story about a van goes places no one could’ve predicted. But Shocks and Struts is a reminder that Kinane is so good he can do it with no words, too: There’s an act-out about a jam band that is somehow perfectly exasperated while nearly silent.
God Loves Me is fueled by the pent-up energy of a long history, and Marlon Wayans wrings every ounce of comedy out of it. The special’s framework is the Will Smith–Chris Rock slap incident from the 2022 Academy Awards, which Wayans uses in about 20 different ways, including reenactments, speculation, pop-cultural observations, and, most extensively, autobiography. Every part of that incident, and every player in it, becomes a catalyst for introducing some piece of Wayans’s past or present. The wave of it all builds slowly over the hour as the comedian returns again and again to the incident itself, now recontextualized within all of his desires, grudges, fears, and accomplishments. Never has a bit of heartfelt personal storytelling been more bound up with electric celebrity gossip, and certainly not to better results.
If Marc Maron’s previous special, End Times Fun, was about how to live in an apocalyptic moment, 2023’s From Bleak to Dark is about what happens when the apocalypse arrives and you find yourself somehow still standing. Despite its title, elements of it are optimistic in a bewildered, almost humbled way; the core of the special is Maron discussing the death of his partner, Lynn Shelton, and although the material is certainly not light, its heaviness has an open, appreciative quality to it, a sense of delight that’s palpable in Maron almost in spite of himself.
Read Kathryn VanArendonk’s review of From Bleak to Dark and read or listen to Jesse David Fox’s Good One podcast interview with Maron.
