The comedy industry is undergoing a metamorphosis in 2024. Name-brand comedy venues are opening new locations, beloved local venues are being bought out by megacorporations, and streaming-service-helmed comedy festivals are usurping the old-fashioned ones. Post–WGA strike, TV-development execs are growing green-light-shy; other streamers are entering the stand-up fray; and YouTube specials are becoming just as, if not more, worthy of watching as Netflix specials. A comedian asking an audience member what they do for a living is transforming from age-old stand-up cliché to heated (and mockworthy) comedy debate, and platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which only a few years ago were looked down upon, are now churning out some of the most consistently talented performers on the internet.
With so much going on, the mattmosphere is sure to be Rife with hacks and phonies, but it’s also full of undiscovered treasures — or, more accurately, treasures who deserve to shine much brighter than they already do. Out there amid this industry chaos, there are touring vets who have honed their craft across the country, young oddball weirdos brimming with disruptive brilliance, and everyone in between, all waiting for their next big break. They’re posting clips on Instagram Reels, releasing self-produced specials, playing tabletop-roleplaying games to loyal fan bases, starring in one-person shows, or hosting podcasts — an audio medium that is for some reason also video now. There’s never been more comedy to parse, and it can be difficult to train your algorithm toward the aforementioned treasures.
So to hell with the algorithm, we say, and turn instead to Vulture’s 11th annual roundup of “Comedians You Should and Will Know.” This year’s list of comics includes such oddities as straight dudes with consciences, career women who left desk jobs to pursue their passion, TikTokers who inspire fancams, club classics, cheeky Australians, showy Canadians, and queer luminaries saying the wildest shit. The list paints a portrait of a world where improv is so back, a Don’t Tell 15 is the new Comedy Central Half Hour, everything old (CollegeHumor, the ancient art of clown, jokes with actual punch lines) is new again, and emerging comics crush like headliners behind their own paywalled gardens. One upside to the clip-based comedy economy? This year’s best comics’ jokes are memorable — immediate calling cards for who they are as artists — and most of all, tight.
We’ve kept this year’s list tight, too. After polling more than 100 industry insiders — including TV execs from streaming and linear TV, bookers for clubs across the country and late-night talk shows, artistic directors from comedy theaters, indie-comedy producers, podcast-network heads, top brass at animation studios, terrestrial-radio chiefs, comedy record-label execs, comedy-festival programmers, comedy historians, live-show photographers, and performers featured on last year’s list — we were left with a pool of more than 200 comedians. From there, we had to grapple with some questions: Which names came up over and over again? Who stood out from the crowd(work), are on the rise to stardom, and will be the masterminds of our future-favorite TV shows and stand-up specials? In the year of our Lord 2024, we thought it fitting to choose 24 of the absolute best. From clown college to Dropout, here are this year’s “Comedians You Should and Will Know.”
Meet the Comedians:
Sabrina Brier | Sam Campbell | Nico Carney | Aaron Chen | George Civeris | Francesca D’Uva | Brandi Denise | Malik Elassal | Roz Hernandez | Skyler Higley | Chloé Hilliard | Leslie Liao | MANDAL | Gavin Matts | Youngmi Mayer | Vic Michaelis | Brennan Lee Mulligan | Courtney Pauroso | Chloe Radcliffe | Rekha Shankar | Veronika Slowikowska | Gianmarco Soresi | Emil Wakim | Eagle Witt
Sabrina Brier
Sabrina Brier’s face can turn the most unremarkable life experience into a meme. Case in point: the way her eyes bug out and she juts her body forward like a blonde Dilophosaurus when she says her Memorial Day weekend was ah-mazing except for her “RAGING UTI.” Or the way she clenches her smile and the life drains from her eyes when she learns that a friend invited someone else to join them for lunch. Videos like these two where Brier plays “That friend” — “That friend who is an open book” and “That friend who only wants 1 on 1 time,” respectively — have become a genre unto themselves since Brier began posting comedy online in 2021. In each, she starts off presenting as chill, hot, and put together until she encounters a specific social dynamic that reveals the needy, anxious, unself-aware mess underneath. Other examples include “That friend who gets defensive about her bestie,” “That friend who is personally offended by everything,” and “That friend who still has your dress.” It’s not just the relatability of her behavioral observations that helps this persona connect with her massive online audience (1.27 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and X); it’s the palpable way she revels in the squirmy grotesquerie. There are entire cringe compilations of her uttering the single syllable “Oh.”
Offline, Brier’s talents extend beyond her POV videos. She’s translated her persona to live shows, landed a deal for an audiobook appropriately titled That Friend, and guested on the most recent season of Abbott Elementary as “Jessca,” a flippant substitute teacher who responds indignantly when Quinta Brunson’s Janine tries to give her teaching advice. The standout appearance is a fitting stepping-stone for Brier, who has often cited Brunson as a role model for her show-business aspirations, and as an added bonus, she got to bring her signature “Oh” to national TV.
Sam Campbell
In Sam Campbell’s 2022 solo show, Comedy Show — winner of the prestigious Best Comedy Show award at that year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the comedian introduced his brand of comic absurdism to the audience with a tongue-in-cheek one-liner: “My mind is a prison full of crazy ideas, and I think there’s going to be a jailbreak!” With delivery verging on manic, the comedian leads audiences through a maze of offbeat non sequiturs, experimental multimedia, bizarre participatory rituals, elaborate fabrications, and subversions of comedy norms. But even his most anarchic material is meticulously crafted. In one bit from his 2022 set on U.K. comedy-news show The Russell Howard Hour, he seems to stumble through a joke about taking a picture of the moles on his neighbor’s back to send to a dermatologist when a caped “audience member” crashes the stage and hypnotizes him into delivering it competently. “The moles, they’re in quite an intricate pattern,” Campbell continues with newfound confidence. “My phone thought it was a QR code!” Then, amid an applause break: “My phone thought that my neighbor Ian was a ticket to see Michael Bublé!”
As Campbell has matured as a performer, he’s grown more adept at translating his style for mainstream audiences. Consider his 2022 special, Companion, which features an increased emphasis on accessible observations and traditional joke structure, all while edited to look like he’s performing in the crosshairs of an assassin’s sniper rifle. This evolution coincided roughly with Campbell’s move in 2022 from Australia to the U.K., where he broke out as the chaotic season-16 winner of the popular panel show Taskmaster the following year. Outside his frequent television appearances, Campbell writes and stars in his own shorts and sketches, co-hosts the podcast Lucy & Sam’s Perfect Brains with comedian Lucy Beaumont, and recently helmed the Channel 4 comedy pilot Make That Movie! Medium aside, one thing remains consistent: Campbell’s eccentricities are palpable but never alienating. In one 2021 sketch, he plays a boyfriend meeting his girlfriend’s discriminatory parents for the first time. But their instant dislike of him isn’t rooted in religious or racial prejudice. They simply can’t get past the fact that he’s 30 percent transparent.
Nico Carney
Once Nico Carney gets to the part in his set where he reveals that he was a Division I athlete in college, everything clicks into place; only years of early-morning drills and after-school practice lead to stand-up that’s this consistent, smooth, and fine-tuned to kill. At only 26, Carney’s got a beguiling mix of boyishness and old-pro confidence that makes audiences lock in, like when he starts a set with an introduction to his trans identity — opening material that might feel obligatory in a lesser comic’s hands but is handled with gleeful irreverence by Carney. “People are very curious about trans people,” he says in his Late Night With Seth Meyers appearance from earlier this year. “People ask me sometimes, ‘How did you know? When did you know?’ And it happened to me the same way it happens to all of us: Caitlyn Jenner bit me.” That joke encapsulates the Brooklyn-based comic’s sense of humor: full of switchbacks and trick corridors, a mix of the personal and pop cultural. In an art form that for decades treated gender like the utmost binary (women do be shopping, men don’t put the toilet seat down, blah blah blah), Carney uses his unique vantage point to play with these borders and categories, like in an extended bit about going to the gynecologist as a man, or being a much more devastating fighter than other dudes because he was a middle-school girl and middle-school girls know how to be mean.
Carney reaches beyond his own experience when he points out how transmasc-coded so many cis celebs are nowadays, comparing himself to Timothée Chalamet and Tom Holland during his Netflix Is a Joke festival appearance in 2022. “I could be the next Spider-Man. Trans Spider-Man. Like, ‘It doesn’t shoot webs, but it’ll get the job done,’ you know what I’m saying?” The joke is cute on its own, but when he throws up the Spider-Man hand pose, “It’ll get the job done” becomes dirty, winky, cheeky. Offstage, he co-hosts a podcast with his friend Conor Janda, Boys’ Club. Never has the phrase felt more welcoming.
Aaron Chen
Aaron Chen’s stage persona demonstrates the practiced, deliberative quiet of someone who knows that discomfort is an art. Some comedians stride onstage with a sense of grandiosity and expansiveness; Chen stands, blinks calmly, and waits for the audience to recalibrate to his measured pace. In his 2022 YouTube special, If Weren’t Filmed, Nobody Would Believe, Chen starts by referring to his two-piece camo-patterned outfit. “This show is sponsored by a paramilitary organization,” he announces, which gets a laugh because it’s so counter to Chen’s otherwise weird-kid vibe. Then he waits, pauses, and continues with the next joke. He took an Uber to the show, he says, and the driver asked if Chen minded if he talked to a friend. “Of course,” Chen says, followed by a long beat of a pause. “And thank you for considering me a friend.”
Beneath the softly awkward exterior, Chen thrills at a joke with just a touch of edge, especially when he makes himself the target. It’s present in his acting roles, as in his role as the mild-mannered probate clerk George on the Australian sitcom Fisk. He has the straight face necessary to hold onto a bit, like the 2020 Adult Swim “Infomercial” where he plays an expert interviewer with a Philomena Cunk–esque approach to asking questions, or his 2019 appearance at the Melbourne Comedy Fest’s Great Debate, where he gives a middle-schooler’s polite “We’ve all had fun” opening before pausing to ask, “Where will you be during the upcoming race war?” (Another favorite: a silly bit on the panel-game show Have You Been Paying Attention? about what he calls “New York” that required several appearances on the show to create.) Chen’s charming and delightfully shy performance proves how magnetic it can be when someone dials a whole crowd into their own odd wavelength.
George Civeris
“I can’t believe I fell for orange wine for three years,” George Civeris, filled with self-loathing, tells the audience. “It’s because I have too much faith in food professionals because of my progressive politics.” It’s a classic Civeris setup: He’s exasperated by his own taste, even while his taste is his whole identity. Civeris is a gay, glasses-wearing, cynical Greek man who, in the stand-up world, is wildly overeducated (Stanford and MIT alum, hello). As he put it to his podcast co-host Sam Taggart, “I’m default either bitchy, condescending, or rude.” In his stand-up, Civeris is often spying through white-picket fences at how his more culturally hegemonic neighbors live. In one runner he performed at Brooklyn’s Union Hall as part of his new hour, he imagines what it would be like to have a beautiful daughter (who hates him). In another, he describes attending progressive straight weddings: There’s a cellist with blue hair, the bride is being walked down the aisle by a random lesbian, and “the bride’s dress is ripped to represent our broken justice system,” he says, getting a hit of invigoration while imagining how straight people can be so well-intentioned without noticing the cringe. Can’t you see that this is lame? he seems to ask. And why does it probably feel so good?
From 2021 to 2023, Civeris worked as a senior editor at the now-lost Gawker reboot, where he chronicled whether or not Josh Gad’s LeFou was going to bottom. He’s appeared on Comedy Central, was a Just for Laughs New Face, and wrote for Fox’s Let’s Be Real, Comedy Central’s Drag His Ass, BBC’s Comedians vs. the News, and Quibi’s Gayme Show. But he’s most beloved for co-hosting the podcast StraightioLab with Taggart, who serves as the horny Ernie to his overanalyzing Bert. On each episode of the podcast — which we called the best comedy podcast of 2022 — Civeris, Taggart, and a guest examine a different aspect of straight culture like it’s a disease cell under a microscope (“Preppy Clothes,” “Museums With Slides in Them,” and “Society” are memorable topics), and it leads to true revelations about the minutiae of the heterosexual experience. No one else is slicing into the gendered experience of pizza like this show.
Francesca D’Uva
Francesca D’Uva’s got the pop acumen of a Swedish hitmaker and the comedic sensibility of an entire 30 Rock writers’ room. She probably could have a lucrative career writing five songs an episode for Netflix reality shows. Instead, she creates the best musical comedy in Brooklyn, which is saying something in a borough that has more musical comedians per capita than doctors. D’Uva has an innately likable and goofy stage presence, queer POV, and tendency to cut off a comedy game before the audience can predict its rules, bounding off into uncharted territory as a song unravels into a Moana homage or an ode to taint. A Mary Poppins–on–poppers song about nannying (“I am your nanny and I will be ’til I die … / I’ll never leave you even after I die / I’ll be your ghost nanny”) finds her voicing a little Cockney boy with a budding foot fetish. A song about wanting to play Joseph in the Catholic-school kindergarten Nativity play functions as an exploration of the ways she struggled with being othered as a kid, but it also ends with another kid getting crushed by a cross and a pitch-perfect Shakira impression.
D’Uva has been producing and performing these songs around New York for years on top of hosting regular shows at Brooklyn venues like Baby’s Alright and C’mon Everybody, places more accustomed to DJ sets than they are comedy shows. D’Uva takes to those stages naturally, even when a pop-inflected song veers into musical-theater territory with a Les Miz–inspired death scene. (“I have loved you, I was never faking it / The vultures will take your body into heaven where you will be seated at the right hand of the father,” she sings to gay Bachelor Colton Underwood.) Non–New Yorkers might have heard her theme song for 2023 “Comedians You Should and Will Know” duo Natalie Rotter-Laitman and Charlie Bardey’s popular Exploration: Live! podcast, or seen her on some of the scene’s greatest cultural-export TV series, including Julio Torres’s Fantasmas and Adult Swim’s Three Busy Debras. Next up, she’s gonna be One Busy D’Uva as she takes her one-person show, This Is My Favorite Song, Off Broadway as part of Playwrights Horizons’ upcoming season. It’s a leveling-up for D’Uva, as she weaves in her older material with new work to create a piece about losing her father in the early days of COVID. Trust she’ll be playing the hits as well. As she sings in one of the two greatest songs ever written about a nanny named some variation of “Fran,” “Once you go Franny, you’ll never, ever want to go back.”
Brandi Denise
Brandi Denise’s signature stand-up bit centers on her previous career as a social worker, when she says she’d often get hit on by her clients. “You got to have a lot of confidence to hit on your social worker after the interview,” she says in her 2022 Comedy Central Stand-Up Featuring set. Much of Denise’s material is rooted in her sitcom-like life experiences and the difficulties of dating, and this joke draws from both. “You just told me you live in an underpass; you haven’t had a job. You can’t feed you! I know you can’t feed me!” Her gifts don’t lie in staking out revolutionary new comic premises but rather in enlivening familiar premises with counterintuitive perspectives and energetic delivery. Consider her 2024 joke about starting therapy. “I’m your employer!” she imagines reminding her therapist whenever her professional opinion starts to feel too “disrespectful.” “You ever employ somebody and then you go to work and then they just pull out an AK and be like, ‘You’re a manipulator, you’re a gaslighter, you got mommy issues’?! I’m up there getting shot the fuck up! Like, girl, I will fire you! Insubordinate!”
Outside her stand-up work — for which she earned a spot on Just for Laughs’ New Faces list in 2022 — Denise is an accomplished actor who has appeared on TV shows like Starz’s Power and Power Book II: Ghost and BET’s Games People Play. As a series regular on the last, her role as Quanisha allowed her the chance to flex the comic timing and instincts she honed during her training at Second City Chicago. Her most impressive onscreen performance is her 2023 guest spot on Abbott Elementary, in which she plays Cassandra, a rude, impatient, and overworked mom who blames her son’s misbehavior at school on her teacher (Quinta Brunson’s Janine); her villainous turn hints at yet unseen dramatic range.
Malik Elassal
How many comedians can say their journey into the performing arts began with their high-school teacher attempting to pilot a theater program just to nurture their talents? Such is the improbable origin story of Malik Elassal, who delivered book reports at his Islamic private school in Calgary with so much theatrical verve that one kind teacher was inspired to take up his cause. It wasn’t long before the program was shut down by another teacher out of an abundance of religious precaution, which may be why Elassal continues to joke about the teachers who didn’t encourage his stand-up aspirations to this day. “You want to be a funny guy, huh?” he says in his 2023 Don’t Tell Comedy set, while impersonating one such teacher with the flair for character work he displayed as a teen. “When you see the power of Allah on the Day of Judgment, brother, you will not be laughing.”
Elassal moved to New York in 2023 after capping off his rise in the Canadian comedy scene with a series of television appearances. Prior to this, he honed his stand-up on the road, where he often performed material about being Muslim to small-town audiences who had never met a Muslim before. The upside of this grind is noticeable in his aforementioned Don’t Tell set, in which he unfurls perspectives shaped by his cultural and religious identity to the broad audience without breaking stride. To wit, Elassal’s bit referencing Israel’s former occupation of Lebanon is crafted so artfully that it lands without a hitch — despite the fact the set was recorded on October 7. In the coming months, Elassal will continue to vindicate the faith of his one encouraging high-school teacher; Snowflakes, an FX comedy pilot he starred in this year, was recently ordered to series.
Roz Hernandez
Roz Hernandez is, with apologies to Demi Lovato, the most fabulous ghost hunter ever born. With her heavy black bangs and penchant for dressing like a paper doll from the 1960s, the comedian is loud, indignant, and ready to entrap both spirits and audience members. In her stand-up, she leads audience members down a cliff by coaxing them into saying the other name for a water spritzer (it’s “mister”), then getting offended that they misgendered her. Part of the fun of Hernandez’s act is how her joyfully exuberant style so directly contrasts her connection with the macabre. The classic Hernandez image is of her in a zebra-print coat with a blue-feather collar, recapping how a ghost ruined her hookup by turning the lights on when her makeup wasn’t done: “These shady-ass ghosts said, ‘Sir, I want you to see what you’ve signed up for.’”
Hernandez has a regular platform for discussing said shady-ass ghosts with guests like Rachel Dratch and Nicole Byer on her successful podcast, Ghosted!, leading to episode titles like “Vinny Thomas Would Break Bread With a Ghost” and “Jackie Beat Saw a Gay UFO.” Hernandez appears in the Netflix queer-comedy documentary Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, and she was the breakout star of the Kristen Stewart–produced ghost-hunting reality show Living for the Dead on Hulu, in which she was billed as the “researcher” in a crew of queer ghost hunters (but really just provided the best color commentary). In one scene, Hernandez declares, “I swear to God, if I’m possessed, I’m gonna be fucking pissed off.” In another, she gets very offended when a ghost calls her fat and “faggot.” She becomes less offended once she realizes that she doesn’t respect the ghost after he misidentifies the color of her dress as red. It’s obviously magenta.
Skyler Higley
Although he came out of the Chicago comedy scene, Skyler Higley grew up in Utah as a Black child of white Mormon parents. This is, as Higley puts it onstage, half of what’s wrong with him. That perspective of observing and feeling outside a dominant dynamic drives much of Higley’s stand-up material, which trends toward sharp bits of scene-setting where he becomes the one person who can actually identify the strangeness of what’s going on. In material about his childhood, it’s descriptions of how much white parents dislike it if their Black child sings spirituals while doing chores. In a bit about the odd social arrangements of asking someone to watch your laptop while using the bathroom at a café, he takes pleasure in performing an exaggeration of Blackness to the discomfort of a white woman nearby who made it weird. He’s the guy who says everything everyone else was thinking but was maybe too polite to say.
It’s an instinct that’s made Higley successful as a staff writer for a number of comedy gigs, including Conan, The Onion, and currently on After Midnight. (One of his Onion headlines: “Smithsonian Devotes New Exhibit to First African American to Use Whites-Only Glory Hole.”) It shapes his onstage persona, too. He talks about his background and the specific disorientation of his early family experiences, but he also describes how powerful it can be to do hallucinogens and see the world in a completely different way. He has a joke about being high on acid while riding public transportation and realizing a guy near him has his whole ass hanging out. “I don’t want to look at ass. I want to look at a beautiful sunset. I want to see a rainbow,” Higley says. “But then because I was tripping, I realize, I’m not looking at ass. I’m looking at billions and billions of cells, made up of billions of billions of atoms.” He ends up gasping to the rest of the train, “That ass is amazing.” The ability to look at a bare stranger’s ass, decide it’s amazing, then make that a functional joke? That’s amazing.
Chloé Hilliard
Reaching six-foot-one by the age of 12 is sure to give a person a unique vantage point. For Chloé Hilliard, who says that her sense of humor “stems from being the awkward ‘big girl’ who had plenty of time to observe others,” this was always going to lead to comedy. “First day of high school, I walked into this: ‘Shh shh shh shh shh, the teacher’s here,’” she jokes in her 2019 set on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. That authoritative presence has carried through to her onstage work, and her material — which showcases a flair for statistics and history Hilliard also displayed in her previous career as a journalist — benefits as a result. “I kinda miss ISIS, y’all,” she begins one joke from her 2020 album Big Dick Energy. Why the nostalgia? Domestic acts of terror have increased since the height of the ISIS threat, she explains, and the news no longer shows the Homeland Security Advisory System “color grid” to tell her how much she should be on alert. “I want a color grid!” she pleads. “I mean, it ain’t gon’ be no color. It’s just going to be different shades of white, cause that’s who’s doing it.” A standout joke from her 2022 Don’t Tell Comedy set, in which she breaks down the differences between New York and Los Angeles by digging into their historical origins, also spins out of a similar fact-based approach. “L.A.’s origin story is the gold rush,” she explains. “They was like, ‘I’m gonna be the one to find a fucking nugget of gold and change my family’s life forever.’ That’s why, today, everybody in Los Angeles is delusional.”
Outside her stand-up credits, Hilliard wrote on A Black Lady Sketch Show — a series that was able to jump from the court room to biblical times to the Harlem Ballroom scene without skipping a beat — and wrote Fuck Your Diet, which was awarded Best Comedy Book in 2020 by the African American Literary Award Show. She’s the A student raising their hand in class, the quietly observant kid hiding behind them, and the class clown all wrapped into one. That’s range.
Leslie Liao
Comics who start stand-up young often look back at their early material and criticize it for its lack of voice and perspective. Leslie Liao, who began performing comedy at 29 after spending her 20s consuming comedy professionally as a scout for management and production companies, avoided these growing pains. Her stage presence is uncommonly composed — slow, steady, and deep-voiced — and she pairs this assured affect with jokes full of short, declarative sentences that speak to her hard-earned outlook. “I am 36 years old,” she begins one joke about the inefficiency of first dates in her 2023 Netflix’s Verified Stand-Up set. “I have a bedtime and decisions to make. I don’t have all night. You need to give me information that matters to me. All I need to see is your penis and your paycheck.”
In 2017, Liao began a day job working in human resources at Netflix while she pursued her passion for stand-up. After years of flexing her comedy muscle onstage, she started posting videos online in early 2023. “When I was younger, I used to be sad about being single,” she says in one of several early viral clips. “Now I’m angry … I feel like when I find him, I’m going to be like a mom whose kid got lost at the grocery store, like ‘Where have you been?! Get in the car! That was so embarrassing. Everyone was staring at me!’” Six months later, she was named one of Just for Laughs New Faces and later got booked on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. This momentum led to a meeting with an executive at another division at her workplace: Netflix’s head of comedy, Robbie Praw, who booked her on Verified Stand-Up and gave her the final push she needed to quit her job at the end of 2023. If her work at the company is over in one sense, in another, it might have only begun.
MANDAL
When MANDAL is on a podcast, the best course of action is to clear out space for him and let him cook. The Atlanta comedian possesses a rare, Norm Macdonald–like quality wherein his natural cadence, parlance, and body language make the journeys to his punch lines as rewarding as the punch lines themselves. At its best, the appeal of MANDAL’s stand-up is similar. All kinetic energy and little giggles, he leans on animated stories and sprawling bits that build momentum as they unravel. “I’m gonna get out of here on a joke that doesn’t work,” he says near the end of his 2022 Don’t Tell Comedy set. “I was talking to this lady who just broke up with her boyfriend, right? And she wanted me to take her to go get crab legs. And I was like, ‘Dang, girl, you gonna need two Old Bays.” True to his prediction, the joke falls flat. But then MANDAL spends the next two minutes explaining the joke’s double entendre, earning bigger laughs with each new layer of deconstruction.
MANDAL’s expressive style lends itself naturally to voice-over, sketch, and musical comedy, all forms he’s successfully dabbled in. Most notably, he voiced a mens’-rights podcaster character in an Adult Swim short titled Buster & TJ: Podcast, which went viral in 2022 largely thanks to the misguided confidence with which MANDAL delivers the line, “Nah man, I ain’t never had a girlfriend.” More recently, MANDAL’s work has caught the attention of John Mulaney, who tapped the comedian to handle warm-up duties for his live talk show Everybody’s in L.A. — a task he’s well suited to given his multiple bits explicitly designed to pump up crowds — and open his Netflix Is a Joke show at the Hollywood Bowl.
Gavin Matts
Self-deprecation is easy. In life, it’s a defense mechanism, and in stand-up comedy, it’s usually a cheat code. But nothing about what Gavin Matts does is easy. He connects the personal to the systemic, the mundane to the existentially troubling. So when he calls himself toxic and adds, “But I’m not masculine — I’m just regular toxic; my toxicity has no masculinity” or insists that he’s stupid, he’s always building toward something bigger. In the case of the latter, it’s police brutality. During a set at the Comedy Cellar in May, he said, “It’s hard to articulate that you’re intellectually insecure when you’re dumb as hell. That’s why I understand why police get so violent as soon as they step on a college campus. They’re like, ‘Aw fuck, everybody here reads? I gotta start hitting somebody.’” Matts sets a tone of gentle irreverence and relatable millennial defeatism (“We are the first generation of all roommates”), and from there, he plunges into climate nihilism or a roast of transphobes: “Older people will be like, ‘There’s two genders.’ How the fuck would you know that? You have six remotes … You have more remotes than there are genders? I don’t think so.”
Matts started out in Vancouver, and after winning SiriusXM’s Top Comic competition in 2017, he hit the ground running. Since moving to the U.S. in 2018, he’s performed on Conan, Comedy Central’s Stand-Up Featuring and Bill Burr Presents: The Ringers, and landed a small part in season two of Ramy. Over time, he’s figured out how to use existing bro-tifs to upend expectations and shepherd audiences through more anxious, ruminative material. Hilarity ensues at the intersection of “philosopher prince” and “kid called into the principal’s office.” ”How can I get sucked off at a time like this? When the whales are in the situation they’re in, I couldn’t possibly succumb to some top right now,” he jokes in his 2023 All Things Comedy–produced special Progression, his performative faux distress barely masking genuine, soul-weary distress. It’s that mutability that makes him fit in at the Comedy Cellar or alternative shows in equal measure. More recently, Matts has been quietly fighting for the soul of stand-up itself by doing biting, brilliant takedowns of the crowdwork trend, inadvertently proving himself to be incredible at crowdwork in the process. In a stratified comedy landscape, Matts could be the one bro to save us all.
Youngmi Mayer
“The fact that I am a failure and fucking nuts and also constantly bring it up” is how Youngmi Mayer describes her own appeal on the first page of her upcoming memoir, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying. While we can’t comment on the last two confessions, the claim that she is a failure may be in jeopardy. Mayer, who grew up in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, is a whirling dervish of off-the-cuff neuroses onstage, a relatable queen on TikTok, and a blunt and brash storyteller on the page. She’s a master at taking would-be clichés — a front-facing comedy video in which she adopts a Korean accent to imitate a Soju Korean Uncle, for example — and elevating them into intergenerational character studies through sheer specificity. When Soju Korean Uncle takes long cigarette drags while staring into the distance, he’s not just getting a nicotine fix. He’s remembering the “IMF crisis.” Across all of her work, Mayer’s superpower is her ability to tap into the emotional core of whatever she has her sights on — racism, the death of her cat, the contents of her son’s backpack, etc. — and articulate it in such a way that reveals how closely humor lives on the other side. The last, for example, features her crying uncontrollably at the fact that her son packed a “cool rock and a really good stick” to bring home, because the discovery makes her prematurely sad that there will come a day when he’s no longer this innocent.
The most complete expression of Mayer’s sensibilities to date arrives in the form of her aforementioned memoir. The book delves into her own life, her family’s history, and the broader histories of both Korea and of whiteness. Along the way, she jabs at everyone from both of her grandmas to a former peer she nicknames “Raw Egg Girl.” Next year, she’ll present her solo show, Hairy Butthole, as part of a performance series at Joe’s Pub, curated by Margaret Cho. The live show shares the same title as Mayer’s podcast, which she began hosting in 2022. The term, she explains in her book, is from a Korean proverb: “Do you know what happens if you laugh while crying? Hair grows out of your butthole.” All we’re saying is that if you see Mayer’s book on the shelf of a potential hookup soon, don’t expect a clean ass.
Dropout’s Breakouts: Vic Michaelis, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and Rekha Shankar
By the time legacy-media company IAC sold CollegeHumor to CCO Sam Reich in 2020, the long-running online-comedy institution had been struggling to find a viable business model for years. Two years prior, it had launched Dropout, a streaming platform that sought to monetize the fan base the brand had built on YouTube, and when Reich took over, this is where he refocused his efforts. Free of the growth mind-set of corporate overlords who wanted the company to pump out content at a breakneck speed without the adequate budget to do so, Reich worked to build a more sustainable and egalitarian business by investing in low-cost unscripted comedy programming — closer in tone to the comedy panel and game shows popular in the U.K. — where performers’ personalities shined. It’s working: Dropout now has evolved into a talent-incubation machine for stars with their own devoted followings.
Brennan Lee Mulligan, the most recognizable of the streamer’s stars, has become a phenomenon in the online-tabletop-gaming community thanks to the popularity of his show Dimension 20, in which he plays tabletop-roleplaying games with a rotating series of guest players. As the show’s energetic host and game master, he builds whimsical worlds for participants to play in and breathes them to life with an array of silly voices. He brings an endearing try-hard energy to his appearances on other Dropout comedy game shows as well — the perfect comic foil for contestants with more of a kids-in-the-back-of-the-classroom mentality. Over 1.6 million people follow Dimension 20 across TikTok and Instagram, and an appetite for his comedy exists offline too: Earlier this year, Mulligan hosted a sold-out U.K. and Ireland theater tour, and next year, against all odds, he’s bringing live Dungeons & Dragons to Madison Square Garden.
Another Dropout breakout is comedian Vic Michaelis, known for their chaotic appearances on the streamer’s game show Game Changer — the premise of which changes every episode, hence its name — as well as the improv-game show Make Some Noise. Since December 2023, they’ve served as host of Very Important People, a talk show in which Michaelis interviews comedians who are transformed into characters by makeup artists. The series offers the host a chance to showcase their anxious deadpan and improvisational skills: In one episode, Ify Nwadiwe, dressed as a purple alien, introduces himself with a long series of indecipherable noises, and Michaelis, unfazed, responds by asking if the name is “spelled the way it sounds?” Where Michaelis has had mainstream acting and improvising opportunities outside their work on Dropout — on Amazon Prime Video’s Upload, the Hallmark movie Round and Round, and Comedy Bang! Bang! — none has raised their profile to the same extent. Season two of Very Important People is set to premiere this fall, and its high-profile lineup of guest stars (John Early, Kate Berlant, Chris Redd, and Paul F. Tompkins, etc.) illustrates the show’s growing reach.
Comedian Rekha Shankar, the third Dropout star on the rise, made the jump from being a sketch writer and performer at CollegeHumor to utility player at Dropout as the company changed gears. During her time working with the streamer, she’s competed on Game Changer, created the Chef’s Table parody Gods of Food, and hosted the shows Celebrity Slumber Party and Erotic Clubhouse with a touch of playful irreverence. As of April 2024, she’s hosted Smartypants, in which she skeptically “yes, ands” semi-serious PowerPoint presentations by other Dropout performers. (One standout segment sees Demi Adejuyigbe making the case for “Which Cartoons Characters Are Invited to ‘The Cookout?’”) An instant hit, thanks in part to Shankar’s quick-witted asides, the show already boasts nearly 500,000 followers across social channels. Outside of this ecosystem, she’s written on TV shows including NBC’s Grand Crew and Comedy Central’s Digman! and acted in 2019’s Between Two Ferns: The Movie. Traditionally, getting plucked for mainstream opportunities like these after starting out on an internet platform would have been considered a graduation of sorts. In the case of Shankar, Mulligan, and Michaelis, it’s been more beneficial to drop out.
Courtney Pauroso
“I took four months off of stand-up to work on a project and all of a sudden there’s a very prominent clown community in Los Angeles,” tweeted 2015 Comedian You Should Know Ian Karmel in 2023. Where clowning — a comedy subgenre in which performers commit to over-the-top character work marked by boorish physicality and purposefully exaggerated stupidity — has been rising in prominence in L.A. for years, it’s recently begun to capture the buzz and attention previously reserved for work staged at improv theaters. Courtney Pauroso, who got her start in one of these theaters (famed SNL cast-member factory the Groundlings), felt creatively lost when she left it behind in 2012, until L.A. clown Natalie Palamides — famous for her 2020 Netflix special Nate — introduced her to the art of clowning in 2016. Pauroso quickly became one of the community’s driving forces, embodying the scene’s style of confrontational silliness and anarchic sexuality.
Pauroso spends years developing clown shows, fleshing out the characters she plays and the worlds they inhabit to probe deeper questions. Her work in this space, as compared to her earlier sketch comedy, is more high concept and socially aware. Take her 2019 and 2023 one-person shows, Gutterplum and Vanessa 5000, which focus on femininity and the commodification of sexuality. In one moment of the latter — which heads to Dropout as a filmed special this fall — Pauroso, outfitted in black-leather lingerie and fishnet stockings, robotically performs a strip routine to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” to woos and cheers from the audience, then starts twerking for a disconcertingly long time. “Uh-oh, I am stuck,” she says in a robotic deadpan, before continuing, “I am your stepmom. Please help me. I’m your stepmother.” Outside of live performances, Pauroso recently collaborated with Palamides on a Duplass brothers–backed TV series, The Broadcast, which she described on Instagram as “1984 meets The Three Stooges meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? meets Eraserhead”; it had its premiere at SXSW in 2024. That she’s finding a way to bring clown sensibilities to mainstream platforms speaks to her position at the head of this growing movement. Pauroso is clown mother. Sorry, no, she is clown stepmother.
Chloe Radcliffe
One of the lines Chloe Radcliffe often uses during a set is a fast jab designed to explain and then quickly dispense with the fact that she has a birthmark on her face. “For those that don’t know, it’s a birthmark. That’s what it is. It doesn’t lower my self-esteem enough for me to fuck you.” It’s an agile way to do the “Yes, I’m aware of what I look like” joke that most comedians need to do in some form or another, but more than that, it’s a handy on-ramp for what the rest of Radcliffe’s material actually feels like. Radcliffe, who says her comedy style developed out of her nerdy high-school and college career as a speech-and-debate competitor, is a cheerful, straightforward, and pragmatic thinker about sex and relationships. She talks about the insecurities and miscommunications that drive them, about her own flaws as a partner, and about how hard it is for straight women to have satisfying sex lives.
When her ex refuses to take direction in bed and complains that it’s like going to a factory and being told to pull a lever, she’s delighted and exasperated. “I’m going to need you to put on your safety goggles and go in there and save American manufacturing!” she says. When she realizes a group of guys in the front row of her show are Swedish, she launches into in a long digression about a Swedish guy she once dated who didn’t take off his condom for an hour and a half. “Reduce, reuse, recycle,” she finds herself chanting in her mind, as they start having sex again using the same condom. Radcliffe has been a staff writer for Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show and acted and written for Stephen Soderbergh’s sci-fi series Command Z, but her 2024 solo show Cheat is where Radcliffe fully honed her persona. Her humor is built on the concept that insecurities can be reframed as aggressive and captivate self-confidence, and it works because it’s framed within Radcliffe’s broader performative approach: thoughtful, unflappable self-awareness.
Veronika Slowikowska
“Another hard but captivating watch. Thanks.” “Brutal watch! Thank you.” “This was EXCRUCIATING … Thank you.” “veronika I can’t keep doing this.” These are typical comments found below the TikToks of half a million-follower-strong Veronika Slowikowska, and their raves. Online and onstage, the comedian possesses all the indefatigable verve and cartoonish physicality of a possessed wind-up doll. Once she gets started on a riff, tangent, character, or song, she feeds off her own energy, doing voices, dances, and faces like a petite female Robin Williams spinning into infinity. Her ability to leapfrog from one idea to the next — as she improvises a song about Friends or invents an intense, too-committed fantastical excuse for why her roommate can’t use the bathroom after her — is why Slowikowska has taken off in such a huge way online. It’s like she’s curated an insane FYP in her mind, and as she performs, she’s scrolling through it at 2x speed. Sometimes, she quite literally bounces off the walls.
Slowikowska is a seasoned live performer, having spent years in Toronto’s sketch- and improv-comedy scene before moving to Brooklyn in 2023, where she co-hosts, along with Haley Stiel, recurring Improv But Good live improvised musicals. Onscreen, she makes college-student roles shine, as seen in her appearances on What We Do in the Shadows and in cult-fave indie I Like Movies. But TikTok is where she’s flourished, in part due to the way she’s managed to serialize her comedy shorts by playing a version of herself with no sense of social awareness, a randomly incredible singing voice, and a deep and abiding crush on her roommate, Kyle, played by her podcast co-host, Kyle Chase. The ongoing will-they-won’t-they saga of her videos — pranking him for attention, trying to make him jealous by paying Lucas Hedges to go on a date, sharing a pivotal New Year’s kiss — gives structure to her train-of-consciousness antics and stakes to her daffier bits. She elevates cringe comedy to a high art, drawing frequent comparisons to real comedians like Kyle Mooney and fictional characters like Michael Scott. That she’s also crafted TikTok’s own Jim and Pam arc is just icing on the face.
Gianmarco Soresi
Ubiquity is a skill. Blanketing social platforms with material can only get a comedian so far; being as undeniably universal as Gianmarco Soresi requires an improbable combination of energy, productivity, and an ability to read the room (and work the algorithm). It’s not just one platform, either. Soresi was a Just for Laughs new face in 2022; performed on The Late Late Show; appeared in The Last OG, Hustlers, and Bonding; and has a popular podcast called The Downside With Gianmarco Soresi, but he’s most impressively inescapable online, where his posts reliably rack up tens of thousands of views and his TikTok has over 700,000 followers. He has Poster’s Disease in the best possible sense: He’s constantly developing new material, and he’s relentless about getting it out into the world. “My girlfriend, she wants us to get a mezuzah,” he says in one of the dozen TikToks posted in the last few weeks. But he feels anxiety about it, “so I got a watermelon mezuzah.”
That ceaseless energy is a career strategy, but it’s also a reflection of who Soresi is onstage. He is effusive and expressive, a chatterbox of ideas and reactions with dense stretches of jokes that draw the eye in the compressed, attention-strained landscape of vertical video. His material about current events plays well in that environment, as do his regular clips of crowdwork. But it’s not surprising that in his longer sets, he’s also the unusual comedian with material about MrBeast. “It’s kind of pathetic, filming strangers to build up your YouTube following,” Soresi says, before his head falls in a moment of self-awareness. The crowd roars because they get it. He lives in that place, he owns it, and he possesses the rare gift of translating it for the in-person experience of live comedy.
Emil Wakim
Some comedians talk about politics with a sense of gravitas — the humor has an edge of anger, or the point of the joke is to clarify injustice. Emil Wakim’s comedy is often political, and it is often about injustice. His material covers conflict in the Middle East and prejudice he experienced during childhood, and even jokes that are ostensibly about sex or relationships often morph into jokes about political correctness or identity. But his political focus has an unusually gleeful tone to it, a bro-y pleasure that often lands on a note of happiness, or at least a sense of excitement that he’s gotten away with something fun. It’s not good that older generations are relying on young people to fix the world, he says. Greta Thunberg should be out at parties having fun: “You can’t penetrate the voice of a generation. It’s wrong! It’s like shooting an eagle. It kills the hope. But that’s what I want for the world. I want Greta to squirt.” “That’s optimism!” he shouts after that punch line. And he’s right.
Wakim grew up in the Midwest and has been featured on The Tonight Show and at Just for Laughs, and in those sets, he often begins from the same premise as all of those naughty-proud comedians who are hung up on a much angrier vision of what’s allowable in comedy. Like them, Wakim tells jokes about wanting to say bad words, jokes about gender and trans people and shame. But he turns those premises towards a joyful or at least absurdist twist by the end, which creates an oddly buoyant sensation of laughing happily at political material rather than chuckling sadly. Wakim’s material allows audiences to laugh at the current state of the world in a way that’s both sincere and satisfying. In that way, it feels almost rebellious.
Eagle Witt
Eagle Witt is a trickster. He creates tension in his jokes by slithering around the different, often contradictory sides of an argument, and he has a gift for living in pockets of uncertainty. In a joke from his 2023 Comedy Central Stand-Up Featuring set, for example, Witt remembers being “infuriated” when one of his white friends called Bob Dylan “the greatest lyricist of all time” … until he actually listened to a Dylan song: “You ever lose an argument so hard you become a fan?” He goes on to concede that Dylan’s “got bars” after all and reads the audience a profound lyric to prove this point. “Isn’t that beautiful?,” he asks — and then, the twist: “Yeah, that’s Jay-Z. Fuck Bob Dylan!” He’s visibly delighted at forcing people to confront their implicit beliefs and assumptions and unwilling to let audiences — especially white audiences — stay comfortable. Later in that same set, the born-and-raised New Yorker makes the case for Kanye as president (“He’s the Black president white America deserves”), then tells a story about the time a heckler believed he was making this argument in good faith: “Bitch, this is a joke! I’d never vote for Kanye West. He’s my favorite rapper. I trust him with beats, not the button.”
Witt’s low-key unpredictability makes him an interesting fit for Wild ‘n Out, a show that leans toward broad, high-energy comedy. After years spent touring as a stand-up, including opening for Aziz Ansari in large theaters and arenas in 2022, he joined the cast of the comedy game show’s 21st season in 2024. In the first game of his first episode, “On the Gang,” where the contestants try to make the stone-faced Chain Gang laugh — often with surface-level roasts and by questioning their manhood — Witt sidles up to the gang’s four big dudes and says, “Y’all look like y’all have strong-ass picnics.” Like in his stand-up, it’s his instinct to zag that gets the laugh. Over its 20 years, Wild ‘n Out has proved to be one of comedy’s most fruitful talent showcases with Katt Williams, DeRay Davis, the 85 South Show trio, and Mikey Day emerging as notable breakouts. It is still early in Witt’s career, but he’s already positioned for a similar trajectory.
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