Our 93 Favorite Comedy Moments of 2024

Stand-up

Anthony Jeselnik has thoughts about the Rogan-verse

Bones and All, November

anthony jeselnik on joe rogan: “i like joe… but if you listen to his podcast you’re a fucking loser” pic.twitter.com/z0OXaGUx1t

— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) November 26, 2024

Before every comedian of a certain ilk had a Netflix special entitled Um, Triggered Much?, Anthony Jeselnik loved to tell offensive jokes; it was sort of his thing. In the 2016 Netflix special Thoughts and Prayers, for instance, he tells a long story about nearly losing his Comedy Central show over a joke about the Boston Marathon bombing … which he tweeted out on the day of the bombing. Considering how intensely the world fixated on “wokeness” in the years since his follow-up special from January 2020, there’s been a lot of interest in what Jeselnik thinks about cancel culture. His latest Netflix special, Bones and All, provides the answer. “I’m against cancel culture,” he says toward the end. The line gets a big reaction from some of the crowd before Jeselnik drops the hammer: “Thank you. That’s my impression of a shit comic trying to get on Rogan.” Far too many comedians are happy to throw marginalized communities under the bus for the sake of “edgy” jokes, so it’s heartening to see one with Jeselnik’s reputation dunk on those other comics to score laughs. But his harshest words aren’t reserved for them. “I like Joe. Joe’s my friend. Joe’s a good guy,” he says in quick succession. Then he waits the perfect amount of time before adding: “But if you listen to his podcast, you’re a fucking loser.” With the sizable overlap between Jeselnik’s fan base and Rogan’s, telling a joke like that in 2024 is nearly as fearless about potential blowback as joking about a tragedy immediately after it happens. —Joe Berkowitz

The best election joke

Arizona comedy show, January

election year joke pic.twitter.com/BoVcsb5Ac9

— anwar (@theanwarnewton) January 17, 2024

In a sea of now-obsolete jokes about the 2024 election featuring such revolutionary premises as “Joe Biden is old” and “Donald Trump looked cool when he got shot,” my favorite election joke was not about the race for the country’s executive branch but a local bid for the office of Arizona mine-safety inspector. “This feels like a skills-based position!” says comedian Anwar Newton, incredulous that the public is qualified to elect a bureaucrat in charge of such a specific and important task. What’s worse is it’s apparently a partisan issue. “They had a Republican and Democratic choice for the mine inspector,” Newton continues. “What could they possibly have disagreed on?” Newton goes on to tell a few solid jokes speculating about how divisive issues like abortion and DEI quotas could theoretically be litigated within a mine setting, but the jokes’ broader point — that society often leaves crucial problems with unambiguous solutions at the mercy of partisan electoral politics — is worth thinking about. —Hershal Pandya

Finally, a James Adomian comedy special

YouTube, September

While comedy fans have been lucky to see a lot of James Adomian this year as Mike Lindell on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and the voice of befuddled Batman baddie Bane on Harley Quinn, they also got something unprecedented: a stand-up special. In addition to his uncanny impressions — including hilarious takes on Jon Taffer, Tom Selleck, and David Attenborough — Path of Most Resistance is more evidence that Adomian is one of the sharpest joke writers on the planet. There are few specials this year, or any year, this smart, energetic, or jam-packed with jokes. —John Roy

Jenny Slate drops the mic (stand)

Seasoned Professional, February

By the time a comedian is ready to film a special, their material is often so polished that it can feel devoid of urgency. There are points in Jenny Slate’s Amazon Prime special Seasoned Professional when it falls into this trap, which is why the moment when she intentionally knocks over her microphone stand then panics as she realizes in real time it’s about to roll off the edge of the stage is so refreshing. True spontaneity in stand-up specials is rare — even rarer when it doesn’t take the form of crowdwork. This appears to dawn on Slate in the moment, too, as her initial panic quickly gives way to excited cheering. The moment produces a second payoff at the end of the special when Slate, lacking her usual place to put the microphone, gently places it on the floor and blows it a kiss. —H.P.

Here comes the comedy

Love You, August

I lost count of how many times Adam Sandler repeats the title of his Josh Safdie–directed Netflix special over the course of its 84 minutes. “Love you,” he tells the audience, the guy who gets him coffee, his keyboard player, and his wife, in between jokes about no-wipe shits, genie hand jobs, and being mistaken for Ben Stiller (actually, those are all the same joke). But it’s clear that what Sandler loves above everything is comedy, and he lays out why in the final song of the special. As clips from comedy history play behind him, Sandler thanks a litany of greats, from Buster Keaton to Maya Rudolph, for helping people get through rough times. By the time he gets to Chris Farley and Norm Macdonald, any lingering cynicism has been thoroughly drained away. Comedy is just so fucking cool! —Emily Palmer Heller

Kyle Kinane’s big, long joke

Dirt Nap, April

If Family Feud polled 100 people on “How many words are in a joke?,” the most common answer would be, like, 30. Well, on Dirt Nap, Kyle Kinane closes his special with a joke that is (based on word counting the copy-and-pasted YouTube transcript) 8,787 words. And every one of those words freaking rules. The joke is a story about moving to the suburbs and adopting a street cat, but that’s like saying Forrest Gump is a movie about sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. It’s so much more! —Jesse David Fox

Nikki Glaser’s virtuosic closer

Someday You’ll Die, May

If the 2024 Nikki Glaser output you’re most familiar with is her set from The Roast of Tom Brady, you’re not getting the full picture. In her HBO special Someday You’ll Die, Glaser takes the same savant-like joke-writing skill she displayed live on Netflix and applies it to topics far more interesting than Brady and Gronk, including suicide, procreation, and hack stand-up crutches. It all builds toward a masterful closer in which she compares the feeling of being alive to being the woman in a gangbang, because “every day, life is just trying to fuck you from so many angles.” It’s a fine-enough premise on paper, but the examples she cites to prove it — and the grueling act-out she performs to sell it — elevate it from a filthy joke to a deeply profound existential rumination. —H.P.

Dan Licata’s joke-dense jokes

For the Boys, May

Dan Licata packs so many bizarre details into one single joke set-up, any one of them could be an entire pause-for-laughter punch line in some other project — a surrealist sitcom, maybe. He transferred to “Jesus Christ High School,” which is a Staten Island public school, because his dad “got a job cleaning the breastfeeding pods at JFK airport,” pods he uses to watch “Paranormal Activity on a VR headset” while drinking two iced coffees before a flight, because you don’t actually need a baby to use those suckers. Then, he describes “edging, but with piss,” which is when he took “one-third of a piss, wrapped a couple rubber bands around the head, started shotgunning Dasanis,” which is extra difficult because he put a gauge earring in his pee-hole. He demonstrates what it sounds like when he pees now by dumping a glass of water on the floor. All of this takes place in the first three minutes after Licata gets onstage, and he keeps going on like this for the rest of the special. It’s called For the Boys because he shot it at his Buffalo high school in front of a room of teenage boys who, I’ll be honest, don’t seem like they’re totally getting it. Watching this special possibly has the brain-damage equivalent of doing ten canisters of whippets back to back. Licata also had an excellent set on Late Night With Seth Meyers to promote the special, if you want a smaller dose. I’ve been thinking about how he says his wife was deployed but “already used up all her PTO so she could be home for Halloween” all year. It tickles me so! —Rebecca Alter

Marlon Wayans impersonates an old camel chewing straw with disconcerting accuracy

Good Grief, June

Good Grief is a special about Marlon Wayans losing both his parents, but even Sigmund Freud, author of The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, couldn’t have dreamed what such a thing would look like. Specifically, Wayans dedicates an unbelievable amount of time describing his elderly parents’ respective genitalia. But the image that is burned in my brain and will soon be burned into yours comes when he imagines what his mother’s vagina would look like late in life. Wayans is a comedian known for act-outs, so when he says “The lips would be stretched out and the hair would be coming out, and it would be like an old camel chewing straw,” the audience expects him to act it out, but the result defies any expectation. It is vivid, grotesque, pained, and weirdly sentimental. —J.D.F.

Lara Ricote’s bait and switch

GRL/LATNX/DEF, September

Netherlands-based comedian Lara Ricote’s GRL/LATNX/DEF, which won the 2022 Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer, is a solo show about the idea of doing a show about identity. Each time it seems like it’s going to fall into a dissection of the various groups she belongs to, it morphs into something else. This approach is best exemplified in a stand-out joke about Ricote’s “degenerative hearing loss.” Ricote’s not getting ahead of it by learning sign language, she explains, because doctors have assured her that medical science is advancing quickly enough that it’ll address the deterioration before it goes too far. She then conducts an informal audience survey. “I just want to know: Is there anyone here tonight who happens to be working on it?” she asks to silence. “And nobody knows anybody?” Finally, the twist: “Now’s the time where I tell you where that whole ‘degenerative hearing loss’ thing is actually a metaphor for the climate crisis.” —H.P.

The way James Acaster holds the mic in Hecklers Welcome

Netflix, December

Throughout Hecklers Welcome, James Acaster walks around holding the entire mic stand like he’s in the tech crew and has wandered onstage accidentally. It looks a bit like he’s about to play an air guitar, or maybe like he’s hauling around a little step stool for reaching a high shelf? The general impact of it is “How do mics even work?” with a large dash of “I’ve picked this up because I’m in the middle of doing something, but now I can’t remember what it was I meant to do, so I’m just going to carry it around until something comes to me.” —Kathryn VanArendonk

Rose Matafeo’s very specific joke targeting

On and On and On, December

Look, for all the critical rubrics people use to judge stand-up, sometimes enjoying a special is as simple as a comedian being roughly the same age as you and referencing things that make you reenact the “Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV” meme. This was my experience watching Rose Matafeo’s Max special On and On and On, specifically during the moments when she swiftly disabuses Gen Zers of the notion that their age group invented the concept of whimsy (“My child, have you ever worn a top hat at the height of summer to a Panic! at the Disco concert?”) and refers to getting dumped over the phone as “the reverse Soulja Boy.” The latter joke, she adds, is “a good litmus test to see how many people my age are in the crowd,” which, yes. —H.P.

Ahir Shah’s “relatively unfunny” stand-up comedy

Ends, September

In 2019, British comedian Ahir Shah concluded an uneven stand-up set at a festival in Melbourne by speculating aloud about the crowd’s perception of him. “You might think that I’ve been a relatively unfunny stand-up comedian,” he said. “But I think we can all agree I would’ve made an extremely funny lecturer. Let’s just acknowledge that we could reassess these ten minutes in the light of that and realize we’ve all witnessed something breathtaking that’s been horrifically missold.” Such is the feeling one might walk away with after watching Shah’s Netflix special Ends, a filmed adaption of his show that won the comedy award for Best Show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2023. In it, Shah uses the story of his family’s emigration from India to the U.K. to make the case that even political progressives who ardently disagree with Rishi Sunak’s policies should see it as a sign of progress that he was elected the country’s first Indian prime minister in 2022. Superficial ethnic representation is the type of thing that inspires eye rolls in 2024, especially when it’s not followed by material change, but Shah’s “funny lecture” is so persuasive that he successfully calls that reflex into question. —H.P.

Stewart Lee calls out his fans

Basic Lee, July

Liking the U.K. comedy legend Stewart Lee is sort of the comedy-fan equivalent of being really into wellness, in the sense that people who do it cannot and will not stop talking about it. In his new special, Basic Lee, the comedian hits out at these (mostly male) obsessives who he says drive women away from his shows with their overenthusiastic fandom. “You have my sympathy, ladies,” he says, sketching out a scenario he imagines they’re all too familiar with. “You’re trying to get ready for bed at night, aren’t you? You’re trying to get in the shower, or have a talk about the gas bill or something, and he’s lying in bed on his back, he’s got a laptop on his chest, and he’s watching little clips of me on YouTube. And he’s going [Ten seconds of obnoxious laughter] Oh God, he’s a genius. And so am I, because I like him.’” That I personally happened to watch this special for the first time in bed with my laptop on my chest, I’m sure, was just a coincidence. —H.P.

Podcasts

Katt Williams scorches the earth

Club Shay Shay, January

No list of notable 2024 comedy moments could be credible without including Katt Williams’s internet-stopping interview on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast Club Shay Shay. Had it just been that Williams’s insults of his comedy peers started going viral before the interview finished livestreaming on YouTube, that alone would merit recognition. (Perhaps you heard that Cedric the Entertainer’s four specials are “so bad” that they’re not available to watch on “Netflix or Tubi.”) But its ripple effects were far wider. It prophesized cultural reckonings (the fall of Diddy), set the tone for a year heavy in public feuds (sorry, Drake), led to follow-up interviews where Williams said offensive things that were much less fun, and coronated Club Shay Shay as a platform so influential that none other than Kamala Harris stopped by during election season. It also spawned this breathlessly funny video of Williams sprinting shirtless to authenticate his eyebrow-raising claim that he’s able to run a 40-yard dash in a little over four seconds. It’s an interview for the history books — one Williams will no doubt read one day as part of his stated yearly quota of 3,000. —H.P.

Nana destroys Heckler, Nana is crushing, #Nana4SNL

Comedy Bang! Bang!, May

Modern-era CBB GOAT Lisa Gilroy takes a page from Nephew Todd and finds a great game in just playing a relative of host Scott Aukerman, saying kooky shit about him that he has to “yes, and” as truths. As Nana Aukerman, Gilroy takes this 15th-anniversary episode to mean that it’s Scott’s 15th birthday and proceeds to give him a silly sex talk. Because this is a supersize anniversary episode, the whole bit is bolstered by a peanut gallery of seven other guests cracking up at her moto-scootoo-quick improvising. What truly makes the mind reel is this was the second half of a two-week streak for Gilroy; she ran away with the episode the week before playing God. —R.A.

Kate Berlant discovers a shocking superpower

Doughboys, November

Next year will be the tenth anniversary of the Doughboys podcast, which is basically a medical miracle of longevity for a podcast centered around eating fast food. Over hundreds of episodes, hosts Mike Mitchell and Nick Wiger have played plenty of games with guests, but maybe none have ever performed so well as first-time guest Kate Berlant, who shocks and surprises everyone, most of all herself, as she correctly guesses the exact year that a series of obscure Long John Silver’s commercials aired, based solely off aesthetic signifiers. (Has Berlant ever even eaten at Long John Silver’s? Extremely unlikely.) When someone fails horribly at a task like this, it can be funny. But when they succeed so impossibly, in a way that feels almost like they’re being guided by the hand of God, at a task so difficult yet so stupid? Hilarious. —R.A.

The triumphant return to Suicide House

Comedy Bang! Bang!, October

It has been seven years since the last time Scott Aukerman found himself at Suicide House for one of Comedy Bang! Bang!’s formerly annual Halloween episodes. It’s tragic imaging Bueford LeBaron (Jon Daly) working in the lab late one night for nothing. Well, apparently all Aukerman needed to do was change up the lineup slightly (not getting into it right now) and we had a perfect episode of Comedy Fang! Fang! And if you can believe it, there was a brand, totally new song from Leo Carpazzi (Nick Wiger) that was nothing like “The Monster Fuck.” —J.D.F.

Mandal debunks Stavvy’s “white kid in Black school” theory

Stavvy’s World, August

Like a good hot sauce, a great podcast guest doesn’t change the flavor entirely but pushes things in new, unexpected directions. Mandal, a 2024 Comedian You Should and Will Know, is new to the podcast-guest game, but he’s already proven himself a must-listen. His brand of deadpan whimsy puts the listener on the edge of their seat, wondering if he’s going to respond with a flight of fancy or something surprisingly understated. So when Stavvy’s World host Stavros Halkias brings up the secret of making it as a white guy in a largely Black high school, Mandal has a perfect “Yeah, but nah” response: “We only had one white dude, and I’m going to be honest with you … They was beating the mess out that boy.” He adds, “If that cat didn’t end up racist, he hated himself.” For that moment, we were all living in Mandal’s World. —J.D.F.

Scott, Paul, and Lauren’s terms of en-“dear”-ment

Threedom, February through December

Every now and then on their podcast, Threedom, Scott Aukerman, Paul F. Tompkins, or Lauren Lapkus will respond to something the other is saying or answer a question with a heightened, hostile condescension, tacking a weaponized “sweetie,” “honey,” or “dear” onto the end of their sentence. They have such an ease with each other, and clearly so much friendship and respect, that the words cut through like comedy daggers. It’s hard to explain to the non-pisspig community, but it makes us fans laugh every time. Sorry if you don’t get it, dear. —R.A.

Late Night

Dad’s home

Comedy Central, February 

But only on Mondays; the kids are still trying to feed themselves Tuesday through Thursday. It’s been nice having Jon Stewart back, even if it is only once a week. His elder-statesman status lets him pop off a little more than the rest of the late-night hosts on touchier subjects. He was pretty much the only host, for example, to talk shit about the McDonald’s narc that fingered Luigi Mangione. —Bethy Squires

A new bombshell enters the late-night villa

CBS, January

January saw the premiere of After Midnight, the reboot/revival of @midnight and the successor to The Late Late Show With James Corden. Host Taylor Tomlinson guides guests through a very different internet than the one @midnight left behind in 2017. A meaner one, for starters. But the show still serves an important function in the comedy world: It helps touring comedians get a little more famous and sell a few more tickets for their shows. In the 12 months since its premiere, After Midnight has settled into a truly stupid little show. Panelists play games like Does This Lamp Work? and Which Guy Named Nick Is Taller? It’s also become a welcome space for certain recurring panelists’ little bits. Chris Fleming’s staged readings are always a delight, for example. —B.S.

Seth Meyers accidentally becomes the news

Late Night With Seth Meyers, March 

When Joe Biden gave one of his most detailed statements on a cease-fire in Gaza, he did it while eating an ice-cream cone with Seth Meyers. That week, Meyers used “A Closer Look” to really wallow in the absurdity of having ice cream with a world leader while they actually do some world-leading. It was a real master class in how to handle a scandal, especially a deeply stupid one. —B.S.

The return of Jiminy Glick

Jimmy Kimmel Live!, June

You often hear how great comedians don’t lose potency with age, but witnessing it in real time can still seem miraculous. Martin Short brought beloved, belligerent, and be-fat-suited celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick back to guest host Jimmy Kimmel Live! over the summer, and the results were explosive. Still perhaps the most courageous improviser on the planet, Short threw himself into physical gags that seem impossible for a man his age. Watch as he unleashes pure comedy chaos on guest Nick Kroll, reducing the usually unflappable pro to a giggling wreck. —J. Roy

The Rightful Heir returns to The Tonight Show

The Tonight Show, April

So many leftists I know were radicalized in 2010 — not by the recession, but by Conan O’Brien losing The Tonight Show. For those who weren’t there, it’s impossible to explain the fervor with which people pledged their allegiance to Team Coco. There were honest-to-God marches! About The Tonight Show! O’Brien got fucked over by Jay Leno and NBC, had The Tonight Show yoinked from his hands after seven months, and the world trembled. But this year, a peace was brokered between NBCUniversal and Team Coco, and O’Brien returned to 30 Rock to plug his new travel show. What a beautiful, but fragile, peace we have found. —B.S.

All the white boys came to Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel Live!, September

When we were all still coconut-pilled and the election seemed almost fun, Jimmy Kimmel assembled a murderers’ row of impressions to play various nut bars across the political spectrum. James Adomian’s MyPillow Guy (he probably has a name, but that’s not important right now) has been on the show for years, as has Josh Meyers’s eerily accurate and slimy Gavin Newsom. But nabbing Haley Joel Osment to play Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance? Inspired. Getting all three of these freaks out on the same night? Gorgeous, gorgeous TV. —B.S.

Seth Meyers curbs Larry David’s enthusiasm

Late Night With Seth Meyers, February

Years ago, when Larry David appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers, he told Meyers that he should do an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It never happened. This year, David appeared on Late Night to promote Curb’s final season, and Meyers used it as an opportunity to uncomfortably confront the famous uncomfortable confronter. The top YouTube comment on the segment says it all: “What’s great about this is Seth complaining that he was never in an episode of Curb, only for the interview to turn into one.” It even ends with multiple unrelated narratives uniting in a way that is both surprising but inevitable. —J.D.F.

The Mulaneyverse

The return of Oh, Hello! 

John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A., May

It would have been enough to have brought back Gil Faizon (Nick Kroll) and George St. Geegland (John Mulaney). But, like everything about John Mulaney’s brilliant experiment in Making Late Night Good Again, Everybody’s in L.A., he went above and beyond, figuring out the funniest possible setting to plunk the “two legendary bachelors” in Los Angeles: a Hollywood mansion tour. The crotchety, idiosyncratic Upper West Siders quickly reveal that they thought it was a Hollywood Manson tour. Why? “The reason we are here is because we’re visiting,” George clarifies, helpfully. Their ulterior motive, however, is they’d like to scatter an unreasonably huge bag of ashes belonging to their late friend Art Simpson (lol) who was a young pledge in the Manson family with them in the ’60s. “So many people were, honey,” George tells their poor tour guide, Robert. There are approximately one thousand jokes in this under-ten-minute segment, like how a wheel of Art’s gaming chair is in the bag (along with some unburned bones), Gil saying “We couldn’t get into the Robert Blake tour because it doesn’t exist,” and Mulaney’s amazing quip when noticing the tram is for a mansion tour: “There’s no i in Manson.” This is such an incredible bit of lore-building for everyone’s favorite modern amoral Statler and Waldorf. Of course they did helter-skelter in the ’60s. Of course they were draft dodgers who “applied hard to the North Vietnamese Army.” And of course the characters are only getting better with age. —R.A.

Rajat and Jeremy: Tina and Amy they ain’t

John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A., May

Two of the stand-out pre-taped segments featured in John Mulaney’s live talk show, Everybody’s in L.A., starred writers Rajat Suresh and Jeremy Levick, who, between their appearances on this show, guest spots on the final season of What We Do in the Shadows, and cameos in the movies Let’s Start a Cult and Rap World, had a big 2024 as performers as well. In this segment, the pair try to help a group of devoted Tina Fey and Amy Poehler fans realize a lifelong dream by participating in a special surprise for them. Unfortunately, the fans, fresh off delivering emotional speeches about Fey and Poehler’s significance in their lives, appear underwhelmed when Levick and Suresh come strolling out from behind a curtain expectantly. “We thought you might be excited to meet us, because we’re comedy writers like Tina and Amy,” Levick deadpans as the participants look on in confusion. Evidently, one thing they didn’t learn from their repeat viewings of Mean Girls was gratitude. —H.P. 

Award-worthy Performers

The year of Josh Johnson

YouTube and The Daily Show, all year

Josh Johnson went from Daily Show writer to correspondent this year, but it’s the internet that has made him a star. Eschewing the quick crowdwork clips so beloved of his TikTok peers, Johnson dropped lengthy, informative, razor-sharp monologues unpacking current events so frequently and so quick on the heels of the news throughout the year that it’s easy to believe his claim to only sleeping four hours a night. Watch this extended take on the Drake-Kendrick beef, which racked up 1.2 million views in its first five days on YouTube, and you’ll see why Johnson’s is a fresh and vital voice in stand-up. —J. Roy

Conan O’Brien on Hot Ones 

Hot Ones, April 

We’re well past the point of incredulity that an escalating series of hot-sauce challenges on YouTube has become one of our best talk shows and an essential stop on promotional tours (Kamala would’ve won if she’d talked inflation policy through Da Bomb sweats, etc.). Hot Ones is quite simply the new Tonight Show, which made this the perfect moment for a comedy legend like Conan O’Brien to fuck with the formula, as he did on the April 11 episode. “I don’t fear your wings, man!” Conan boasted, taking regular breaks to stash chicken-wing bones in his pockets and consult his dubious physician Dr. Arroyo (José Arroyo). On a baseline level, this is absurd, because O’Brien looks like (and admits as much) he’s never eaten anything spicier than corned beef. At around the 14-minute mark, he speeds past his last exit ramp, taking a heedless swig from a bottle of hot sauce, working himself into a Howard Beale–esque frenzy, lips stained orange, his face sickly sweaty in a way only true Irish heritage can produce. After taking a perfectly on-target shot at the parent company of the show he was promoting (“They used to call it HBO, but people found that too popular!”), our final image is of O’Brien — eyes crazed with a mania that’s no longer quite as exaggerated as it was six wings ago; his chin dripping a revolting combination of milk, drool, and maybe snot — having defeated Hot Ones, but at what cost? —Joe Reid

Kiko Soirée wears nude

Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson’s improv marathon, October

Dicks: The Musical creators Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson did six straight hours of gay improv this October at the Bell House, with hourly changing guests that included Ilana Glazer, Julio Torres, and Pat Regan. The whole thing was a glorious salute to increasingly deranged improv energy, and the best guest was drag artist Kiko Soirée. She walked onstage with a completely done-up face including bright-blue eye shadow, but was otherwise only wearing skin-tone heels, nude pasties, and tights, the combination of which she claimed would help the audience be able to imagine her as any character. She then changed out of her nude heels into white sneakers and became a child in anaphylaxis. It’s these moments that make you want to claim that improv is back. —Jason P. Frank

Cole Escola drags a chair across the stage

Oh, Mary!, February

2024 was the year that Cole Escola became someone your grandma might text you about. The comedian’s play Oh, Mary!, in which they play a demonic version of Mary Todd Lincoln, became one of the biggest hits on Broadway, after beginning the year Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel. In the show’s grand finale (spoiler ahead!), Mary Todd is finally able to return to cabaret after her bitch husband’s been shot, and, in a moment of pure theatrical bliss, performs a full cabaret number with a multiplicity of songs. My favorite moment? When Escola drags a chair out from one side of the stage and, instead of pausing to use the chair for any form of performance à la Chicago, simply drags it to the other side. Perfection! —J.P.F.

Great Moments in TV

Dylan skateboards on Great British Bake-Off

Netflix, September

Oh, Dylan. The standout contestant of this season of The Great British Bake-Off would have been easy to hate. He was just 20 years old, gorgeous, a little pretentious, and preternaturally good at baking. The show’s producers were in a quandary. They knew this Little Mister Perfect was destined to go all the way to the final. How to get viewers on his side? By taking him down a peg right off the bat. In week one, as he explained his concept for a sticky mango rice loaf cake (inspired by a trip to Thailand during his gap year — ugh, but also: sounds delicious), the editors cut to a ten-second clip of Dylan completely sucking at skateboarding. “He’s a bit rusty,” host Alison Hammond murmured apologetically. The message was clear: We could love Dylan, because we had permission to laugh at him, too. —Nate Jones

The light-switch gag in “Bart’s Birthday”

The Simpsons, September 

Ah, 2024. I’m going to miss this place. There’s a sort of “Too Many Cooks” effect that happens over the course of The Simpsons season 36 premiere, in which the internal reality of The Simpsons begins to subtly fold in on itself, all using sitcom series finale tropes. They zoom past the rule of threes and do the joke nine times. —R.A.

John Blackthorne ages a pheasant

Shōgun, March

Yes, Shōgun is a series mostly defined by court intrigue, human loss on a devastating scale, honor, betrayal, scheming, and the naked pursuit of power. If it had only those things, it would be a solid show. What makes it a great show is that it also has a scene where its idiot himbo Englishman gets extremely excited about cooking a pheasant, and demands that his household of Japanese aristocrats let him age the pheasant for days and days by hanging it near the front door of their house. “Yes, yes!” he tells them, cheerfully, when they ask about it rotting. “It will be a terrible stench.” Then, in typical Shōgun fashion, an elderly gardener gets killed because he messed with the pheasant, and the whole thing is exactly awful enough that the gruesome rotting pheasant is painfully, perfectly absurd. —K.V.A.

Ava holds a pencil

Hacks, May 

In the great 2024 comedy-television wars, Hacks emerged as not the hero we deserved but the one we needed. As we wrote, it isn’t a good comedy, but it beat The Bear for Best Comedy at the Emmys, vanquishing the mighty beast that grew to be the symbol for gag-writer resentment toward the post-comedy genre of sitcom-making. But this is not a time for negativity but to focus on, for my money, the one scene in the most recent season of Hacks that really had me going. Ava (Hannah Einbinder) is promised the head-writer job on Deborah’s new late-night show, so she needs new headshots. Which means she must take a photo holding a pencil. This was written by writers who have had to be photographed as writers, and they nailed this one.—J.D.F.

Jerrod Carmichael asks a Grindr date to the Emmys

Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, March

Jerrod Carmichael’s reality show wanted us to cringe at him, right? Like, the whole point was that you kind of just felt bad for him, because the choice to make this thing at all could only ever amount to deep wells of pity in his audience. Well, he won, and in the process made the best cringe comedy of the year. While the show broadened its focus eventually, the foundation of it all was in its pilot, in which Carmichael tried to get Tyler, the Creator, who he had a crush on, to come to the Emmys with him. While nervous about Tyler’s answer, he tried to ask a 20-year-old Grindr hookup to go instead. The accompanying “yes” by the hookup and immediate rudeness of Carmichael in response (“Would you mind being a backup date?” he asks. “I have to see if someone that I genuinely love wants to go”) made for a shocking, horrible, embarrassing, and, yes, hilarious moment. —J.P.F.

“Muffin Unboxing”

Bluey, July

The Bluey minisodes range from unobjectionable to transcendent, but “Muffin Unboxing” is the only one that manages to produce a gut-level laugh. Muffin, the show’s resident chaos-causing cousin, has been wheedled into filming an unboxing-style video by her father, Stripe, who has once again reached for the parenting stars but landed somewhere significantly south of his goal. Everything goes wrong, beginning with Muffin’s distaste for the unboxed toy and continuing through battery mishaps, a jelly bean frenzy, and a final sibling-rivalry-fueled collapse. Sometimes Bluey sneaks up from behind in an emotional ambush, but there’s no need to worry about that here. It’s Schadenfreude all the way down.  —K.V.A.

“Mr. President”

Smiling Friends, May

Smiling friends - President Jimble Screws up #smilingfriends pic.twitter.com/MePnXcL1MC

— Killed Companion Cube (@MakeValiumOTC) May 13, 2024

Adult Swim’s Smiling Friends delivered the boldest piece of satire of the 2024 presidential election with its second episode of season two, which imagines an election between incompetent incumbent President Jimble, played by a human actor in cartoon surroundings, and populist favorite (and Smiling Friends fan favorite) Mr. Frog, returning from his cancellation in season one. The face-off, which aired two months before Biden backed down, captures the feelings of dread at the time and heightens them to psychotic proportions. Mr. Frog is a rich-as-filth TV star who enjoys widespread popularity despite his history of inappropriate behavior, total lack of moral compass, and seeming disdain for his voter base. But sitting President Jimble is a useless idiot of a man who accidentally cozies up to war criminals leading to the bombing of children, can’t string three words together, and pretty consistently throws up on himself and shits his pants as he toddles around. No piece of comedy trying to get a handle on the “rock and a hard place” nature of national politics in 2024 was quite so crass, or quite so cathartic. —R.A.

Brilliant Minds’s fridge full of ferns

NBC, September

In the new NBC procedural Brilliant Minds, Zachary Quinto plays not-quite Oliver Sacks (Oliver Wolf, thank you very much), a doctor with face blindness, a desperate need to treat his patients via unconventional methods like kidnapping them and throwing them on the back of a motorcycle, and an all-consuming passion for ferns. He loves ferns. There are ferns all over his house. There are ferns in his windowsill. There are ferns on the counters, on his desk, and on his bookshelves and on the floor. And when he opens the fridge to get some water, there is water, and there are also ferns. This is what repetitive, underbaked medical procedurals should be: overserious acting and a goofy fridge full of ferns.  —K.V.A.

Tony Khan wears a neck brace

NFL draft, April

Every year I am allowed to sneak one funny wrestling moment onto this otherwise totally normal list, and this year the winner is All Elite Wrestling owner Tony Khan wearing a neck brace during the NFL draft and his subsequent TV interviews. Wrestling is at its funniest when it bleeds into the straight world, confusing well-meaning normie interviewers who do not understand they are actually now in an improv scene against their will. Khan was injured when his company’s EVPs, the Young Bucks, attacked him on live television in front of his own perfectly mustachioed father. He then went around for days in a neck brace — the funniest of all medical devices — like a guy trying to garner sympathy during a court hearing. The coup de grâce was when he caused two NFL Network interviewers to completely panic by calling WWE the “Harvey Weinstein of pro wrestling.” If only all billionaires could be this funny. —Anne Victoria Clark

Carmen Christopher stealing the show

English Teacher, September

Rick Santana, Businessman Extraordinaire @CarmChristopher #EnglishTeacherFX pic.twitter.com/qFiu7dvt3R

— Cinemania Scenes (@CinemaniaScenes) October 18, 2024

Carmen Christopher may not have the biggest role on FX’s English Teacher, but he eats every moment he’s onscreen as Rick Santana, the high school’s guidance counselor whose whole character game is to say and do things that suggest he just might be the world’s least qualified person to be giving guidance. He’s a mildly dumb guy in a very 2024 way, falling for online business-opportunity scams, avoiding the students who bully him, and saying things like “My cousin created his own version of ChatGPT to write a more fucked-up version of Breaking Bad, dude!” Whatever the fate of this show ends up being (creator and star Brian Jordan Alvarez is currently facing allegations of misconduct on the set of his 2016 web series), future TV series should be leaping at the chance to get Christopher in their ensembles. —R.A.

Kathy Bates wears the Matlock suit

Matlock, October

The premise of the Matlock reboot is that Kathy Bates plays Madeline Matlock, which, she explains, is like the guy on the TV show Matlock, except he’s a fake lawyer on TV and she’s a real lawyer (on TV!). But also her Matlock identity is a ruse! It’s a cover-up for her own secret plan to bring down the law firm that helped the evil pharmaceutical company that profited from opioid abuse. And now she’s so deeply entrenched in her identity that she’s having dreams about the original TV Matlock, in which she is Andy Griffith, wearing the Matlock suit. It’s so delightful. She’s so annoyed! —K.V.A.

GirlsNoLonga

The Benihana puking joke

March 

While Girls5eva is an embarrassment of comedic riches overall, Renée Elise Goldsberry is a rare talent who can truly do it all. She sings! She dances! She acts! But she can also sell the hell out of a joke. Here, she tells her ex-beau Torque that she doesn’t want to hear about the time she puked at Benihana and it started cooking and the guy tried to flip it into his hat. It’s the kind of joke you’d have heard on 30 Rock in its heyday: an entire story — nay, a tableau — laid bare in a single run-on sentence that escalates from simple embarrassment to absurd devastation. While the joke is strong enough on paper, Goldsberry punctuates it with a “no” delivered with such seductive flair it made me laugh for 15 minutes straight. That’s more than some Emmy-winning comedies (ahem) make me laugh in a whole season. —A.V.C.

Fox teeth

March 

Grotesque, fantastic. A scream at an instantly iconic and horrifying set of jagged vulpine teeth transplanted into a hot man’s forever-altered mouth is kind of like a laugh, right? —Roxana Hadadi

Catherine Cohen says Rebecca Lobo’s name

March 

What the night sky was to van Gogh, vowel sounds are to Catherine Cohen: a landscape for expansive, impressionistic, kaleidoscopic exploration. In her season-three guest appearance, of Girls5eva in which she plays Taffy, a sugar baby celebrating her birthday, the show’s writers gave Cohen the perfect canvas to do her thing. In response to WNBA legend Rebecca Lobo asking if it would be cute if she makes as many baskets as Taffy’s age, the line as scripted is “So cute, Rebecca Lobo.” Cohen read the line as “Sooo kewt, Rebecca l-O-b-O” with an earworm musicality. The line played in my head like the chorus of a song: So cute, Rebecca Lobo / So cute, Rebecca Lobo / So cute, Rebecca Lobo / So cute, Rebecca Lobo. —J.D.F.

Cinema

Maria Bamford plays Lorne Michaels

The People’s Joker, April

Vera Drew’s Gotham Award–winning debut feature, The People’s Joker, uses a lot of classic Batman characters to transformative effect in its autobiographical story of coming out as a woman (awesome!) and a comedian (YIKES!), but it also introduced a new villain into the Rogue’s Gallery in the form of lo-res CGI Lorne Michaels The ultimate big-bad of this Joker origin story is the head honcho of a UCB-SNL dystopian hybrid that exerts authority, control, and sexism over comedy in Gotham, and Maria Bamford voices him like a little cartoon weasel. What makes it great is she’s not trying to do a Lorne; she’s doing her own thing. So not only did People’s Joker out-Joker Joker: Folie à Deux, it out-Lorned Saturday Night. —R.A.

John Early slippin’ on chicken

Stress Positions, January 

Theda Hammel’s debut feature Stress Positions is full of smart satire about millennials, COVID, brain worms, and queer Brooklynites, but it also has a couple of good, old-fashioned pratfalls courtesy of John Early as neurotic loser Terry Goon. Watching him in this starring role, throwing his back out on raw chicken, just confirms that he’s our best physical comedian since maybe Jim Carrey. Get this guy a franchise! —R.A.

A rare throwback with wall-to-wall jokes

The Gutter, November

A problem common to silly comedy movies, even as they’ve grown increasingly extinct, is that their marketing teams often release trailers ahead of time that spoil all of their best jokes. Watching The Gutter, Yassir Lester and Isaiah Lester’s movie about a bowling prodigy named Walt (Shameik Moore), the script feels like it was written with the explicit intention of making this impossible. An editor could conceivably cut together a 15-minute-long teaser without scratching the surface. It’s not just the movie’s joke density that impresses, either — it’s the joke assortment. There’s wordplay, roasts, physical gags, callbacks, and visual jokes littering the backgrounds of scenes to reward eagle-eyed viewers. It’s a movie in which the main character types out his résumé in a font called Buffalo Wingdings and tries to seek a pro-sports endorsement from a local business called Booty Clappin’ Jermaine, Attorney at Law. If only it’d been released 20 years earlier, its DVD would be a staple of college dorms everywhere. —H.P.

The vaping cardinal

Conclave, October

#CONCLAVE Cardinal Tedesco and his vape is brat pic.twitter.com/hRrYUeBbml

— Becca (@becca_mekasha) December 7, 2024

No movie captured the hearts of the meming public this awards season quite like Conclave, a film about the Catholic clergy choosing a new pope. Something about the messiness, the Gossip Girl–like maneuvering, and the pure heart of one particular cardinal made for perfect X.com fodder. The most meme-able part of the movie was the occasional cut to the villainously traditionalist Cardinal Tedesco inconspicuously vaping. It captured the old-new dichotomy of the film perfectly while still being legitimately surprising. Plus, the vaping was cool enough to turn the racist, homophobic, misogynist Tedesco into a Charli XCX–scored queer icon. Slay. —J.P.F.

“Pick up my hat!”

Megalopolis, September

Apart from its Randian contention that a visionary individual could get humanity back on track by inventing Hudson Yards, Megalopolis is not the Movie of Big Ideas that Francis Ford Coppola billed it as. It is, however, one of the year’s funniest movies — a fact sometimes obfuscated by the clunkiness of its stylized dialogue and its general incoherence. But rest assured that the maestro who wrote “What do you think of this boner I got?” knew he was making a comedy. The film’s comedic apex arguably arrives when Coppola tosses in a quick shot of the villainous Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) power walking across marble floors, three henchmen in tow. Without breaking stride, Clodio removes his fedora and throws it on the ground, barking “Pick up my hat!” Unfazed, the goon behind him picks up the hat and throws his own fedora on the ground, yelling “Pick up my hat!” This continues down the line, until the goon in the back is presumably forced to reckon with the fact that he’s last in the pecking order. Supposedly inspired by an improv exercise, the scene manages to say more about man’s relationship to power than any of the drivel that spills out of Cesar Catalina’s Emersonian mind. And it’s funny! Pick up my hat, Francis. —Chris Stanton

The bumbling home invasion

Anora, October

It’s not often that a prestigious, Palme d’Or–winning film’s best scene is when it becomes a Three Stooges–like farce. Anora is that movie. Watching Ani kick and bite the Russian bodyguards invading her newfound home while they fall on top of glass tables could be terrifying. Instead, director Sean Baker opts to make the scene madcap fun, leaving the deep well of fear and sadness for later, and allowing for 28 full minutes of Looney Tunes–esque pratfalling. And at the center of it is a star turn by Mikey Madison as Ani, with oodles of charisma and comic timing, plus a fearsome determination that makes it the funniest home invasion since Kevin McCallister grabbed both sides of his face. —J.P.F.

The most harebrained scene in the most harebrained movie

Let’s Start a Cult, October

Imagine you’re on the lam, and you’re trying to disguise your getaway car from the police. Would your first thought be to swap the license plate or spontaneously and haphazardly repaint the car using house paint? In Let’s Start a Cult, Stavros Halkias and Wes Haney’s old-school comedy about a ragtag group in search of a chosen family, the crew chooses the latter. In doing so, they successfully give birth to the spiritual sequel to Zoolander’s gasoline-fight scene you didn’t know you needed. —H.P.

DìDi grandma rant

DìDi, August

Sean Wang’s feature-directorial debut, DìDi, was another under-the-radar gem this year, a comedy-drama about a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy navigating the summer before high school. It features a heartwarming performance from Wang’s own grandmother Chang Li Hua, who seems to be invoking every grandmother I’ve ever met with this monologue about how the main character’s life is already ruined, because he got a black eye, of course. —A.V.C.

Ed Harris very angrily and seriously eats a bug

Love Lies Bleeding, March

Ed Harris never half-asses anything — not even the final episodes of Westworld, when it was clear that he had no idea what the Man in Black was up to. (Same, Ed. Same.) But he spouted off all that nonsense dialogue like a true professional, and he brings the same degree of commitment to the grimy and vulgar Love Lies Bleeding. As Lou Sr., the estranged father of Kristen Stewart’s same-named gym manager, he’s a leathered raisin of a criminal mastermind, the man haunting his daughter’s memories and ruling their crummy little town’s underworld with an iron fist. All that seriousness is what helps make his breaking-bad moment so wonderfully ludicrous. The man keeps pet beetles. And in a moment of particular fury, he chomps into one of those with zero hesitation — no abandon, all crunch. Like Penélope Cruz throwing vegetables around in Ferrari, it’s so intensely dramatic that it bounds into camp; hopefully it’s part of why John Waters named Love Lies Bleeding his top film of 2024. —R.H.

The Eggs

Problemista, March

Julio Torres’s movie Problemista takes various silly things very seriously. That’s perhaps no better represented by The Eggs, a series of paintings that RZA’s painter character created and nobody but Tilda Swinton understands. They provide the fulcrum around which the entire movie turns but are ultimately just eggs. The 13 Eggs are not particularly amazing works, nor do they have a deeper meaning beyond “eggs,” but, by the end of the movie, you find yourself completely invested in their futures, because the characters take them so seriously. You want the world to understand the Eggs, even as you don’t. —J.P.F.

The Gambit gambit

Deadpool & Wolverine, July 

The funniest part of Deadpool & Wolverine was not any of Ryan Reynolds’s many, many jokes about anal. It was Channing Tatum’s locked-in commitment to his terrible attempt at Cajun English as the New Orleans–based Gambit. It could have been awful and offensive. Instead, it was the funniest thing in the most-watched comedy of the year. —J.P.F.

Thelma!!!

Thelma, June

This comedic double-hander between June Squibb and Fred Hechinger is one of the most delightful films of the year, and Squibb’s performance has been tragically overlooked come year-end lists and discussions. One of the worst Golden Globe snubs of the year. Her performance as a nonagenarian tracking down a scammer is brave and so, so silly, culminating in a high-octane “hacking” scene where she has to pull off the greatest technological feat this side of Mission: Impossible: logging in to an online banking account. —R.A.

Melissa Barrera crying montage

Your Monster, January

Your Monster is a horror rom-com that flew quietly under the radar this year, but please be aware that this movie exists and is a total treat for fans of both horror rom-coms and heavy comedic weeping. Deep sobs are hysterically funny in the correct hands, and Melissa Barrera proves she’s up to this specific task in the film’s opening montage. Having been dumped by her Broadway director boyfriend while in the hospital with cancer, Barrera’s weeps are both righteous and pathetic. They also happen regardless of how much pie she’s crammed into her mouth. The Amazon guy delivering boxes of tissues and serving as her only sympathetic ear adds a straight man to the scene at exactly the correct rhythmic intervals. All-around A-plus shtick. —A.V.C.

Bob

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, September

Tim Burton says the death of “Bob” was necessary in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”

“You know what he deserved it, there you go, kiss ass.

(Via: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Commentary) pic.twitter.com/Tv7A9wdBcs

— Tim Burton Daily (@TimBurtonDaily) October 10, 2024

Tim Burton’s best movie in a good long while is simply just okay. It bounces along on a sort of sketch-comedy rhythm without actually containing too much that can be considered actually funny. More often, the comedic set pieces are nifty, or cute, or gross, or impressive; you appreciate the fun of the underworld’s Soul Train bit more than you actually laugh at it. But Bob, the film’s preeminent shrunken-head guy, is funny just to look at. His worried murmurs, his big eyes with tiny pupils on his tiny head on his huge body, the way he pilots that huge body around — all of these traits make him a great scene partner for an extremely on-one Michael Keaton. —R.A.

Fufu’s, the first and only queer hamster nightclub in New York City

Fantasmas, June

Look, if you don’t understand why it’s funny to watch actual hamsters with the voices of John Early, Josh Sharp, and Aaron Jackson pretend to do cocaine in a teeny-tiny nightclub that’s “like Studio 54 meets Berghain, but for gay hamsters” and has a teeny-tiny coat check that costs $5, I certainly can’t explain it to you. —Jen Chaney

What?!

Comedians meet the pope

Rome, June

The pope is an inherently funny figure: He’s very powerful but only to those who believe in him, like Santa or the Rock. Comedians meeting the pope, then, is double funny, because we’re watching people who make a living being totally unserious be completely earnestly emotional about meeting this adult version of Santa. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who isn’t even Catholic, fully looked like a Disney adult about to meet Mickey Mouse. Also, I cannot stress this enough: Someone brought him a bottle of olive oil. —A.V.C.

Internet Stuff

Zach Woods being too good at this

TikTok, all year 

To quote TikTok user River__Betty in the comments section of Zach Woods’s March 4 TikTok, “Gangster Jazz,” “Zach Woods understands content creation on a deep level.” The comment has over 15 thousand likes because it’s true. The actor and comedian had a strong start to the year with his tragically overlooked stop-motion NPR parody In the Know, but maybe the show didn’t make the impact it should have because audiences couldn’t see his beautiful punim behind the puppet-man he voiced. Enter TikTok, which Woods posted to for the first time on January 5 (it was an unsolicited product recommendation for cinnamon brooms and Enron), and from there has been the highlight of followers’ FYPs anytime he graces us with a front-facing video. Woods posts like someone who watches a lot of TikTok, which is surprising and rare coming from a 40-year-old master improviser. Sometimes he uses his powers for good, like in July when he tried to get a dog adopted by staring down the barrel of the camera with his baby blues and saying “You thought I was a one-and-done hit-it-and-quit-it charitable fuckboy slut!” He experiments with existing TikTok genres, like making a keenly observed GRWM makeup tutorial or rattling off an inspirational stream-of-consciousness story time. Most recently, he offered some beautiful tips about how to have the perfect Christmas (kiss someone under the mistletoe, but also insult them near drywall). He’s setting the bar for TikTok posting at six-foot-four. —R.A.

Paula Pell’s 178 types of women

Instagram, June

This season of Girls5eva, Gloria (Paula Pell) made it her mission to sleep with 178 types of women. In June, she recited the entire list on Instagram, including “a Siri or Alexa-type,” “femme Mr. Peanut,” and “lumberjackess.” Women can truly be anything! —R.A.

Pete Holmes roasts Sam Reich

Make Some Noise, August

So much of the appeal of Dropout programming is that it feels like hanging out with dear old friends. Even when the performers are new or unfamiliar, their dynamics encourage viewers to let go of their inhibitions and laugh along with them. That’s the draw of this clip from Make Some Noise, in which Pete Holmes relentlessly roasts the show’s host and Dropout CEO Sam Reich. As much as Holmes’s jokes about Reich’s outfit — “You look like you just got back from the Wild West selling a remedy that doesn’t work” and “How is it defending an innocent man in the South?,” to cite a few — are well-crafted and build momentum as he doubles down, it’s the way everyone around him absolutely loses their shit that makes this so rewatchable. —H.P.

“I used AI to re-create my grandpa’s dead wife”

Hotel Art Thief on X, March

I used AI to recreate my grandpa's dead wife and something amazing happened pic.twitter.com/oFdkTMVHRq

— Michael Kandel (@K_A_N_D_E_L) March 22, 2024

When they’re not onstage at Union Hall, Brooklyn-based sketch duo Hotel Art Thief are doing haunting, amazing things with digital animation. This year they had a viral hit with “The bear video game actually looks pretty cool,” which imagines a hack video-game adaptation of the hit unfunny comedy, complete with cigarette-smoking side quests and NPCs trauma dumping and yelling “Yes, chef!” But this is slightly edged out on a laugh-per-second basis by this zany, sci-fi dystopian short, which uses sentimental clickbait as a diving board for its damning AI use case. In this short tragi-parody, an old guy in a sexy ascot is horny for a janky CG face (“Holy moly, I frigging love my computer wife!”), but when Anonymous sucks her into the dark web (“They stole my wife! I have to hack to get her!”), he has to enter the Matrix to track her down. If Michael Kandel and Joe Miciak are already reaching heights not seen since Conner O’Malley’s Hudson Yards simulator, just imagine what they could do if a network gave them a budget. —R.A.

“Brown dudes trying to figure out their new GOAT after Drake”

X, July

our new king has been chosen pic.twitter.com/ap9annFrT0

— Sahib Singh (@sahibcantsingh) July 24, 2024

It’s possible that the best joke spawned by the Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef came courtesy of Kendrick himself (“trying to strike a chord and it’s probably A-minor”), but the back-and-forth was nevertheless a goldmine of inspiration for comedians everywhere. It gave us pitch-perfect RDCWorld1 sketches, a great Niles Abston joke about wishing rap music was “recorded at a frequency where only n- - - - -s can hear it,” and this Sahib Singh sketch about a group of South Asian Drake stans being thrust into an existential tailspin after their GOAT’s downfall. It hits harder if you’re familiar with the archetype of South Asian male Singh is parodying, but even if you aren’t, the out-of-left-field punch line at the end is extremely gratifying. —H.P.

A Twink and a redhead at the DNC

TikTok, August

“Name a more iconic duo than a twink and a redhead.” So goes the comedy-pop song by Grand Gibbs and Ashley Gill, who are merely the latest in a proud comedic tradition of gay guys and redheads committing joint slays (see also: Will & Grace, Difficult People, Team Rocket). The Gen-Z comedy duo have had a prolific year on TikTok, where they did some crucial reporting from the Democratic National Convention … in character as their married Disney Adult swinger couple, thinking the “D” in DNC stood for Disney. While they were there, they also got Fox News’s ass. —R.A.

Guy Montgomery’s spelling-bee reunion

YouTube, February

A lot of comedians hosted shows on Zoom over the pandemic, but almost none of them turned them into full-fledged TV shows. Enter New Zealander comedian Guy Montgomery, whose virtual spelling bees in 2020 and 2021 were such a convincing proof of concept that he now hosts television adaptations in both New Zealand and Australia. The official version, Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, has all the elements of a good panel show, but February’s one-off virtual revival had the added draw of featuring comedians from all over the world. When else would performers from America, the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia like Paul F. Tompkins, Lolly Adefope, Rose Matafeo, and Aaron Chen ever be in the same place? It’s comedy’s Multiverse of Madness but with spelling. (For those new to Montgomery’s comedy, he also released a very good stand-up special this year titled My Brain Is Blowing Me Crazy that is very much worth your time.) —H.P.

Tommy Spaghetti

@Keeple_AI on X, February

Meet Keeple AI #SuperBowl #AI pic.twitter.com/gj4emBZLkJ

— Keeple AI (@Keeple_AI) February 13, 2024

Not enough comics are putting their powers toward the noble use of exposing AI for the garbage it is. But Nick Corirossi never misses an opportunity to satirize whatever VC-backed aesthetic rot is currently being pushed on the masses by pushing it to a degree only slightly more absurd than the real thing. Enter keeple.ai, a fake Sora-style artificial-intelligence graphics engine that aims to upload “life-challenged celebrities” into their “library of recognizables” for use in soulless ads. Co-written and directed by Corirossi and Charles Ingram, the  ad-parodies-within-an-ad-parody for things like John Lennon endorsing eczema medicine, or James Gandolfini doing a food-delivery app spot, are just shitty and creepy enough to seem like actual AI companies. —R.A.

Funny People Named Conner or Chris

Chris Fleming DESTROYS the little boy from The Bear

Instagram, September

This was the year to make fun of The Bear, a show that Emmy voters love and fans of Matt Berry have sworn a vow of vengeance against. I didn’t expect Chris Fleming to be the person to do this, but this was the year he established himself as the entertainment industry’s Joker (Good). Here, he dunks firmly on the FX dramedy, while also doing a perfect Jeremy Allen White impression by simply taking off his glasses and making a face. In any other century, this is witchcraft. But we’re lucky enough to live in an age of science and reason, where this can be rightfully recognized as a zenith of physical comedy. That’s right, a zenith!! —A.V.C.

Conner O’Malley’s guided meditation

Stand Up Solutions, May

Conner O’Malley understands the American male in an utterly terrifying way. In his special Stand Up Solutions, he portrays a suburban dad from Illinois who pitches the audience on his AI start-up. Over the course of the presentation, he takes the audience on a guided meditation he does regularly in which his entire family is killed by big fat Italian guys, forcing him to become their avenger. It’s a darkly hilarious unpacking of a male fantasy catered to in so many classic action films, one in which they have every excuse to clean guns all day and also a scenario in which, yes, they are single. —A.V.C.

Chris Fleming roasts Colin Jost

Instagram, August

A roast typically works best when there’s a clear affection between the roaster and the roastee. Not so for Chris Fleming, master of the most precisely worded burn you’ve ever heard. Nestled into a joke about how SNL is too boring if the rumor is true that everyone is on cocaine, Fleming hones in on Jost’s particular brand of bland mundanity. It’s a beautiful joke — “He is the final pebble before the estuary of not knowing” — made all the more awe-inspiring by the realization that Fleming is burning every possible bridge that could lead to working for Lorne Michaels. Jost could never. —E.P.H.

“No kings, no presidents, no senators. Just Corey.”

Coreys, July

There’s a temptation to label Conner O’Malley as something like the “bard of the manosphere,” as The New Yorker put it. In a year when everyone’s rushing to understand what young white guys are getting up to on the internet, O’Malley has cranked out one film project after the next in which he plays a delusional midwestern striver liable to tumble down any rabbit hole. But his best stuff never seems reverse-engineered for maximum satire — instead, it feels like he stewed his brain in ungodly corners of YouTube, then bottled the results. In his short film Coreys, what emerges from that stew is a demonic, hard-partying, masculine id named Corey who exists “outside of space and time” and inexplicably absorbs a timid midwestern dad who looks just like him. His grand plan? To make everything Corey. “No kings, no presidents, no senators. Just Corey.” —C.S.

The snacks only women can see

Chris Fleming’s YouTube, August 

Chris Fleming’s capitalist meditation on the hallucinatory qualities of the Trader Joe’s snack aisle is also an exquisite deconstruction of exactly how gender, time, and quantum physics work, beginning with Fleming’s assessment of their own gender, the nature of donkeys, the quality of a particular audience member’s laugh, the physicality of how women glide through store aisles, and the fourth-dimensional Dune-prophetess-esque experience of snack shopping. It is Donnie Darko for suburban Lean In moms. It is a fever dream. It is perfect. —K.V.A.

The Giggle Crypt

Corporate Nadja

What We Do in the Shadows, October

In its final outing, What We Do in the Shadows played to its strengths. Natasia Demetriou has quietly been the funniest person on earth for years, and season six of the FX comedy let her off the leash by giving Nadja, the ancient vampire who grew up a peasant on an island in Greece, a corporate job at a private-equity firm. You see, Nadja is obsessed with regular people, but her obsession reads as ironic, making her every move a roast of us. She wears power suits that make the movie Working Girl look like a low-budget web series, and she engages with modern office life by doing things like pouring coffee all over the break room while moaning “Mmmm, mama’s gogo juice.” Again I say to you, this was peak TV. TGIFMLNGL-LOL! —A.V.C.

The vampire gang names in “Come Out and Play”

What We Do in the Shadows, December 

In its sixth and final season, What We Do in the Shadows rejected the kind of “We’re wrapping it up” sentimentality you’d expect from a long-running series making its exit. Instead, the FX comedy went all-in on goofy, with an array of pranks that pick up long-running gags (Colin and Laszlo taking their neighbor Sean to the railroad where they’ve claimed to work for years, Guillermo sharing with his cousin Miguel that their family is descended from vampire killer Van Helsing) or rely on one-off cameos for episodic silliness (Steve Coogan as Laszlo’s selfish father, Jon Glaser as a March Madness–obsessed demon). “Come Out and Play” combines both those approaches and the series’ customary wordplay into a Warriors homage that sees the gang running around New York avoiding other vampires intent on killing them. That gave writers Shana Gohd and Paul Simms the opportunity to unleash increasingly absurd vampire-gang names upon us: Lower East Side Vampire Punks, Manhattan All-Girls Private-School Vampires, Coney Island Carny Vampires, JFK TSA Vampires, a riverboat-gambler vampire, even a guy in an MTV astronaut suit from the ’80s. “We’re artist and writer vampires who happen to currently be working as baristas” is a line worthy of 30 Rock! There’s a rhythm to the listing that’s pleasantly like that time Simon the Devious identified all his hangers-on, and coupled with Laszlo for the second time quoting the Democracy Manifest viral video, it’s a reminder that WWDITS often sounded like no other show on TV. —R.H.

“P.I. Undercover: New York”

What We Do in the Shadows, November

What We Do in the Shadows is over, but its final season was a feast — particularly so during the season’s eighth episode, in which Guillermo totally fanboys out over his favorite show filming in their neighborhood, while Laszlo and Nandor react to this like it’s a very real military invasion. The episode hits right in that Shadows sweet spot of putting our favorite silly vampires in a distinctly modern situation, then letting them react accordingly. In the episode’s B plot, Colin and Nadja (who recently learned about girl talk from watching the “‘Sexy City’ show”) attend a dinner party where they valiantly attempt to seem normal, only to find their host Joel (Zach Woods, a real ringer of a guest star) secretly wants Colin to copulate with his very angry wife. There’s also a scene where their neighbor Sean (Anthony Atamanuik) is yelling about “Mike Burbooglio’s piss”; television will simply never be this good again. Pack it up! —A.V.C.

Count Orlok aggressively sniffing Ellen’s lock of hair

Nosferatu, December

Bill Skarsgård does not get to be hot, nor does he get that much screen time, in Nosferatu. How often his villainous Count Orlok is kept unfocused in the background means he’s more a creation of our imagined fears than a distinctly presented one. That’s also why his obsessive huffing on a locket holding a lock of hair from Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen, the woman he’s been obsessed with since her youth, is so unexpectedly funny. It’s the most recognizably human thing this centuries-old vampire, hunched over and shuffling around his decrepit mansion (sometimes with no underwear on!), does, and it’s also a bit of outsize physical acting that wouldn’t seem unusual in an old Mr. Bean episode. Sorry to everyone whose lingering Pennywise crush was dampened by all the prosthetics Skarsgård is under as Orlok, but hopefully that giggle-inducing lusty sniffing is enough for your sicko-mode fantasizing. —R.H.

Saturday Night Live

“Beavis and Butt-head”

April

This sketch established itself as an instant SNL classic before it was even over. Written by Streeter Seidell, this depiction of a NewsNation town hall about AI that gets derailed by Beavis and Butt-head look-alikes contains all the elements that make an SNL clip forever rewatchable: a brilliantly random premise, a perfect kicker (the King of the Hill reference: genius), and multiple performers cracking up so badly they can barely say their lines. Mikey Day, who plays Jeff, the Butt-head doppelgänger, rarely loses it during sketches, but totally loses it here. Host Ryan Gosling — Dean, the pompadoured Beavis double — always loses it during sketches, but loses it extra hard in this one. Then there’s the normally unbreakable Heidi Gardner, who breaks so freaking hard at the sight of Day’s fake exposed gums that you can actually hear her funny bone crack. But the best thing about this sketch is that it’s a reminder of how vital it is to actually watch this show live. “Beavis and Butt-head” is definitely funny after the fact, something I can personally attest to after revisiting it approximately 87 times. But it was really something to witness the reveals of Gosling and Day in real time, with zero warning that this news program was about to devolve into a Beavis and Butt-head revival. “I just couldn’t prepare for what I saw,” Gardner told us in an interview after the episode. Neither could we, Heidi. Neither could we. —J.C.

Those dead eyes

October

Because Wicked was not Ariana Grande’s best comedic tour de force this year — really, it was her completely dead eyes as she played a castrated teen male opera singer in Renaissance Italy on Saturday Night Live. —J.P.F.

Domingo came all this way

October

Domingo was not universally beloved at the Vulture offices, but I am willing to take a stand here and say what needs to be said: Domingo is good! A catchy tune? Ariana Grande singing off-key? An ultra-confident nice-guy horndog who shows up to sexually taunt another woman’s husband? What’s not to like? The best SNL sketches find a way to turn an otherwise throwaway idea into something that hits a cultural nerve. Domingo did this rapidly, fusing Marcello Hernandez’s raw charm with this year’s biggest pop hits to create a Lingua Franca used among friends and on TikTok over and over again for weeks. This is what comedy should do: make everyone feel connected, like we could be buddies no matter what, because we understand each other at least enough to laugh together at Domingo showing up to a Sabrina Carpenter concert. —A.V.C.

“It’s the ’90s, Colin!”

All year

For those not in the know, Weekend Update is currently going through somewhat of a Golden Age. It might not be cool or fashionable to say this, but pretty much every week, the hardest I’ll laugh at any episode is when Colin Jost and Michael Che deliver a joke or two that’s just a little too naughty. Che’s “Ain’t I a stinker?” energy is especially infectious and makes it easy to laugh at jokes that would sound genuinely offensive, instead of clearly ironically so, in the hands of a lesser or meaner comic. Often, the audience sounds like they don’t know what the fuck is going on or are too stunned to laugh when Che makes a topical joke about something like abortion or abuse, leading to a self-deprecating shake of the head. But this season, he’s taken on a new catchphrase for when a joke prompts pearl-clutching. “It’s the ’90s, Colin!” he says, trying to justify it, suggesting we’re all modern men and women, able to handle an edgy joke about a touchy topic. It’s a scary world out there, and whether it’s political cold opens or internet-trend sketches, SNL is often ill-equipped to handle it. But on Weekend Update, it’s the ’90s, baby. Get with the times. —R.A.

Charlotte the Stingray confronts her baby daddy

March

Ego Nwodim, as Charlotte the Stingray, saying “I’ve been near males, but none of them been men. None of them been, Mr. MICHAEL CHE” was my favorite song of the year. —J.D.F.

Dana Carvey is late-stage Joe Biden

September

As much as Donald Trump has fumed about his portrayal on SNL, he should be grateful none of the show’s many impressions of him have ever been quite as devastating as Dana Carvey’s geriatric take on Joe Biden. The impression went through many iterations over the years — Jason Sudeikis, Woody Harrelson, Jim Carrey, and James Austin Johnson have all played him — before Carvey got to him back in October, and from his halting first steps, looking down at his feet to make sure he doesn’t fall (again), the SNL veteran’s squinty Biden felt like a major event of an impression. His face is a roiling bouillabaisse of tics that swing from confused to scared to overconfident so rapidly, it might as well be all happening at once. By the second time he trots out his catchphrase — the dueling non sequiturs, “Guess what” and “by the way” — the audience is in hysterics well before he gets out the last syllable. Never has a political impression been so scathing with such little exaggeration. While Kamala Harris’s campaign was still ongoing, Carvey’s Biden was a comic harbinger of why the newly buoyant Dems might actually win. Now, it’s a bitter but still comic reminder of why they lost. —J.B.

The Lonely Island shows the kids how it’s done

October

Since Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone left SNL in 2012 (Akiva Schaffer left a year earlier), musical sketches on SNL have ranged in quality, but they’ve all tended to be straightforward. There are parodies and pastiche executions of one comedic idea, but nothing nearly as layered and dense as what the audience came to expect from the Lonely Island’s Digital Shorts. Then, as a by-product of Samberg playing Doug Emhoff (remember Doug Emhoff!) early in season 50, we got some dang Digital Shorts. Both were exceptional (if not Criterion Collection worthy), but “Sushi Glory Hole,” a song about sushi being fed through a hole in the wall, should be studied in musical-sketch-writing classes for its instant premise introduction, having multiple games that heighten, the amount of moves in less than three minutes, and the ending. Hear us out: It was very good. —J.D.F.

Line Readings

“Her web connects me all”

StraightioLab, February 

There was no greater success in the “unintentional comedy” category this year than Sony’s box-office murder victim Madame Web, and no greater chroniclers of its flop-dom than George Civeris and Sam Taggart over at StraightioLab. Discussions of the film — including the way the villain’s lines were all dubbed, the hyper-sexualizing of Sydney Sweeney, and the blind Dakota Johnson at the end who acts like Bob Odenkirk in Little Women — took over the podcast entirely. But their obsession peaked in the episode “Museums With Slides in Them,” in which they brought up the film’s tagline “Her web connects them all” to guest Esther Fallick (who had not yet seen the film) so many times that she grew to share their obsession. That led to the greatest single phrase of the year, when a confused but enthusiastic Fallick said, when describing how much she loves her niece: “Her web connects me all.” What a compliment! Hear Fallick say it once, and the phrase will somehow never leave your brain.  —J.P.F.

“You’re 31. You’d have a better shot with a handgun in your mouth.”

Challengers, April

The shocked laughter this elicited in the theater! If only they gave an Oscar for Sickest Burn. —R.A.

“He’s sart of like an evil porson”

Joel Golby on X, May

sabrina carpenter: so what's the joker?
barry keoghan: he's sart of like an evil porson

— ????️ BUY FOUR STARS BY JOEL GOLBY (@joelgolby) May 9, 2024

Barry Keoghan’s relationship with Sabrina Carpenter is dead as a bog body. His turn as the Joker won’t come until The Batman Part II in 2026. But this tweet, a 15-word sketch by writer Joel Golby, captures a beautiful, more optimistic moment in the year, when “Please Please, Please” was on the radio and Joker: Folie à Deux still had a shot at being maybe actually good. “___’s sart of like a ___ porson” is a useful, silly-sounding tool to describe literally anyone. It is linguistically perfect and a sign that, for better or for worse, Twitter’s still where the jokes are at. (And if you go along with calling it “X” you’re a narc, a loser, and sart of like an evil porson.) —R.A.

“Back off”

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, June

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars was awful this year, but you can’t deny a great lip-sync’s power, and while she may not have won the season (for some reason), at least Roxxxy Andrews gave us that. During the spoken-word bridge in her lip-sync to “No One Gets the Prize,” by Diana Ross, Roxxxy filed her nails, seemed utterly bored by the idea that you could “run behind” her back, and thrust her shoulders forward on the words “back off” in a way that made me, the first time I watched, legitimately jump. It was precise, it was fully in character, and it was funny. Thank you for your service, Roxxxy! —J.P.F.

Dennis Quaid loves his wife

The Substance, September

The grossest part of The Substance had nothing to do with the body horror Elisabeth (Demi Moore) put herself through in order to regain her youth; it was the opening scene of Dennis Quaid’s smarmy TV executive scarfing down shrimp. He also gets the funniest line reading of the movie. As he unceremoniously kicks Elisabeth out of the studio where she’s hosted an exercise show for decades, he hands her a gift that comes highly recommended by his wife. Then, almost as an offhanded comment to himself, he practically squeals “Oh, I love my wife!” The glee in his voice is so genuine, you actually believe he doesn’t realize how cruel he’s being. The Substance didn’t get enough credit for how funny it is, probably because the comedy comes in these small, throwaway moments that keep things light even as things get grimmer and grimmer for our heroine(s). —E.P.H.

“What’s a baby need pockets for?!”

Hard Truths, September

The omnidirectional sense of grievance that Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) projects into every single social interaction in her daily London life immediately announces Hard Truths as one of Mike Leigh’s more prickly comedies. She’s furious with everyone, from checkout cashiers to the doctors who try to administer a check-up to (especially) her own family. Leigh eventually steers Pansy’s story into a more dramatic direction, as Hard Truths becomes a story about family, frustration, and a kind of pain you can’t even account for, much less heal from. But before that happens, Pansy lets rip the funniest line in this or any movie this year, as she complains about a neighbor who doesn’t dress their fat baby appropriately for the weather, just an outfit with pockets. “What’s a baby need pockets for?! What’s it gonna keep in its pockets — a knife?” That line elicited the biggest burst of laughter in a night full of them at the film’s Toronto International Film Festival world premiere, an early sign that Jean-Baptiste had locked into a performance that would be raved about through the end of the year and hopefully deep into awards season. If only so her line about babies with knives in their pockets becomes the Oscar clip it deserves to be. —J. Reid