For most comics, a special represents an ending — the culmination of a creative chapter. Not so for Josh Johnson, at least with his first HBO special Symphony, which he says marks a new beginning — “a change and a new direction…and a new theme and era of work.” A beautifully stitched together…

There’s an interesting paradox at the heart of Eric André’s career: Here’s someone whose brand is built on raunchy, chaotic unpredictability whose work is made possible by a very different set of qualities. Sure, André admits: A good percentage of his work comes down to “the stupidest poop and…

As executive producers of Sarah Squirm: Live + in the Flesh, SNL cast member Sarah Sherman’s debut comedy special, Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein had a firm mandate. “They were like, ‘Cut the f*cking RFK Jr. jokes, bro, Cut the airplane jokes,'” Sherman recalls. “‘Just freak sh*t…

With late-night at a crossroads, Ben Gleib is forging a new path. On May 28, just a week after the permanent shuttering of The Late Show, Gleib is set to launch Good Night with Ben Gleib, the world’s first late-night talk show built specifically for YouTube. It’s a bet rooted in the belief…

Atsuko Okatsuka presents as someone who knows exactly who she is and has no trouble expressing it. But in truth, it’s taken the comic some time to come around to this place. These days, she travels the world selling hundreds of thousands of tickets — an artist whose appeal knows no borders. But…

Over the course of more than four decades, David Cross has done it all. An Emmy-winner and two-time Grammy nominee who was central to the rise of alt comedy in the 1990s, Cross has been performing stand-up professionally since he was a teenager back in late ’80s Boston. He’s best known to…

As a comedian, Ali Siddiq is a paradox — someone who is putting up some of the biggest streaming numbers in the business and selling hundreds of thousands of tickets, yet has not been embraced by Hollywood and not quite broken into the mainstream. When lists of top comics are written, Siddiq…

For comedian Max Amini, building a dream career meant taking the long road. “My career has been a long career and a very difficult career in so many ways, in the sense where I’m American, I’m also Iranian. The industry has always had a difficult time understanding what box to put me in,” Amini…

If there’s one lesson to take from the story of Michael Strassner, it’s that even the worst moments in life can lead to something beautiful, given time, community support, and the willingness to fight. In 2018, Strassner hit a low point that forced a hard reckoning. Booted from the Groundlings…

Stapleview has come a long way since its 2022 launch. Originally developed by Sam Grey as the first live, weekly sketch show tailored to a TikTok audience, Stapleview was driven by an exploration of how traditional and digital spaces could be bridged through a new kind of content designed for…

Nurse John never envisioned an on-stage career for himself, much less one in which he’d be selling hundreds of thousands of tickets in cities worldwide. And yet it’s something he’s built for himself in a short span of time, going from frontline nurse to viral TikTok creator to globally successful…

To Carly Hoogendyk, the manager from Omnipop Talent Group West, Hollywood today has come to embody a kind of “no new friends” mentality — and oftentimes, it takes non-traditional efforts to break into traditional spaces. In an era of contraction — marked by the dwindling of TV roles, late-night…