For Jeremiah Watkins, as for many comics, building a show biz career has been a gradual process — the result of a decades-long, consistent grind in a variety of lanes, rather than one single flash-in-the-pan moment. A Kansas native, Watkins went all-in on the pursuit of his dream after moving to…

Carisa Hendrix, the Canadian-born comedian, magician and variety artist, has a business mind as unusual as her career origin story. It’s a story that took Hendrix from performing at haunted houses for $50 a night as a teenager to building a global touring business around Lucy Darling, an…

Kountry Wayne, the Southern comic who landed major streaming releases for his first two specials, has an unusual origin story. While many comedians have built audiences through social media, Wayne took a more specialized route: He zeroed in on vertical micro-dramas, a format that helped him…

2026 finds comedy at a moment of reinvention across platforms. The last decade has seen stand-up boom, with artists able to bootstrap their own careers like never before. TV comedy has enjoyed a golden moment of its own, though feature comedy continues to struggle to regain its footing as a…

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…