Standup Comedy
Adam Sandler Announces Standup Tour
Adam Sandler is heading back out on the road for a Fall 2022 standup tour. The 15-city US trek will feature a currently unannounced surprise guest. The arena tour kicks off on October 21st in Allentown, Pennsylvania ahead of stops in Boston, Atlantic City, Tampa, and more. It will wrap up in Savannah, Georgia on November 14th. Tickets go on sale Friday, September 16th at 10 a.m. local time via Ticketmaster. Before that, there will be a pre-sale on Thursday, September 15th (use code VENUE). Advertisement Related Video Sandler last took his signature blend of comedy and music on the road in 2019 following his Netflix special 100% Fresh, which hit the streamer one year earlier. Since then, he has given the performance of his career in Uncut Gems, starred as a basketball scout in the spor...
Chris Rock Says He Was Asked to Host Next Year’s Oscars But Turned It Down
Chris Rock famously became the talk of the 2022 Oscars after Will Smith slapped him on stage, but the comedian isn’t trying to be the talk of next year’s ceremony. In a recent stand-up set, Rock said the Academy asked him to host the 2023 Oscars, but he turned them down. According to the Arizona Republic, Rock told the crowd at a recent gig in Phoenix that returning to the Oscars would be like returning to the scene of a crime, comparing the offer to asking Nicole Brown Simpson to “go back to the restaurant” she ate at before being murdered. Rock also said he was asked to do a Super Bowl commercial in light of the slap, an offer he also refused. Elsewhere in the set, Rock said being slapped by Smith physically hurt, noting that Smith played Muhammed Ali in a movie. “He’s bigger than me,” R...
Minneapolis Venue First Avenue Cancels Dave Chappelle Show Following Transphobia Backlash
Minneapolis venue First Avenue has cancelled a standup set by Dave Chappelle slated for July 20th, following backlash surrounding the comedian’s penchant for transphobic jokes. Chappelle will now perform at the city’s Varsity Theater. First Avenue announced Chappelle’s set on July 18th, prompting numerous users on Twitter to criticize the booking. In a statement, the venue stated, “To staff, artists, and our community, we hear you and we are sorry. We know we must hold ourselves to the highest standards, and we know we let you down. We are not just a black box with people in it, and we understand that First Ave is not just a room, but meaningful beyond our walls.” “We believe in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression, but in honoring that, we lost sight of the impact this wo...
Desus & Mero Break Up, End Showtime Talk Show
Desus & Mero have broken up and ended their popular Showtime talk show. Showtime confirmed the news in a statement, saying, “Desus Nice and The Kid Mero will be pursuing separate creative endeavors moving forward. Showtime’s late-night talk show Desus & Mero will not be returning for a fifth season. Its final episode aired Thursday, June 23rd.” Desus Nice addressed the end of the talk show on Twitter with a cordial statement (“thanks for being part of the journey”), but social media posts from both comedians suggest Desus and Mero had a falling out of some sort. Related Video On June 19th, Desus tweeted, “bodegahive you think I abandoned y’all but the art is coming back. Plz believe in me, I love y’all,” prompting Mero to respond on Reddit, “NAH IT’S A WRAP BRODY, SOMEBOD...
Norm Macdonald’s Posthumous Nothing Special Is Unlike Any Other Comedy Performance — Review
It’s hard to imagine a comedy set like Norm Macdonald’s latest and last. Nothing Special, a title that manages the Norm-like feat of simultaneous irony and honesty, was recorded at Macdonald’s home, without an audience, during the pre-vaccine pandemic days of 2020. It’s performed in the style of a webcast; MacDonald has a microphone, but he’s sitting down, focusing mostly on his face, as if Zooming into his own special. The press materials boast that it was done in “one take,” which is both impressive, in that Macdonald appears to do 55 minutes of comedy more or less extemporaneously without any breaks for laughs, and obvious, in that he’s occasionally interrupted, by a ringing phone or a barking dog. The comic had been preparing material for his next Netflix special, but, as very few peop...
Surprise Norm Macdonald Stand-Up Special, Filmed Prior to His Death, Coming to Netflix
Norm Macdonald was working on new stand-up material for a Netflix special before his death, but he never got to try out the routine in front of a live audience. Fortunately for fans, the comedian committed his jokes to tape in a home-recorded video that the streaming platform will soon unearth for the first time. Macdonald was diagnosed with cancer in 2012, but kept his illness private from the public. According to Lori Jo Hoekstra, the comedian’s longtime friend and producing partner, he recorded his final special before heading into the hospital in 2020 as a precautionary measure. “His test results were not good, so during the heart of COVID-19 pandemic and literally the night before going in for a procedure, he wanted to get this on tape just in case — as he put it — things went south,”...
Why Des Moines Is the Funniest City in America
I don’t want to hear about your local comedy scene. Honestly, it just doesn’t compare. You don’t have people who scrape ice off of their cars and slide out in brown slush just to try out five minutes of new material. If you’re talking about Chicago, it’s expected. When you’re talking about Des Moines, Iowa, it’s insane. For the last 14 years, there has been an enclave of huggable freaks, pukers of truth and go-getters who have made the Des Moines comedy scene the greatest in the country. Around 2007, you would have been lucky to find an open mic, any open mic, happening around there. Des Moines was kind of a dead town. If you did happen to find one, it was usually littered with acoustic guitar music, rancid, amateur beat poetry, and the occasional bit of comedy. When you did find that come...
Not Your Average Joe
The comedian Joe List is set to premiere his newest special, entitled This Year’s Material, on his popular YouTube channel, continuing a trend of DIY releases, such as Mark Normand’s Out to Lunch, Shane Gillis’s Live in Austin, as well as List’s own excellent 2020 set I Hate Myself. Each of those specials have garnered millions of views, not due to any sort of controversial material that would attract otherwise disinterested lookie-loos, but from hundreds of hours of road-tested material that has captured the attention of those of us only interested in punchlines. It is the opinion of this writer that Joe List is, pound-for-pound, the best working stand-up comic in America. His self-deprecating nature (“I Hate Myself” is both a title and common phrase for List) belies a novelistic detail f...
How to Buy Tickets to Kevin Hart’s 2022 Standup Tour
Kevin Hart has just announced his first standup tour in over four years, and it’s safe to say these comedy shows will be unforgettable. The “Reality Check Tour” spans over 30 dates and will see the comedian trekking across America from July to October, 2022. Get tickets here, and read on for more info about pre-sale codes, tour dates, and more. What is Kevin Hart’s 2022 Tour? The “Reality Check Tour” will begin in July, 2022 with standup shows in Las Vegas, Nevada. Hart will then tour throughout the country, ending the run in San Francisco, California in October, 2022. Advertisement Related Video About the tour, Hart says “I am hype as shit to go back out on tour. There is nothing better than making people laugh, I can feel the energy in the venues like caffeine pumping through my veins. I...
Comedian of the Year Bo Burnham Captured Our Collective Anxiety in 2021
Our 2021 Annual Report continues with the announcement of Bo Burnham as our Comedian of the Year. As the year winds down, stay tuned for more awards, lists, and articles about the best music, film, and TV of 2021. You can find it all in one place here. There’s a moment of context in Bo Burnham’s Inside where things start to click in a different way, and the whole special gets cast in a new light. At the end of the first verse and chorus of “All Eyes on Me,” Burnham describes making the decision to return to stand up comedy after a four-year hiatus from the form. In a supremely ironic fashion, he made this decision in January 2020, finally deciding that he was ready to be vulnerable in front of an audience again — all before a global shutdown. Hindsight is (clears throat) 20/20, but regardl...
John Mulaney Announces 2022 “From Scratch” Tour
As John Mulaney prepares for the final performance of his 2021 “From Scratch” tour, the comedian has announced a fresh slate of dates for 2022. Our former Comedian of the Year will return to the road beginning March 11th in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The 33-date trek seems designed to rack up the frequent flyer miles, with a performance in Ohio being followed by a stop in Maine, a two-night stand at the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut giving way to a run through Texas, and what could have been one extended California leg interrupted by layovers in Denver, CO, Omaha, NE, and Saint Paul, MN. Ticket presale begins Tuesday, December 7th via Ticketmaster. Use code ‘BELLS’ to buy your tickets early, or wait until Friday, December 10th for the general sale. Check out the full itinerary below, and...
Lewis Black Announces 2022 US Tour
Lewis Black is hitting the road for a tour in 2022. The comedian has today announced the “Off the Rails Tour,” a US trek that will hit 35 cities from January to May. Black’s upcoming jaunt begins with two nights at Denver, Colorado’s Paramount Theatre on January 21st and 22nd and wraps up at Greensburg, Pennsylvania’s Palace Theatre on May 8th. Some dates are already on sale, and tickets for Minneapolis and Mt. Pleasant will be available in December. Everything else becomes available this Friday, November 19th. See the full list of dates ahead. Specializing in observational black comedy, Black’s standup tends to devolve into rants about American history and politics — meaning he should have plenty of new material in this climate. What’s more, The Daily Show contributor ends each of his com...
