There’s a variety of comedy special that belongs in its own particular class: the Update Special. It’s an hour of comedy that assumes you already know who this comedian is, assumes you already care about and are invested in them, and catches you up on what has happened to them since the last time you saw them perform. They can be fantastic hours, especially when a comedian has taken the central idea of the Update Special and embedded it within something transformative — see Marc Maron’s From Bleak to Dark or Sam Jay’s Salute Me or Shoot Me. And even when an Update Special is not especially remarkable, when it’s coming from your favorite comedian, it’s a thrilling and notable event. But when it’s someone who’s not already endeared to you, the Update Special can be a letdown — it’s the experience of arriving at a dinner party where everyone but you is a comfortable old friend, and you can’t help but notice the potatoes are a touch underdone.
There were some transcendent specials in 2023, but it was also marked by a few too many that could not extend beyond the sense of just checkin’ in. The year’s best specials arrived both from relative newcomers, like Zainab Johnson, and from established comedians like Beth Stelling and Gary Gulman, who both find ways to build jokes that are personal and intimate while also reaching toward broader ideas about themselves, their audiences, and comedy as an art form.
10.
Sasheer Zamata, The First Woman
The titular joke of Zamata’s special comes at the end, a long and pointed joke about the history of female aviators that’s part You’re Wrong About episode, part feminist screed, and part that thing when your hilarious friend can’t help but tell you this fascinating Wikipedia rabbit hole they fell down last night. There’s a bit of “Fun fact!” impulse to Zamata’s comedy with each topic of obsession (medical bias, menstrual squeamishness, the history of witchcraft) a new little door to her personal history and favorite bugbears. It is an hour of painstakingly conscientious crafting with ornamental callbacks and a thematic through-line that demonstrates both who Zamata is and how her brain works: She’s thorough and polished, and she will ask you which household item you masturbated with as a child.
➼ YouTube, 56 minutes
9.
John Early, Now More Than Ever
Part sketch, part stand-up, part concert documentary of a fake cover band, Early’s Now More Than Ever gleefully puts its tongue in several nested layers of cheek. It’s an ode to millennial exhaustion while being a screed of exhaustion with millennial culture. It’s a portrait of grossly egocentric performance, and Early spends most of the special center stage, egotistically and enthusiastically performing. It mocks sincerity and glibly copies the recent trend of musical-comedy specials by including the perfect falseness of highly sincere cover songs between segments of Early’s stand-up. The whole thing is absurd, and it’s almost certain that there are one or possibly a dozen too many ideas in here that are all shoehorned into the concert-documentary conceit, then undermined by the cynicism of the entire production. But it’s easy to excuse the few moments of slippage, because mostly, Now More Than Ever is clownish and buoyant. Cynicism never felt so fun.
➼ Max, 65 minutes
8.
Mike Birbiglia, The Old Man and the Pool
There are very few comedians who approach the idea of an hour-long special with the same rigor and meticulous sense of construction as Birbiglia. His work feels connected to so many different trends of comedy specials (the autobiographical show, the nested anecdote, the move toward considered stage elements, a general focus on dramaturgy), and yet, still, too few comedians aim at the standard Birbiglia strives to set. The Old Man and the Pool, like much of Birbiglia’s work, circles ideas about death and parenting, the prison of having a body, and what happens as we age. It’s a lovely and imperfect show; like Maron’s, it seeks to offer comedy as an answer to existential dread.
➼ Netflix, 77 minutes
7.
Zainab Johnson, Hijabs Off
Hijabs Off, Johnson’s first hour-long special, is a combination of two familiar comedy-special types. The first is the big introductory special, which typically includes large chunks of material on autobiography, self-definition, and the notable things that differentiate this person from any other comedian. Johnson does this part of Hijabs Off with ease and self-possession. She jokes about her name, which becomes an insight into her family. She begins with material about her religion, both welcoming and scoffing at the “haram police” in jokes that echo Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. It’s unusual, though, for that kind of special to have the guts and the careful confidence to also be a “now comes the serious part” comedy hour. Hijabs Off does it, though, by moving into a frightening childhood story in the second half of the hour. Johnson is not interested in waiting or in storing away material for some later point in her career. Now is the time to talk about the hard stuff, to embrace it as part of who she is from the jump, and to establish that she’s the kind of comedian who can do it with grace.
➼ Amazon Prime, 68 minutes
6.
Maria Bamford, Local Act
Any year with a new Maria Bamford special is a good year. Local Act combines material Bamford has been developing in conjunction with her recent book, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, with stories about her parents, who both died within the past few years. Bamford, as always, is radically transparent about experiences like hospice and the death of a loved one and approaches stories about them with both self-deprecation and a forthrightness about her need to stand on a stage and talk about them to a room full of strangers. There can be a dizzying disorientation to Bamford’s work at times, especially as she cycles through voices and characters she barely names, sometimes launching into stories with little prelude or explanatory hand-holding. It makes her an unusually engrossing comedian: Once you’ve adjusted to her rhythm and the worldview, everything else starts to look bland and desaturated by comparison. Local Act also ends with a beautiful form of inverse crowdwork in which she lets everyone in the audience do a minute of comedy onstage. It could be a bit of a tongue-in-cheek response to current comedic trends, but knowing Bamford, it’s probably more just a lovely little idea she wanted to bring to life.
➼ Apple TV+, 58 minutes
5.
Gary Gulman, Born on 3rd Base
Gulman’s a fantastic observational comic, able to see absurdity and oddness everywhere he looks and to convey that defamiliarization back to an audience with remarkable skill. What distinguishes him from other comedians in that style is his ability and willingness to translate that kind of observation into a more global perspective. Born on 3rd Base is a comedy special about income inequality and the fraying social fabric that creates lasting poverty in America, a topic that feels like a dubious framework for an hour of laughs. Gulman’s so good at negotiating that tension and weaving material about his childhood together with more general ideas about culture and class. A stand-alone Gulman joke, like the Chipotle one he performed on Late Night With Seth Meyers, is already such a world unto itself. It’s thrilling to watch as that joke is then fully contextualized inside the broader ideas of this special, which pulls everything together with such confidence and care.
➼ Max (premiering December 21), 65 minutes
4.
Sam Jay, Salute Me or Shoot Me
The meditation on a forbidden word-style joke is a popular and well-traveled territory by now, as is the ancient comedy bedrock of “men are like this, women are like that.” From Jay, though — from her perspective, with her unusual gravitas, and with the palpable sense that she truly doesn’t give a fuck — all of that hoary familiar material sounds fresh and exciting. Jay has a certain amount of charisma that’s just irreducible, but the material here never coasts on personality. She has a masterful command of tonal registers, and Salute Me Or Shoot Me is all about her ability to move in and out of jokes that swagger and jokes that approach with delicacy and grace. Every other comedian who wants to stand on a stage and say bad words to get people riled up desperately wishes they had what Sam Jay has.
➼ Max, 60 minutes
3.
Joe Pera, Slow & Steady
The rhythm of a Joe Pera joke can feel like water dripping from a faucet. The punch line will come at the same beat as everything else, and yet when you’re there waiting for it, the gap between the last line and the next one can feel like time slowing down and just hovering for a moment. Pera has a reputation for gentleness, and there’s certainly a warmth and sense of compassion to his humor. But there’s an iciness too, just the faintest vein of chilliness as he turns to the audience members and asks them for their thoughts before softly indicating his exasperation with their answers. Slow & Steady provides an uncannily precise balance of Pera’s humor, toggling from improbable sweetness (his favorite food is rolls) to sharp observation to a long closing imagined story about a marriage that twists through darkness and lightness while all the while sounding like an ASMR bedtime story. The ending image, of hands touching an enormous ice cube, is a fitting encapsulation of what this special accomplishes: chill and warmth, all in one sensory experience.
➼ YouTube, 57 minutes
2.
Beth Stelling, If You Didn’t Want Me Then
Stelling is a consistently great comedian, but her Netflix special If You Didn’t Want Me Then represents some of the best of her work. Her comedic persona, which ticks between cool disaffection and full-throated weirdness, is especially effective in this special she records in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio. It’s full of reflections on her childhood, and Stelling comes at those stories about her youth with both fondness and a sense of absurdity, all of it heightened by her awareness that she’s back in this place where she grew up. The highlight is a sequence of jokes about her father, culminating in an account of his hobby: feeding raccoons in his backyard. Stelling outlines the contours of that joke with a finely honed emotional antenna. It is inarguably dumb, it is surreal, it is sad, it is endearing. The entire special comes from the same pitch-perfect blend of feelings, tender and wry at the same time.
➼ Netflix, 59 minutes
1.
Marc Maron, From Bleak to Dark
If Maron’s previous special, End Times Fun, was about how to live in an apocalyptic moment, 2023’s From Bleak to Dark is about what happens when the apocalypse arrives and you find yourself somehow still standing. Despite its title, elements of it are optimistic in a bewildered, almost humbled way. The core of the special is Maron discussing the death of his partner, Lynn Shelton, and though the material is certainly not light, its heaviness has an open, appreciative quality to it, a sense of delight that’s palpable in Maron almost in spite of himself. Beyond all of that, it is also a special about what Maron believes comedy can do at its best and about Maron’s commitment to that set of values.
➼ Max, 65 minutes
Honorable Mentions
Shane Torres, The Blue Eyed Mexican
In the realm of comedians who revel in the darker, grosser corners of life — your Skank-adjacent names, your clubby types — Shane Torres’s new special, The Blue Eyed Mexican, stands out for its beautiful directness and keen sense of good storytelling. Lots of people can stand on a stage and talk about how COVID was a hard time for them, but Torres can turn it into an anecdote about mortifying and total personal collapse that ends with him trying to deal with an unhoused person who’s walked into the wrong home. Not only that, he can do it while using the adjective “Rockwellian” and imagining a cannibalistic future where “toes are the new shrimp because you have to peel them.” Torres’s sensibility comes from a fairly familiar place: The Blue Eyes Mexican is a special full of material about alcohol, how bodies are disgusting, and what it’s like to hang out with your weirdo friends. But his work really sings in the details, in strange little bits of word choice and turns of phrase. It’s a refreshing combination of delicate and obscene.
➼ YouTube (premiering December 10), 57 minutes
Dina Hashem, Dark Little Whispers
One of the most exciting newcomer hours this year, Hashem’s Dark Little Whispers stands out best for the comic’s political material and especially her excellent joke about liberals, conservatives, and the ways they prefer to be conned. But it’s not the kind of comedy in which political commentary feels tacked on as an opener or like a box that has to be checked because it’s straightforward and familiar to make fun of current events. Hashem has a clear and specific vision about how the political intersects with her own experience of the personal, and it shapes her material without feeling put-upon or unmotivated. She does jokes about getting death threats, the Muslim ban, religion, and Jeff Bezos going to hell, and what makes them feel distinctive is Hashem’s delivery, which remains low-key, measured, and a little nonchalant and underwhelmed by it all. There’s a bit of a Daria quality to it, a fascinating approach in the age of high affect and performative emotion.
➼ Amazon Prime, 49 minutes
Chris Fleming, Hell
Like all the best comedy specials, Hell is like entering an immersive world built out of all the strange detritus and intense obsessions that fill a comedian’s brain. In the case of Fleming, that world is particularly bizarre and delightful. Fleming can begin with relatively familiar ideas, like hipsters with children or the mannered interview style of talk-show hosts, and quickly drive those premises off a cliff to somewhere entirely unanticipated. The highlight of this is a song where Fleming points out that a hamster costs the same as a carton of raspberries and proceeds to compare these two purchases as though deciding which one to buy is a common, relatable dilemma. Hell accomplishes what every first big special should do: It makes Fleming’s perspective both irresistible and unmistakable.
➼ Peacock, 69 minutes
Ali Siddiq, The Domino Effect Part 2: Loss
It’s an unusual gambit to pitch a comedy special as a direct sequel to one that came before, in part because most comedy specials are sequels in a more implicit way: I told you what was going on in my head a few years ago. Now here’s an update. But Siddiq’s first The Domino Effect told stories from his childhood in carefully connected ways that (as suggested by the title) gradually added up to the person who was now standing, and often sitting, onstage. Part 2, in the same general mode and style of the first, picks up with stories from Siddiq’s later adolescence. Once again, Siddiq is expansive and deliberate with stories that tend to turn on his observations of his own absurdity in the middle of intense yet mundane circumstances. There is — and I mean this in the most complimentary way imaginable — something a bit like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon in these specials: a portrait of a distinctive Americana, hilarious and tragic and not often visible from the outside. But Siddiq is more original and arresting, and by the time the special winds its way around to the story he promises from the beginning (about being duct-taped and thrown in the back of a car), it’s hard to remember why he’s not one of the best-known comics working today.
➼ YouTube, 90 minutes
John Mulaney, Baby J
It is a guarded special that insists it is a vulnerable one; it’s a return to form for a comedian who is arguing that the core of that form is actually different now. But Mulaney is still one of the strongest and most culturally influential stand-ups of the last decade, and Baby J is a solid, striking piece of Mulaney comedy. Although the body of the special is a retelling of key points from the last three years (his drug addiction, intervention, and time in rehab), the special’s best and most fascinating joke is the one he uses to open the show. It’s a joke about Mulaney’s childhood realization that he could leverage real tragedy for attention, and how much he wanted a tragedy to happen solely for the attention it would bring. The suggestion inherent in that joke becomes the subtext for the rest of the special, and it makes Baby J pricklier and better as a result.
➼ Netflix, 80 minutes
Mo’Nique, My Name Is Mo’Nique
Five years after accusing Netflix of trying to pay her significantly less than comedians who were her peers, Mo’Nique’s Netflix special is a funny, bracing, furious, and intricate celebration of her own strength and joy and how she has gotten to this point in her career. It’s an indictment of the many systems that have tipped the scales against her — there are stories about her years as a special-education student, the racism she’s encountered throughout her life, and how hard she’s worked to get where she is. But the special is a demonstration of Mo’Nique’s ability to turn that lens on herself. Her strongest jokes are the ones that come from many perspectives at once, balancing her self-confidence with how she imagines herself being seen from the outside. The special’s back half, which focuses on Mo’Nique’s marriage, is where she’s on her strongest footing, telling the same story from multiple sides and finding new, hilarious, and surprising joke beats each time.
➼ Netflix, 76 minutes
Mae Martin, SAP
Martin’s SAP is a special full of delightful weirdos: themself, their parents (especially their moon-loving, hippieish dad), a mailman who steals all the mail, a silly set of characters in the Edinburgh Dungeon. But Martin’s main interest is in describing the way each of us presents ourselves to one another. The signature joke of SAP is about snow globes and a vision of human interaction where we all hand one another our beautiful little self-contained anecdotes and hope they’re received with care. The snow-globe joke turns all of those stories of oddball characters into a ticklish and sweet literalization of precisely the theme Martin’s most interested in: Martin shares their own snow globes. At the end, as Martin shifts into a more serious mode to talk about gender and their teen years, the snow globe is a reminder of how hilarious — but also how fragile — those stories can be.
➼ Netflix, 70 minutes
Kyle Kinane, Shocks and Struts
Kinane’s specials are not built to drive cultural conversation or to reinvent any wheels. They’re generally unflashy productions, featuring a collection of jokes that don’t speak to some heartfelt personal issue or life-changing revelation. They are not really-more-of-a-one-man-show specials. That’s not the point. The point is that Kinane is a comedy bloodhound — he has one of the keenest noses for where to find every stray bit of a joke, and Shocks and Struts is a demonstration of his superhuman ability to stand on a stage and use words in bizarre, fascinating ways. A joke about pillows slides backward through the inherent gayness of 17th-century trade routes. His cruise-ship material conjures a nightmarish, hedonistic carnival. His story about a van goes places no one could’ve predicted. But Shocks and Struts is a reminder that Kinane is so good he can do it with no words, too: There’s an act-out about a jam band that is somehow perfectly exasperated while nearly silent.
➼ YouTube, 77 minutes
Marlon Wayans, God Loves Me
God Loves Me is fueled by the pent-up energy of a long history, and Wayans wrings every ounce of comedy out of it. The special’s framework is the Will Smith–Chris Rock slap incident from the 2022 Academy Awards, which Wayans uses in about 20 different ways, including reenactments, speculation, pop-cultural observations, and, most extensively, autobiography. Every part of that incident, and every player in it, becomes a catalyst for introducing some piece of Wayans’s past or present. The wave of it all builds slowly over the hour as the comedian returns again and again to the incident itself, now recontextualized within all of his desires, grudges, fears, and accomplishments. Never has a bit of heartfelt personal storytelling been more bound up with electric celebrity gossip, and certainly not to better results.
➼ Max, 60 minutes
Nate Bargatze, Hello World
Some comedy specials — more than one this year — are stand-up that also functions as an explicit, considered, relatively hifalutin defense of comedy as a cultural act. It’s easier to see those arguments for what they are when they’re packaged together with deliberately serious subjects, like material about death or violence. Bargatze’s special flies a little more under the radar, but it’s doing the exact same thing: It makes the argument for stand-up as an inclusive, open, all-comers platform for every person, even if they’re dumb. Another comedian might make that sound cruel or judgmental, but Bargatze is sincere about it. Comedy does not have to be smart to be good; people can learn things without needing to feel bad about not knowing them before; accepting all of our own blind spots makes us more able to accept the blind spots of others. It’s a theme that ripples under Hello World’s entire hour. “Anything I say here does not come from a building of education,” he says. “This is all stuff I’ve overheard at Target or Lowe’s.” It’s a joke Bargatze’s making about himself, but it’s also a statement for the audience. That’s who we all are. Why pretend otherwise?
➼ Amazon Prime, 60 minutes