Lewis Black at UNC Chapel Hill in the early 2000s. I was attending college at NC State down the road in Raleigh.
Mike Birbiglia - I actually saw his one man show Sleepwalk With Me in New York when I visited my sister there around 2008. It was quite enjoyable if you like his “storytelling” style of comedy.
Dimitri Martin - I’ve actually seen him twice, both times at the Crest Theater in Sacramento. The first time was very fun. The second time he was trying out some new material, so as you might expect the jokes were somewhat hit or miss.
Tig Notaro - Also very fun. If you’ve never heard her she’s got a very deadpan style of delivery. You might know her as Jett Reno on Star Trek: Discovery.
The Best of Second City - I caught this show when I was in Chicago a few years ago. It was a mix of scripted sketches and improv. While the players are all pretty much unknown now, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if one or two of them ended up on SNL in a decade or so.
I’ve seen Robin Williams (1982?), Rodney Dangerfield (1984?), Tim Allen (?) Cheech and Chong (2012?) and met George Carlin.
I ran into George at the airport in Detroit right before he died after a show in Toledo that I missed (damn it!). He was dressed up in a clown outfit and I followed him into a coney island at that airport. I told the waitress that it looked like you served clowns so I must be in the right place. He chuckled and we exchanged small talk, but mostly I was in awe of being next to him.
If you’re only going to see two comedy acts, those are two good ones. Jeselnik’s brand of offensive, dark comedy does walk a bit of a line. One of my favorite jokes of his: "when I was a teenager, I told my mom I wanted to buy a motorcycle. She said ‘are you crazy? Your uncle died in a motorcycle accident.’
‘…just take his motorcycle.’"
One of my favorite comedy bits.
That’s quite a list! Curious about Jon Stewart’s stand-up: was it highly political, or did he branch out with non-political humor? I mentioned in the OP seeing Michael Kosta, one of the current Daily Show hosts. His stand-up was almost entirely apolitical.
I do very much enjoy his storytelling style, and he’s someone I’d really like to see someday. I’m a regular listener of his podcast ‘Working it Out’, in which he actually works out bits he’s developing. So I got to hear jokes he was working on for his upcoming (at the time) show ‘The Old Man and the Pool’ months before the show came out. And I wasn’t too impressed with them. I remember thinking “eh, I think this show is going to be a rare ‘miss’ for him”.
But when I actually saw the show on one of the streaming channels, the way he wove the jokes into the greater tapestry of his storytelling was genius, IMO. I was really moved at how funny and poignant it was, despite already knowing many of the jokes at the core of the stories.
Wow, that is a great story. Did you find out why he was in a clown outfit? It doesn’t sound at all like his style of stand-up.
I think that he did it because by that point everyone knew who he was and recognized him immediately anyway. So dressing like a clown actually stopped people from bothering him because of the shock of seeing him like that. But that was my guess, I didn’t ask him and respected his space as much as possible.
I do like his double punchline jokes. Before seeing him live, I heard him a lot on XM.
One of my favorites was always the Superman incident. Paraphrased: I’ve got this cousin, he’s an asshole, everyone hates him, his own family even doesn’t even like him. Then one day he was riding a horse and got thrown. He broke his neck and ended up paralyzed. We call that The Superman Incident, because that horse is a hero.
I don’t know if they could be classified as comedians, per se, but I saw Penn and Teller before they were famous in 1980 at the Phoenix theater in San Francisco, a tiny theater on Geary between Mason and Powell.
I’ve been to a lot of small shows with comedians you’ve never heard of that haven’t made the big time yet. Two that should have are Ray Shock and Barbara Buckley. Both had the story-telling stand-ups I prefer.
Lewis Black, Demetri Martin (twice), Eddie Izzard, Kevin Nealon, David Cross, Steve Martin/Martin Short, Eric Idle/John Cleese, Eric Idle (solo), Kids in the Hall, Marc Maron, Fred Armisen, Wanda Sykes, and a bunch I can’t recall off hand.
But the best experience, by far, was night one of the Monty Python O2 performance in 2014. Most of the energy was coming off being in the same room with 20,000 fellow Python fans, but it was wonderful way to see off one of the defining influences on not just my sense of humor but actually the way I look at the world.
Sure, there’s a definite comedy element to their shows, usually dark comedy. One funny bit of dark humor I remember from TV was Teller doing a version of the old “pick a card” routine. Teller had an audience member choose a card and put it back in the deck without showing him the card. Then Teller scattered all the cards face down, and, with a knife, stabbed a card and brought it up to show the card picker- wrong card. Teller did it again, and again, wrong card. Increasingly frantic, he kept trying until he ‘accidentally’ stabbed the knife though his other hand, and when he brought his hand up in agony, the bloody but correct card was stuck to the point of the knife sticking through his hand
I saw George Carlin, too. As he’s one of my comedy heroes, I was thrilled. Front row tickets, and I got to meet him after the show. Super nice guy.
I did stand-up professionally for about 6 years. I saw a LOT of comics over the years. I made friends with the stage manager at the local club, so I got to go see a lot of people. Some went on to become bigger names in the industry. Many didn’t, or are still working on it.
I’ve also seen Rondell Sheridan, probably best known for playing the dad on That’s So Raven.
I got free tickets to go see Gallagher (the original one, not his brother Ron). I wasn’t impressed.
I’ve seen Tim Wilson (RIP) several times. Tim Cavanaugh, Heywood Banks, Jeff Dunham, Earthquake.
I don’t know if you consider Weird Al as a comedy act, but I’ve seen him twice and met him after one of the shows.
It’s even better in person. At the “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society” – the show at the Phoenix theater – it’s Penn who was stabbed. Teller stabbed the cards faster and faster as Penn was shuffling them on a tray chastising him for screwing up the trick until the reveal.
Sure, musical comedy is comedy. See also: Flight of the Conchords. Or Tom Lehrer’s stuff, to go way back.
Cool that you got to meet him. What was that like? I hear he’s also s super nice guy.
His ‘What’s New, Pussycat’ bit is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. I won’t even attempt to explain it-- just search for it on YouTube if anyone is curious.
It was a meet & greet after a show. A friend of mine and I stood outside the stage doors, along with a large group of others. His people came out and organized us into a line, and he came through, taking pictures and talking with everyone.
His staff said he only had a few minutes before he had to leave, but he went out of his way to interact with every person there, shaking hands, the occasional photo, and talked to everyone individually. He was the sweetest, most accessible, most accommodating, most genuine celebrity I’ve ever interacted with. You could tell just by watching just how much he appreciated each person individually for enjoying his contributions to the world.
I love Mateo Lane! I’ve never seen his stand up but he’s probably the comedian I watch the most clips of.
I totally forgot I also saw John Hodgman, at the Akron library in 2014. I guess he did a library tour. I don’t remember buying his book but maybe I did. I stood in line to get a photo with him. Was I also getting an autograph? Hmm.
I saw Margaret Cho when she was first starting out, maybe around 1990, at an open mic night in some San Francisco bar (I only went there to support a friend who wanted to try out something). As I remember, she was hilarious. Some of the material from that night made its way into her early standup routine when she got better known, the stuff about her family’s porn bookstore in the Castro. Some of her material was fairly raw; one joke I remember was a very deadpan “So, I’ve been getting into fisting… Oh, have I opened up too much?”
Unfortunately, my friend had to follow her, and he fell completely flat.
It was almost all non-political. Saw him twice, actually. One was as a headliner and he did a little topical and then mostly his regular stand-up about family and such. The second time he was the surprise guest opener for Dave Chappelle. It was a New Year’s Eve gig and he did some older bits about being Jewish and his family. Same with Bill Maher. He opened with a few political jokes but the majority was his standard act.
Ron White, I saw before he was part of the Blue Collar group. It was just a regular gig at the local Funnybone and we had won free tickets from a radio contest and I remember him being funny enough that I tried to remember his name. Short name with color. Years later, after he got famous I realized who he was and that I had seen him.
Chris Rock, I’d bought tickets before the Oscar incident, so we really anticipated that one. It was almost entirely what was on Netflix later that year.
Jeff Dunham I saw years before he had his current lineup. He was just a regular ventriloquist, as was I. He did my personal critique after I was in the amateur contest. at 13.
Story with no punchline, or even interesting details.
We were visiting the DC area, where my wife grew up, and one of her high school friends was the opening comedian for a bigger named person, so we went to the show with another high school friend, or two. I recall the opening guy we were there to see as being fine, without too many real laugh out loud jokes, but entertaining enough.
I do not know the headliner’s name. He was on the Teen Wolf TV show, and perhaps played a villian. I’d never seen that TV show, but the parts of his act that did not reference the show were pretty funny, with lots of laugh out loud jokes. Like the OP, it ended up being worth the hassle of getting from rural Maryland to downtown DC.
Worst one was a local guy with the stage name The Magical Cyclops, or some similar dick joke. He was part of an event I was at, and not the reason I had gone. His shtick was doing stuff that wasn’t funny, but he was not funny doing it. Imagine (assuming you actually like Andy Kaufman) watching someone try to impersonate Kaufman without any of the understanding of what made Kaufman funny.
It got to the point where the audience was loudly booing him, which was at least a reaction, and we all hoped maybe where the real bit would begin. No, it didn’t happen, and the “maybe part of the joke” boos turned into just straight up hate boos.
The guy later showed up on the American Idol audition show in Denver, where the judges yelled at him after going through the same process of “is this bad as a bit, and it will turn out to be really good? No, it is just bad.”
