Saw and met Mort Sahl 4x
Saw George Carlin 2x
Saw Dave Chappelle 2x (met him after one show briefly)
Saw Doug Stanhope 3x
Saw The Melbourne Comedy Festival
Saw many, many more popular and amateur comedians (not worth mentioning)
Yay, that puts Carlin over the top! Thanks, MSF. I won’t bother updating the whole list yet, but I’ll update the top two:
George Carlin 9
Bill Cosby 8
Adding in mine…thankfully never saw Cosby but we had a ton of his records and he was pretty funny in them. A real shame what he turned out to be.
Lewis Black, I think I’ve seen him 4 times. The first was when he was less known and performed at a little comedy club in Ann Arbor. He had me laughing so hard I could barely breathe.
Jim Gaffigan I saw last year at the Fox in Detroit. Great show, very funny guy.
Trevor Noah also at the Fox, they were filming his Netflix special and everyone had to put their phone in a Faraday bag. He is fantastic at standup but also just uniquely poignant and authentic.
Wayne Brady, what a whirlwind of talent. He can sing with an amazing voice, dance, tell jokes, and do improv tricks (writing a spontaneous song based on a long obscure word from the audience and then singing it for us…) that absolutely blow your mind.
Ryan Stiles, as part of a “Whose Live Anyway?” Show famously without “The black guy (Brady), the bald guy (Mochrie) and the rich guy (Carey)”…he seemed like he didn’t want to be there, wasn’t terribly engaging with the audience, and … His parts wrent very funny or energetic like when he was in the show.
Dan McMillan, an engineer turned comedian who was on AGT, I think, but didn’t win. He is hilarious and his whole show is a PowerPoint presentation.
Norm MacDonald, who held a cigarette the whole time and would be just about to light it and then start another joke, mostly about masturbation. He was ok, just not my kind of humor. Everyone dared him to light the cig, though it was a smoke-free establishment. He never did. Less than a year later he was gone.
I’ve caught several of his bits on YouTube-- his (self described) ‘nerd’ humor is indeed very funny.
Even if it wasn’t your kind of humor, cool that you got to see what must have been one of his final shows.
Add me to the George Carlin list. It was at a small theater in the round, and at one point the stage started revolving, which led him to comment on how you only go around once in life.
Penn and Teller at the Rio in Vegas, when they were still doing after show meet-and-greets.
Also off the top of my head: Marcel Marceau, Ronn Lucas (ventriloquist), Victor Borge, Peter Shickele, a number of comic acts at the Bristol RenFaire whose names escape me, the Flying Karamazov Brothers.
Also, although not strictly comedy acts, at least two different Rat Pack tributes, one at the Desert Inn shortly before it was torn down, We had stageside seats, and “Dean Martin” flirted with my wife during one of his songs.
So Al did two tours of his less-well-known material: The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour and The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculouly Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, a few years later (Covid was sandwiched in-between).
On both tours, his set list varied from night to night, no two nights were identical, but the bulk of the show was his “originals”, the pastiches and non-parody material that your average joe on the street doesn’t know because they aren’t parodies, hence the name of the tour. But with no fixed set list, there was no way to know what song would be next! It made for a very spontaneous experience. At the end of the main show they would do a parody medley, then reenter for the encore and do a classic rock cover - a different one every show - followed by “The Saga Begins” (which is pretty much his standard closer for shows now, alone or in a medley with “Yoda”).
Emo’s one of my favorites and he was an opener on both of those tours. Most of it was recycled material, but he did about 5-10 minutes of observational material about our city and some recent news - so he did his share of keeping things spontaneous as well.
I never thought of myself as going to many comedy shows, but as I read the thread some came back to me. I saw Graham Chapman at college - would have been about '88 or maybe early '89, so shortly before his death. He had a great bit for dealing with heckling. I saw Victoria Jackson at a local club where she almost got booed off the stage once she started on some material about creationism and evolution. I saw a Flying Karamatov Brothers show that incorporated tech from the MIT Media Lab. Somebody mentioned the Ren Fest mud show guys - I saw them at Atlanta in the late 80s as well.
Bill Cosby did a night of stand-up at my summer camp - but, being something of a high-culture snob at that age, I was the only one in my division not to go see him. When the allegations against him started appearing years later, my first thought was “See? I told you so!”
I saw a live theater version of this with Mochrie, Greg Proops, Josie Lawrence, and Brad Sherwood. Some amazing talent on show, although as expected the live shows without the editing you get on television are a lot less frenetic. Sherwood had to rattle off an extended rap while waiting for Mochrie to stop him, which he didn’t for a long, long time.
I also went to see Austentatious, which is basically an improvised Jane Austen novel based on a suggested audience title. The one I saw started as a parody of The Great British Sewing Bee and ended with Satan being shot by a cowboy, so it was a pretty wild ride. Rachel Parris was performing the night we went (but not, alas, Cariad Lloyd).
It was extremely funny, and the improvisation included the music (keyboardist on stage in the corner) and lighting personnel. The show format appears to involve complete improvisation in the first half, and then (I’m guessing) some planning during the interval on how to steer the plot (such as it is) to a satisfying conclusion by the end of the second half.
I saw that show in Seattle. Greg Proops was the only one who seemed to have his heart in it.
Yeah, I wish Pinette had lost weight more and tried to save his own life. At one point, he lost a bit of weight, but he was adamant he had to remain somewhat fat since so much of his routine(s) over the years were based on that.
Bill was hilarious in his prime, especially “Himself”, one of the great comedy routines. I was actually watching it about one day before the long-rumored abuses came back into the spotlight. I was glad to have one last chance to laugh at his comedy before it would be, and now is, forever ruined.
I seen exactly one comedy act. Jerry Seinfeld at the 2019 Workday Rising conference in Orlando, Florida. He was pretty funny. I also remember a DJ with a hat who I was sure was coked out of her mind.
I also saw Graham Chapman at college at the same time. Never occurred to me to mention here because I didn’t consider it to be a comedy show. There were certainly funny stories but it was set up more like a guest lecture than a stand up show. Along similar lines I saw Hunter Thompson and Frank Zappa (separately) give talks around the same time period.