25 Standup Standouts From 21st Century

Best known as the anchor of Comedy Central’s broadcast news satire The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015 (a seat he currently fills once a week, on Monday nights), Stewart began as a stand-up. His muscular sets, like his anchor job, often deal with the political and cultural state of the country, and they still kill. This year, he toured with Pete Davidson and John Mulaney — a bill he described as “rehab, recovery and hospice.” At 63, aging is one of his themes: “The other day, I needed my reading glasses to jerk off,” Stewart told the crowd at the annual Stand Up for Heroes benefit for military families in 2024. (Stewart has long been a staunch activist for service members and 9/11 first responders.) 

At the same event, he recalled that when someone asked him if he was “worried about anti-Semitism.” He replied, “I think anti-Semitism will be just fine,” then told the story of posting a remembrance on social media of his beloved late three-legged pitbull. While most replies offered condolences, one stood out: “Why did you change your name, Jew?” (“Stewart” is a different spelling of his middle name; he stopped using his birth name, Leibowitz, after falling out with his father.)  

When President Donald Trump, during his first administration, tweeted similar comments at Stewart, the comedian replied that Trump’s real name was “F—kface Von Clownstick.” 

With his Van Dyke, spectacles and shaggy gray hair, this Harley-riding Scot resembles a hippie Colonel Sanders. “The Big Yin,” as he’s known across the Atlantic, retired from stand-up at the end of the last decade. But at 83, he still consistently ranks as one of the best — if not the best — comedians of all time in U.K. polls. Connolly’s legacy as a comedian — which stretches back to the ‘70s and was preceded by a musical stint in The Stumblebums with Gerry Rafferty (“Baker Street”) — lives online and on streaming services. Connolly, who broke through in the States in the ‘90s, is a brilliant politically incorrect storyteller, who was slinging the f-word back when it was still shocking. Start with “Dwarf on a bus,” or “Colonoscopy,” and you’ll find yourself traveling down a blue, burr-filled rabbit hole. 

Noah is another stand-up comedian who hosted The Daily Show, replacing Stewart from 2015 to 2022. Born in South Africa, his outside-looking-in observations about America and racism are scalpel-sharp, and in 2024 helped make him the No. 7 highest grossing comic of the year, according to Billboard Boxscore, earning $29.7 million and selling 392,000 tickets over 94 shows. In his 2023 Netflix special, Where Was I, he observed that America’s national anthem is like gangsta rap, or “a Michael Bay movie in a song,” full of bombs and rocket’s red glare: “The American anthem is the only anthem where you can put the word ‘b–ch’ at the end of every line, and the song still makes sense.” 

Gaffigan has been at it since the 1990s, and blew up at the end of that decade after acing an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. He subsequently became a favorite guest of his fellow Hoosier.  

A clean comic, Gaffigan has built a career out of poking fun at his family, his weight and American eating habits, including his own. To wit, his extended bit on Hot Pockets (repeatedly punctuated by his singing the brand’s two-word theme song): “I was looking at a box of Hot Pockets. They have a warning on the side: ‘You just bought Hot Pockets! Hope you’re drunk or heading home to a trailer. You hillbilly, enjoy the next NASCAR event.’” This, of course, was followed by a self-critical inner voice imagining what members of his audience were likely thinking: “I like NASCAR. He’s a jerk.” 

Gaffigan doesn’t do that inner voice as frequently these days, and though his family remains a theme, he’s lightened-up on the weight jokes after losing 50 pounds on a GL-1 drug. On his 2024 Hulu special, The Skinny, Gaffigan said his newly svelte form tended to provoke two reactions. The first: people approach his wife to ask if he’s sick because, “Obviously, Jim isn’t exercising and eating healthy. He must have cancer.”  The second: they accuse him of taking an appetite suppressant like Ozempic. “And I’m not,” he said. “I’m on a different one. I’m on Mounjaro, which is better, because it sounds like an Italian restaurant. Welcome to Mounjaro. When you’re here, you’re not eating, because you’re a fat ass.” 

When Iglesias, 49, first got into stand-up comedy in the late 1990s, he was less than solvent: his car was repossessed and he was evicted from his home. He’s traveled light-years since then. In 2022, he became the first comic to sell out Dodger Stadium, and the show was later released as the Netflix special, Stadium Fluffy. (Fluffy being his self-bestowed sobriquet, making fun of his girth.) And in June, Billboard Boxscore named him the No. 3 most successful comic of 2025 so far, having grossed $20 million performing for 275,000 fans over 50 shows. 

The Mexican-American comic was raised by a single mother in low-income housing in Long Beach, Calif., and his sets tend to be cheerful riffs — heavy on the storytelling and peppered with DIY vocal sound-effects — on race and culture. In a bit on California cops, Iglesias talks about being asked to perform at a police benefit in Fresno. When he declines, he’s told he has an outstanding warrant there. At the performance, he encounters an unsettling scene: a roomful of cops drinking heavily. “If they get ghetto, who do I call?” he says. 

In 2016, offered insight into the wide appeal of his comedy in an interview with the Bakersfield Californian publication: “Don’t talk about politics, don’t talk about religion,” he said. “Stay away from sports. Talk about things that are relatable to everyone. The more relatability you have, the bigger the fan base you’re going to have.” Misión accomplished.  

“A couple of nights ago,” goes a Silverman joke from her 2005 one-woman show, Jesus Is Magic, “I was licking jelly off my boyfriend’s penis and I thought to myself . . . Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother!” Her deadpan coyness allows Silverman to push the comedy envelope, whether she’s tackling gender, race, politics or pop culture, as when she called Britney Spears’ children “adorable mistakes” at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards. 

The New Hampshire-born comic’s resume includes everything from a season on SNL and an episode of Seinfeld to Star Trek: Voyager and two Wreck-It Ralph movies for Disney. Her full-frontal takes on sex can be revealing or ridiculous, as in the classic series of viral videos “I’m F—king Matt Damon” with ex-boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel. But it’s her ability to tangle with the deeply serious through that that sets her apart. In the 2025 Netflix special, PostMortem, she channeled the days-apart deaths of her father and stepmother through her brand of comedy. “My biological mother, Beth Ann O’Hara — I know some of your wheels are spinning. She married an Irish-Catholic man. She’s fully Jewish. You can still jerk off to me.” 

Wong doesn’t tell jokes so much as offer up laugh-inducing mini soliloquys on gender inequality, marriage, motherhood, race, fame and most recently, — on her 2024 Netflix special Single Lady — post-divorce sex. 

Like this one: “I’m very jealous and bitter that when a man finds any ounce of mainstream success in comedy, they get to date models, actresses and pop singers. One of my dear friends is arguably one of the top stand-up comics in the world. And for the past year and a half, she’s been dating a magician. I was like, ‘Okay, no judgment, girl, but is he at least, like, a good magician? Is he the best magician, like how you’re one of the best stand-up comedians?’ I looked that dude up on Yelp, and he had two stars. That’s what being one of the best female stand-up comics will achieve you. An ‘ain’t-s–t’ magician.” 

And this: “I love watching porn, and I think that when people look up porn on their favorite site, they always have their two standard search words. Mine are ‘Asian’ and ‘school.’ Yes, I like to watch ‘Asian’ because I’m conceited, and I like to watch ‘school’ because I’m Asian. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, are they doing a standardized test? Yeah!’” 

Born to a Vietnamese mother and a Chinese American father and raised in San Francisco, Wong, 43, won a Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy for her co-starring role in the rage-infused 2023 dark comedy Beef.  She is currently in a relationship with comedian Bill Hader, which qualifies them as one of the funniest households in America.  

“I don’t throw garbage in the street ever,” O’Neal told the crowd in a 2002 special, “and not because I care about the earth. I’m afraid I’m gonna be walking through the park drinkin’ a soda, and when I’m done, throw that shit away. It’ll fly over a bush and land on some dead white woman’s head with my fingerprints on the f–kin’ can. Now, I’m the Pepsi Cola Rapist because I’m f–kin lazy.”  

The way that uncut truths about race and sex sneak up on you there is typical of O’Neal’s genius. His work could be easygoing and raw at the same time, and no one was safe. His dedication to batting away bullshit was absolute, whether he was brutalizing fellow comics or even sometimes driving audience members from his show. “Liars don’t like me,” he once said. “They don’t want to be given anything straight.”    

In another bit, O’Neal talked about watching news footage of devastating floods in North Carolina. He recalled seeing “rednecks on TV just drowning” and telling reporters, “I lost everything.” “I swear, man, I’m not no a–hole. I started crying, you know. I cried, because I couldn’t give a f–k,” he said. “I tried my best.”  

O’Neal’s candor extended to his own mortality. He carried some 300 pounds on his 6-foot-4 frame and suffered from Type 2 diabetes. “I’m the leader of the fat people,” he once joked. “I’m Malcolm XXL.” And on a Comedy Central special, he said, “I’ve got to lose weight now to stay alive, and that’s not enough motivation for me.”  

In October of 2011, his diabetes brought on a stroke, and a month later he was dead. He was just 41. But he left behind a legion of A-list comics and top bookers who consider him a comic’s comic. Bill Burr — who produces an annual comedy benefit in memory of O’Neal — Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, Wanda Sykes and Jim Norton were among those who attended O’Neal’s funeral. When it was Colin Quinn’s turn to speak, he said, “If I could somehow be looking at him in Heaven right now, and watched him meet God, I know I’d be thinking the same thing everybody else would be thinking. ‘Uh-oh, God shouldn’t have said that. Now he’s going to get hammered by Patrice.’” 

Sykes began doing stand-up career in the late 1980s, won recognition (and an Emmy) writing for The Chris Rock Show on HBO in the late ‘90s, and then became one of Larry David’s most memorable tormentors on Curb Your Enthusiasm. “Larry’s a tip profiler,” she told him when she witnessed David add to the gratuity left by a Black tech consultant he had just fired. “You trying to get an NAACP Image Award or something?”  
 
She and David also share an affinity for lampooning clueless human behavior. Here’s her riff on a chatty gynecologist: “I don’t mind talking before the exam starts, but once I get in the stirrups, you shut the f—k up.”  

When that rule is broken, Sykes imagines an act of retaliation worthy of a Curb episode. “You know, one day, she gonna start talking, and I’m just gonna take my big toe and brush her bangs back. ‘Hey, girl, you streaming anything good lately?’” 
 
Her conversational style can mask just how tautly written her material is, as when she skewers race, American history, and pop culture in her 2023 special I’m An Entertainer with an explanation of why white people “would make the worst slaves on the face of the planet… They’ll be leaving the fields early. ‘Hey, hey, where you going?’ ‘Uh, Harry Styles tickets, hello!’”  
 

Gervais has released eight comedy specials and created the Office franchise, but the best example of his scorching comic brilliance is perhaps his opening monologue at the 2020 Golden Globes. Gervais faced a theater full of Hollywood’s A-list basking in their own glow and treated it like a Friars roast. Jokes begat jokes in such rapid fashion, many of them didn’t have time to land.  

Commenting on the length of movies in contention for awards, he told the crowd that Leonardo DiCaprio attended the premiere of his film, the two-hour, 40-minute Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “and by the end, his date was too old for him.”  

Even DiCaprio laughed at that one, but the real roaring commenced — Gwyneth Paltrow included — when Gervais zeroed in on the 2019 film adaptation of Cats, a critical and box-office bomb that featured an all-star cast (including Taylor Swift).  

“The world got to see James Corden as a fat p—y. He was also in the movie Cats, but no one saw that,” Gervais said of his fellow Brit. “But Dame Judy Dench defended the film, saying it was the role she was born to play.” After dissolving into laughter, and claiming, “I can’t do this next joke,” he forged ahead. “Because she loves nothing better than plonking herself down on the carpet, lifting her leg and licking her own minge.”  

He was just getting started. With Apple CEO Tim Cook in audience, Gervais praised its series The Morning Show as “a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing — made by a company that runs sweat shops in China.” The groans had barely started when Gervais (himself a target of accusations of transphobia) followed through with a dig at political correctness: “Well, you say you’re woke, but the companies you work for — I mean, Apple, Amazon, Disney — if Isis started a streaming service, you’d call your agent. So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world,” he continued. “So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god — and f—k off.”  

At that point, it’s safe to say few people in the audience recalled what Gervais had said at the beginning of his monologue: “Remember, they’re just jokes. We’re all gonna die soon. And there’s no sequel.” 

Hedberg’s time among comedy’s top ranks lasted less than 10 years — ushered in by a breakthrough 1996 performance on Late Show with David Letterman. He died from a drug overdose in 2005 at the age of 37, leaving behind just one comedy special, two albums (a third was released posthumously), and an indelible legacy. 

Hiding behind his floppy shoulder-length hair and aviator sunglasses, Hedberg resembled a sweet-faced Kurt Cobain, who spoke in a Midwestern hep-cat cadence.  

Though Time magazine suggested in 1998 that Hedberg could become the next Seinfeld, his comic style was his own. He was a nimble user of non sequiturs, and his sets played like comedic Morse code: the dots were quick punchlines strung together; the dashes, longer stories interspersed with dots.   

In his sole special, 1999’s An Escalator Can Never Break on Comedy Central, Hedberg turned a busy restaurant waiting list into a master stroke of sustained laughter: “They start calling out names like, ‘Dufresne, party of two. Table ready for Dufresne party of two.’” When no one answers, “They’ll go on to the next name, ‘Bush, party of three.’ Yeah, but what happened to the Dufresnes? No one seems to care. Who can eat at a time like this? People are missing. You people are selfish. The Dufresnes are in someone’s trunk right now with duct tape over their mouths. And they’re hungry… We need help. ‘Bush, search party of three. You can eat once you find the Dufresnes.’” 

Hedberg joked about the drug use that eventually took his life — “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too” — and during an appearance on The Howard Stern Show just a few weeks before his death, he said he was using them “just for the creative side of it.” Perhaps a documentary about the comic that’s slated for release this year will explain why they cut short a brilliant career instead.  
 

If you never experienced New York in the ‘90s, check out Attell. The gritty, economically strapped, crack- and crime-infested city of that time runs through his DNA. The scruffy beard, dark work jacket over gray hoodie, accessorized with a similarly colorless beanie or baseball cap screams 1992 afternoon bar regular, but make no mistake, Attell may look old-skell, but he’s just as hilarious in this century as he was in the last one.   

Growly and disconsolate, Attell’s style crosses standard set-ups and punchlines with stream-of-consciousness surrealism. On his 2024 Netflix special, Hot-Cross Buns, he killed with a riff on White Claw hard seltzer, “the hardest of the seltzers, and hard seltzer is the gateway drink to a soft penis,” he said. “If you’re up for a night of apologies, and ‘this never happens to me,’ and maybe, just maybe a game of Uno, then that’s the drink for you.”  

The man is also swift as hell with a comeback. Appearing as a judge on an episode of the podcast Kill Tony, after listening to an auditioner’s set (which included a bit on footjob porn), the show’s host Tony Hinchcliffe asked Attell, “Dave, do you ever watch footjob porn?” Attell’s response, “Where I come from, they call it Riverdance.” Mic drop. 

Since 1995’s Billy Madison, Sandler has been known for blockbuster comedy films such as Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer and the underappreciated You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love brought out a serious side to his acting, as did 2019’s Uncut Gems and this year’s Jay Kelly, which is generating Oscar buzz.  

But he is not to be underestimated as a stand-up comedian. The Brooklyn-born, New Hampshire-raised Sandler finished No. 9 among Billboard Boxscore’s top-grossing comics of 2023 and 2024, with grosses of $14.2 million and $27 million, respectively, with a total of 402,000 tickets sold.  

The Sandman is a master storyteller with an acrobatic voice — his and Nikki Glaser’s Timothée Chalamet bit at this year’s Golden Globes was genius. He excels at comic rage, but his bits also can be childlike and sweet with a solar plexus punch at the end. In one of his Netflix specials, he recounted the time his daughter asked why the boys in her sixth-grade class kept responding, “That’s what she said” after every comment she made. When Sandler becomes tongue-tied trying to give her an age-appropriate explanation, she says, “That’s okay, Daddy. You tried your best.” To which Sandler replies, “That’s what she said.”  

Sandler also does musical comedy well — his Hannukah song “Eight Crazy Nights” has become a holiday playlist staple — and his sets include anthemic rockers with vocals somewhere between Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits, counterbalanced with lyrics about epic failure, such as the one about the alcoholic lawyer that starts out like the 1982 Oscar-winning film, The Verdict, and ends up with his client getting the chair. “Well let’s have a few whiskey sours in his memory.” We’ll drink to that.  

Since his breakthrough on Netflix’s The Standups in 2017, coupled by the massive boost that hosting Saturday Night Live gave him in 2023, Bargatze has built a comedy empire he calls Nateland. Perfecting a deadpan delivery with (as the title of his 2025 bestselling memoir puts it) Big Dumb Eyes, and working clean, Bargatze fills stadiums and generates viral videos, such as the hilarious “Washington’s Dream” SNL skit.  

Bargatze is more storyteller than punchline assassin, and he often makes himself the butt of his jokes. His recounting of being a water meter reader in Tennessee post-9/11 is a tear-inducing gem: “We figured, they just went to New York. Obvious next stop: Mount Juliet, Tennessee,” he says on last year’s Your Friend, Nate Bargatze special. “And they are going to poison our water.” Assigned to guard a water tower with just a lantern, “I stood just in a dark field alone, waiting for the Taliban to show up.”  

“To this day,” he says he wonders, “What did they want us to do? Call the Mount Juliet police. ‘Osama is here. He got past our lanterns. He’s in the water tank. He knew how to open that. We were surprised by that, but he knew what he was doing.’”   

That style of comedy made him Billboard Boxscore’s fifth highest grossing comedian in 2023 ($20.6 million), No. 1 in 2024 ($82.2 million) and has topped the ranking in August, September and October of this year, with $16.6 million, $13.3 million and $15.8 million, respectively, and sold more than 2 million tickets over those measurement periods.  

That’s big, but it sure ain’t dumb.  

Read Maniscalco’s memoir-slash-comedian playbook, Stay Hungry, and you’ll learn that his was a long, difficult road to the top. Now that he’s there, he’s not wasting his shot.

In the fall of 2024, Maniscalco performed a record-breaking five nights at Madison Square Garden, and this year, he was Billboard Boxscore’s top-grossing comedian of the first half of 2025 and ranked No. 25 — just below Dua Lipa — among all genres of live performers.  

Like his comedy forebear Pat Cooper, Maniscalco mines his Italian American upbringing, which, he told Billboard in a recent interview he found earlier in his career “resonated not only with people with Italian immigrant backgrounds, but Spanish, Greek or wherever you come from.” And his hairdresser father Salvatore, who immigrated from Sicily, often figures into his routine: “To this day, my father, he knows what I make, I know what he’s got hidden,” Maniscalco said during a set at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, adding that his Dad always calls him before leaving on vacation because he thinks he’s going to die while away. “He says, ‘Listen, just in case anything happens on vacation, you’re gonna get a treasure map in the mail in three weeks.”  

His wide appeal also has a lot to do with his talent for “can-you-believe-this” observational humor that he delivers in a voice that could be straight out of Brooklyn, even though he comes from the suburbs of Chicago.  

Maniscalco is a stage stalker, given to Mediterranean-style hand gestures, and his sets have become more physical and exaggerated as the venues he plays become larger — a performance style recently parodied by Marcello Hernandez in a pitch-perfect SNL skit. As they say: imitation is the highest form of flattery.