Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: HBO (Jennifer Clasen, Jesse DeFlorio), Netflix (Todd Rosenberg, Scott Yamano), Ali Siddiq via YouTube
This list is updated monthly with new Best of the Year–worthy titles.
There have been a few years of unevenness on the comedy-special release calendar, as well as an unfortunate but understandable reliance on the “just catching everyone up on my life” approach to filming an hour of stand-up, but 2024 has felt like a welcome shift. We still have a few months left in the year and there’s already a notably strong set of comedy specials — not only the fun, “Oh, that’s nice” sort of entries but several really outstanding hours that deserve some time to absorb and enjoy. Some, like Ali Siddiq’s Domino Effect Part 3, are part of a longer arc of work they’ve been developing, while Ramy Youssef’s More Feelings, for instance, is not exactly a sequel to his previous special but is obviously continuing in that vein. Yet several, including Just for Us, Get on Your Knees, and Someday You’ll Die, are instant stand-alone knockouts, the result of polish and care that took time to develop until they were really at their best.
All specials are listed by premiere date with the most recent releases up top.
Love You, Adam Sandler (Netflix)
Photo: Scott Yamano/Netflix
The difference between a gimmick and a meaningful artistic choice comes down to how well the concept illuminates some idea or argument about the broader work. Gimmicks stay superficial, grabbing attention but not translating to something deeper. “Make Adam Sandler’s new special feel like a Safdie movie” could just have been a gimmick, especially if the show had been restricted to the tense, nerve-wracking opening sequence. But when Love You, directed by Josh Safdie, stretches the conceit into the body of the special, it pushes its premise of a messy show teetering on collapse somewhere past gimmickry and uses it to articulate ideas about fame, joy, performative pressure, and the value of comedy. It’s especially useful as a run-up to Sandler’s last song, an ode to his comedy heroes, but the whole special is better for it. Sandler is still the famous, rich comedian here, but he’s beleaguered, frustrated, and hopeful, desperately trying to make sure everyone has a good time. And it works — the special is distinctive and artful but also just an entertaining way to spend an hour.
➼ Read Kathryn VanArendonk’s review of Love You.
Domino Effect, Part 3: First Day of School, Ali Siddiq (YouTube)
Photo: Ali Siddiq via YouTube
There’s nothing else in comedy like Ali Siddiq’s multipart Domino Effect, and it’s hard to imagine what other comedian could ever come close to pulling off the epic creation Siddiq has been building for the past few years. Each YouTube installment is its own long special (often over an hour), but they all connect as pieces of Siddiq’s autobiography, beginning from childhood and continuing through the years he spent incarcerated for selling drugs. No part of Domino Effect is bad, but Part 3 is a particularly remarkable standout. It’s the period of Siddiq’s life when he’s been imprisoned but not yet found guilty or sentenced, and that moment is especially suited to allowing Siddiq to play to his strengths as a comedian. He creates and embodies all of these characters in the world he’s describing, and he’s incredibly adept at reviving and narrativizing his younger self. It’s both enormously funny and some of the most moving depictions of a particularly American life experience available in any genre, in a way that makes him feel like a modern Mark Twain. Someone please call the Pulitzers.
➼ Read Jesse David Fox’s interview with Ali Siddiq.
Someday You’ll Die, Nikki Glaser (Max)
Photo: Jennifer Clasen/HBO
Glaser has had a good year, which most people know from her work on the Netflix roast of Tom Brady. But what Glaser should be most known for right now is Someday You’ll Die, which is the most virtuosic and impeccably made special so far this year. Glaser’s known for sex jokes in the vein of the incredible run she does in her special Bangin’, but Someday You’ll Die takes that same cheekily dirty mind-set and re-centers it in her awareness of getting older. She has material about deciding not to have children, about death and physician-assisted suicide, and her closer is an astonishing piece about the sex games she plays with her partner that manages to be both sweet and filthy. Someday You’ll Die should also get attention for its lovely set and lighting design, which use a glam draped curtain and shifting light tones to capture Glaser’s high-class debauched sensibility and her movement from one idea to another.
➼ Read Hershal Pandya’s close read of Nikki Glaser’s joke style in the special.
Just for Us, Alex Edelman (Max)
Photo: Sarah Shatz/HBO
The genre of “comedian does a one-person show” shows tend to follow a set of tonal and structural rules. They are funny with the aim of getting at something quite serious. They begin with humor, transition into a more grave place through the two-thirds mark, then pivot back into funny by the end. They’re often extensively autobiographical, generally with the goal of using life experiences to chase down some idea. Just for Us is all of that, but it’s also the best of all of that, and it sets itself apart by cramming all of its ambitions and ideas into one large anecdote about Edelman’s experience of attending a neo-Nazi meet-up. Edelman’s so skilled at juggling fear and absurdity. He allows the entire hour to spool out of those engines while simultaneously keeping it carefully inside the smart structure he’s built to contain it all.
➼ Read Jackson McHenry’s review of the theatrical version of Just for Us.
More Feelings, Ramy Youssef (Max)
Photo: Jesse DeFlorio/HBO
One of Youssef’s superpowers as a comedian is his comfort with ambiguity. He has an unusual ability to talk through and reconsider large, messy ideas about religion, morality, and what it means to be a good person, and it’s always rooted in the sense of who he is and what questions he cares about. But he can do it in a way that avoids the standard stand-up approach of being stupidly definitive for the sake of humor. More Feelings, like his previous special, allows Youssef to once again thrive in all the uncertain gray areas, especially in his material on politics and family. The show’s set piece is a story that lives in all the awkward, mixed emotional space of a childhood memory you’re not proud of; it’s a story about schoolwork he didn’t do, his guilt and glee at getting away with something, and it’s full of all these uncomfortable mixtures of shame and pride. Plus, for all the Chris Storer–heads created by The Bear, More Feelings is full of Storer’s signature direction style, with long profile-shot close-ups and a warts-and-all sense of casual intimacy.
➼ Listen to Jesse David Fox’s Good One podcast interview with Ramy Youssef.
Dirt Nap, Kyle Kinane (800 Pound Gorilla, YouTube)
Photo: 800 Pound Gorilla Media via YouTube
The centerpiece of Dirt Nap is Kinane’s very long joke about his cat, named Dirt Nap. Calling it a joke about a cat is already a misnomer, though: It’s a very long joke about the pandemic and what it was like to live during this bizarre and alienating time, and it allows Kinane to do the kind of comedy he does better than anyone else. Its half-hour run time feels winding and anecdotal, until you realize he’s been weaving this whole nest of an idea around you the whole time. It gives him opportunities to create characters and do small act-outs, which always feel like surprising little presents from a comedian with such an otherwise writerly brain. It’s a masterful closer, but everything that precedes it is just as weird and delightful, especially his lengthy detour through action-movie criticism. His joke about movies where the president gets kidnapped is a little sidebar and also some of the most deft political commentary this year.
➼ Read Jesse David Fox on why Kyle Kinane’s long joke is good.
Have It All, Taylor Tomlinson (Netflix)
Photo: Todd Rosenberg/Netflix
Tomlinson’s first special was about introducing herself to a broad audience by demonstrating her ability to capture the feeling of being a 25-year-old. Her second was a more personal approach to her history, dealing with her mother’s death and her own mental-health diagnoses. This special comes at a trickier point in her career: She’s become much more famous, she’s playing in front of crowds who definitely know who she is, and she’s reached a point where she wants to talk about her own life even as she’s catapulting past the point of broad relatability. Have It All is a fascinating and revealingly prickly way to approach it, with stories about her mixed feelings about her friends getting married, the ever-fraught “have it all” standards she still feels caught inside, and what life is like when you can bid on a Hugh Jackman glove at an auction. It’s not a complete departure from her previous work, but it does feel like the beginning of a transition into a new phase of her career.
➼ Read Kathryn VanArendonk’s 2022 interview with Taylor Tomlinson.
Get on Your Knees, Jacqueline Novak (Netflix)
Photo: Netflix
In the list of one-person-show features exemplified by other specials on the list this year, Novak’s fully embodies some (an autobiographical focus, one big idea that’s explored over the course of the hour) and notably departs from many of the others. Novak does follow a structure that curves toward gravity before rebounding into positive feelings, but her idea — which is blowjobs, but which is also the joy of language and creative expression — is so full of ebullience and energy that the show itself seems to burst out of its own seams. The special, directed by Natasha Lyonne, is an almost dizzying visual representation of Novak’s animated physical presence, with a camera that tracks her across the stage almost like it’s following a high-stakes tennis match. It’s overwhelming to watch, which is exactly the point.
➼ Read E. Alex Jung’s 2019 interview with Jacqueline Novak about Get on Your Knees and Novak’s first-person essay about returning to the show after its pandemic-driven hiatus.
