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    6 Terrific Comedy Specials Worth Streaming

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    Jenny Slate, Dan Soder, Cara Connors, Tig Notaro, David Cross and Dave Attell stamp these hours with particularly rich sensibilities.Jenny Slate, ‘Seasoned Professional’(Amazon Prime Video)Wearing a bow tie, pocket handkerchief, crop top and shorts, Jenny Slate stands on a shiny circular platform on the distressed BAM Harvey theater stage. It’s an image of sharp contrasts, the kind you find in her comedy, where commonplace subjects are imbued with manic, absurd charisma. Her version of relatable is asking: “You know that one feeling when you can tell you’re going to pass away?”Whereas her debut special incorporated documentary elements, this hour effectively captures the improvisational eccentricity of her live act. Slate is blessed with a spectacularly nimble comic voice. She’s also a deft physical comedian, and her best bits show off both traits. When trying to describe the strangeness of giving birth, she likens it to the discomfort of being invited to audition for Pennywise the evil clown. Rattled, she expresses the shame at being considered for the part by flapping her hands, looking perplexed (“That couldn’t be the murdering, kidnapping, balding male clown, right?”), doing a creepy impression of the character as well as the meeting among producers that led to this offer. It’s a screeching, sputtering display of kvetching that builds runaway comic momentum.Dan Soder, ‘On the Road’(YouTube)While most specials go too long, this one, at 39 tightly funny minutes, is just right. Punchy, diverting, varied, it’s a perfect pick-me-up for your lunch hour. In clothes as casual as his delivery, Dan Soder presents himself as a laid-back people-pleaser, the kind of guy aiming for a specific kind of dumb. As he puts it, he wants to see a trailer for a new “Fast and Furious” movie and be shocked that they found a way to go faster. But make no mistake: His lightness requires heavy effort. And his comedic tool kit is full, featuring sharp impressions (Batman villain, Enrique Iglesias), melancholy notes and clever phrasemaking. In a story illustrating the childhood joy of curse words, he says this line with a genuine (and ridiculous) sense of nostalgia: “I was 8 years old, just out having a cuss.”Cara Connors, ‘Straight for Pay’(Apple TV+)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dave Attell Bids a Heartfelt (and Hilarious) Farewell to Carolines

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      Each year, the comic headlined the club during the holidays. With the space closing, his final show there was a mix of deadpan and melancholy notes.How do you honor the death of a comedy club? First, you kill.Walking onstage late Friday night at the final headlining show at Carolines on Broadway, which after three decades is closing its doors, Dave Attell handled that job quickly, spraying punch lines, roasting the front row and making sure the raucous audience knew it was part of history. In one galloping tangent, Attell urged anyone not laughing to leave. “Take a table and chair with you, because we have to clear this place out,” he said.Attell has performed at Carolines between Christmas and New Year’s for 13 years, a holiday tradition for audiences who wanted something significantly dirtier than the Rockettes. This time, he mixed in a few heartfelt, even melancholy notes into his virtuosic deadpan rhythms to eulogize the passing of a legendary comedy room. But comedians mourn differently. When a waiter walked past the stage toward the door, Attell, dressed in a characteristic black jacket and baseball cap, asked him where he was going, pausing before the joke: “Unemployment.”Like a drama queen writing her will, New York is perpetually and loudly dying. Hardly a day goes by without teeth gnashing over a beloved part of this city calling it quits. Every closed diner is the end of an epoch. The most mundane and predictable demise, the end of a Broadway run, receives extended soul-searching and public autopsy. To me, this seems (mostly) sensible. It’s healthy to mark the end of things, and what is better than a great finale? But I’ve been covering show business in this dynamic city too long to get too sentimental. We shouldn’t overly fetishize institutions. One of the legacies of “Stomp,” which closes next month after a 29-year run, is all the shows that did not get produced in its theater. Change is good.Dave Attell performing at Carolines on Friday. For 13 years, he played the club over the holidays.And yet, I couldn’t help but feel a little melancholy walking down the steps into Caroline’s for the last time, a steep descent that gave you a chance to adjust from the gaudy lights of Times Square. Caroline’s isn’t technically gone; after a final show on New Year’s Eve, it is producing the New York Comedy Festival and other unnamed projects. Still, with the stage backdrop, stools and other parts of the club soon to be shipped to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, N.Y., the loss of this room is significant.When Caroline’s opened in Chelsea in 1981 (it had two homes before moving to the theater district in the next decade), New York comedy clubs were essentially dive bars with stages, featuring packed bills of short sets by lowly paid or unpaid comics desperate for performing time to work out jokes. Caroline’s introduced a new model: hour sets by more established talent, bigger pay days and a more upscale atmosphere. There was plush carpeting and a dressing room. Instead of a brick wall, the comics stood in front of a checkerboard pattern artfully missing a few pieces. In a 1985 story in The Times, Robert Morton, a producer on “Late Night With David Letterman,” described Caroline’s as “the first yuppie comedy club,” becoming maybe the last person to use that word as a compliment.Memorable performers at the club have included, from left, John Mulaney, Tracy Morgan and Leslie Jones.The stairs down into Carolines allowed patrons a chance to adjust after the gaudy lights of Times Square.Many were exposed to the club via the television show “Caroline’s Comedy Hour,” which ended in the mid-’90s. Its impressive lineups offer a history of modern stand-up. On one 1992 episode, Attell performed with Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Jon Stewart, Susie Essman and Colin Quinn.That Caroline’s was located in the heart of Broadway mattered, adding a touch of class to stand-up, an art form rooted in vaudeville and minstrel shows that was then rarely afforded the critical respect of theater and film. Caroline Hirsch, the founder of the club, played a key role in raising the stature of stand-up. You can even make the case that she helped set the stage for the transformation of Times Square, opening just a few years before Disney arrived in the neighborhood.On Friday before the show, when I asked about her most memorable nights at the club, Hirsch recalled the time Robin Williams took over a Jeff Garlin set with some inspired heckling and a string of performances by Kevin Hart. She also told a story about how Don King walked into the club when John Witherspoon was telling a joke about him. Her recollections underlined the real importance of Caroline’s: the staggering number of memorable experiences had there. I had more than my share.Caroline Hirsch opened the club in 1981; it moved a few times before settling into the Theater District. Caroline’s was the only place where I saw veteran stars like Dick Gregory, Richard Lewis and Damon Wayans. Before he was on “Saturday Night Live,” I caught Michael Che there. And years before he had a special, I knew that Ricky Velez would get one after watching him do an electric opening set. The most memorable part of a Tiffany Haddish show was when she spotted Whoopi Goldberg in the audience and tearfully described how important it was as a child to see the veteran star on television.Caroline’s was not dogmatic about the kinds of comics it booked. It didn’t have a house style, which might have hurt its brand but made it unpredictable, featuring talent from an array of ages, backgrounds and styles. Bo Burnham cut an album there early in his career, and Phoebe Robinson got her start by taking a comedy class at Caroline’s.One of the all-time funniest shows I ever saw was Rory Scovel doing an hour at Caroline’s. A decade before John Mulaney toured arenas with bits about fame and addiction, he performed a hilarious hour at Caroline’s in which he told jokes about his marriage and his alcoholism.Caroline’s was also not above oddball bookings (Larry “Bud” Melman performed there). I once saw a 13-year old do a standup act and also made the error of taking my 7-year-old daughter to a Ron Funches show, only to rush out when the jokes became too dirty.The audience at Attell’s final show at Carolines. The club didn’t have a house style and the bookings were eclectic.Toward the end of the night, Attell asked his opening acts, Ian Fidance, Jordan Jensen and Wil Sylvince to join him onstage. They riffed with one another, before Attell turned to the crowd and asked with an odd formality: “May I?” Then he took out a blue recorder, which he described as “somewhere between a flute and a bong.”In between raunchy jokes, he played simple, wistful songs. He remarked on the sadness of the instrument’s sound. Then he opened his jacket and brought out a second recorder, a yellow one. Seeing this gruff, grizzled legend wield two colorful pipes was its own sight gag. It was also a reminder that while Attell’s much imitated delivery has its own musicality, when it comes to expressing certain kinds of emotion, no joke can really match a few notes played with conviction.Then he beckoned Caroline Hirsch to the stage, called her “a force” and thanked her for “making us all better.” Describing the moment as “bittersweet,” she said she would be producing more shows in the future. Then everyone took selfies onstage to commemorate the moment and awkwardly shuffled off the stage. More

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      Best Comedy of 2021

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      The return of indoor shows brought comedy closer to normal, and there were plenty of specials from Bo Burnham, Tig Notaro, Roy Wood Jr. and others.From left, a scene from Tig Notaro’s HBO special “Drawn,” Susie Essman in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Tiffany Haddish in Netflix’s “Bad Trip.”From left: HBO; John P. Johnson/HBO; Dimitry Elyashkevich/NetflixComedy got dangerous in 2021. Not cancel-culture dangerous (though after creating one of the loudest controversies of the year with his Netflix special “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle might disagree). More like “I might contract Covid at this show” dangerous. After a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime shutdown of live performances, audiences returned to indoor shows, and comics picked up where they left off. These are some of the highlights.Best Punch Line Inside a Club to Defuse Covid AnxietyOne night at the Comedy Cellar, Dave Attell told a guy in the crowd: “I’m glad you’re wearing a mask because we need a survivor to tell the story.” But in the basement of the West Side Comedy Club, Bill Burr took down the elephant in the room even quicker: “I’m happy to be down here working on a new variant.”Best Experimental ComedyTig Notaro is not the first stand-up to turn herself into a cartoon, but her “Drawn” HBO special was the most ambitious attempt, using a different animated style for each bit — realistic one moment, whimsically fantastical the next, veering from the perspective of the audience to a cockroach. Imagine if Pixar did stand-up.A scene from “Drawn,” an animated HBO special from Tig Notaro, which uses a different animated style for each bit.HBOBest Musical ComedyThis was the year that visual humor caught up to the verbal kind in comedy specials. Bo Burnham invented a new comic vocabulary with his Netflix hit “Inside,” a filmic meditation on isolation, the internet and ironic distance itself. It was so tuneful and thematically well made that a blockbuster musical is surely in his future.Best Opening BitIn “Imperfect Messenger,” a Comedy Central special packed with refined comic gems, Roy Wood Jr. begins by discussing things that are not racist but feel racist. Things that have, as he puts it while rubbing his thumb and his fingers together as if he’s grasping at something, “the residue of racism” — like when white people use the word “forefathers,” or when you go somewhere and there’s “too many American flags,” which he calls “too much freedom.” He rubs his fingers and thumb again and asks: “How many American flags equal one Confederate flag?”Roy Wood Jr. in his Comedy Central special “Imperfect Messenger.”Sean Gallagher/Comedy CentralBest DirectingWith a jangling horror soundtrack, claustrophobic close-ups and the menacing humor of a Pinter play, the movie “Shiva Baby” offers a modern spin on the postgraduate angst of “The Graduate.” Its director, Emma Seligman, is the most promising cringe-comedy auteur to come along in years.Best MemoirIn the Audible original “May You Live in Interesting Times,” Laraine Newman describes studying with Marcel Marceau, dating Warren Zevon and farting in front of Prince. She gives you what you want in a “Saturday Night Live” memoir, but what makes her audiobook excel is her nimble voice, impersonating a collection of characters, none more charismatic than her own.Best Documentary“Mentally Al” catches up with the unsung comic Al Lubel when he’s near broke, disheveled and struggling with an impossibly dysfunctional relationship with his mother. Onstage, however, he’s consistently hilarious, even when the audience doesn’t think so. After countless documentaries about how a really funny person became a star, there’s finally a revelatory one exploring why one didn’t.Best Political ComedySometimes the most powerful punch is a jab. In “Oh God, an Hour About Abortion” — an understated, humane and deeply funny examination of the experience of having an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion — Alison Leiby uses observational comedy to reframe a political question at a critical moment for reproductive rights.The comedian Alison Leiby performing at Union Hall in Brooklyn in September.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBest Keystone Cops UpdateNot since Chaplin has running from the police been as funny as Tiffany Haddish in “Bad Trip,” a scripted movie on Netflix that includes unscripted scenes, such as Haddish emerging from under a prison bus dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forcing a male bystander into an uncomfortable decision.Best SpecialThere’s never been a better year for handsome comics making jokes about their fraying mental health. Along with Bo Burnham unraveling onscreen and John Mulaney describing the depths of his addiction in live shows, the British comic James Acaster delivered his masterwork, “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” on Vimeo. It’s a nearly three-hour show, wildly funny and deeply felt, that mocks how easily mental struggles can be turned into entertainment before doing just that.Best Arena SpectacleThere were prop missiles, shining diamonds and a massive sign that announced “World War III” in lights. I’m still not sure what the battle was about, but as soon as the born entertainer Katt Williams charged into the Barclays Center, yellow sneakers a blur, it was clear he had won.Best Netflix DebutNaomi Ekperigin is a natural — a comic that can make you laugh at just about anything: summing up Nancy Meyers movies, vaccines, clichés (why L.A. sucks), the way she says “OK.” In a half-hour set, as part of the collection “The Standups” that will be released on Netflix on Dec. 29, she even has two different jokes about the color beige that earn laughs. It’s a delight.Naomi Ekperigin performs in Season 3 of “The Standups,” coming to Netflix on Dec. 29.Clifton Prescod/NetflixBest Grand Unified TheoryIn describing how the porn industry pioneered everything on the internet, from user-generated content to diversity casting, Danny Jolles, in his endearing and far too overlooked Amazon Prime Video special, “Six Parts,” finds a new way to describe the fragmentation and filtering of the news: fetishes. All news, he argues, has become “kink news,” catering to our narrow, even perverse whims.Best Inside Comedy ParodyLast year ended with the release of “An Evening With Tim Heidecker,” a parody of edgy stand-up comedy that was a bit too vague to really resonate. Now, Heidecker hit the bull’s-eye with his recent YouTube spoof of The Joe Rogan Experience; its 12-hour running time (really one hour on a loop) is its first joke. So precise, so meticulously sensitive to the details, to the cadence and lingo of that podcast, his conversation with two sycophantic guests (played with pitch-perfect smarm by Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh) is a master class in sounding absolutely earth-shattering while saying precisely nothing.Best Argument for the Staying Power of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’No comedy that started in 2000 should still be this funny. Part of the reason for this feat is the consistently elite supporting performances, none more important than Susie Essman, who shined this year. Famous for her volcanic fury, she can do dry and understated just as well. I have not laughed louder at a television show this year than after hearing her say the word “caftan.”Susie Essman, left, plays Susie Greene in the long-running HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”John P. Johnson/ HBOMost Underrated Star ComicJim Gaffigan has put out so much material for so long that he’s easy to take for granted. The fact that he’s family friendly probably doesn’t help his press either. His dynamite new special, “Comedy Monster” (premiering Tuesday on Netflix), may be his best, showing Gaffigan at his most dyspeptic. It suits him. Who would have thought that he would so satisfyingly eviscerate marching bands and parades? Or have the most unexpected prop joke of the year (keep an eye out for a grand piano). More