What comedian should i listen to

But lucky for you, our crack team of podcast enthusiasts spent the year exploring the ever-expanding comedy-podcast universe, making it a bit smaller and a bit more manageable by recommending our favorites each week.

Should we ever need a lighthearted time capsule for the year , there is perhaps no relic better suited than the podcast Stay F. Born out of the stay-at-home orders introduced at the beginning of the pandemic, this show, hosted by Paul F. Tompkins and his wife Janie Haddad Tompkins, documents the universal stages of quarantine, managing to channel the anger, frustration, and uncertainty of the world into hilarious banter that both entertains and makes listeners feel a little less alone.

The result is an intimate hour or so of podcasting that just happens to be hilarious. There are a few treats outside of the usual format though, including two watch-along specials to sync up with viewings of Interview With a Vampire and Urban Cowboy , giving a further glimpse into what a typical night in with these two is really like.

Listen: Spotify Apple Website. Double Threat was new in , debuting just after quarantine started in March and bringing with it a fitting attitude of cheerful nihilism. The arcane system of inside jokes is still there, but an innovative format leverages the community of listeners and keeps each episode anchored to one or two ridiculous current events. The listeners and producer Brett are always on the lookout for the next embarrassing thing a high-on-his-horse canceled celebrity or multinational corporation has said or done, and Tom and Julie listen to the sound bites for the first time during the recording.

And in , YBS had a banner year, with a weekly lineup of guests that was truly unpredictable. One episode had comedian Whitmer Thomas discussing his brief childhood kidnapping , while another featured an interview with Dany Hellz Kitchen, who cooks gourmet cellblock meals out of his French prison cell. Gale made his first appearance in , when the gentle Gentile shared a story about sneaking onto a Birthright Israel trip with a suitcase full of forgotten felony-grade fireworks.

When Gale passed away in August , Wagner unlocked a Patreon episode with Gale, who was as innately talented at telling stories as he was at conjuring mosh pits with a guttural roar. Unlike typical true-crime podcasts, Mosley leads with a load of positivity, empathy, and, yes, excitement. She invites fellow comedians to revel in the bewilderment and brilliance of the scammers and pay them respect.

Each week comedians Mitra Jouhari and Joel Kim Booster give advice to listeners who call in and email with their questions — typically, the pettier, the better. Things took on a new sense of, well, urgency when the continuing disasters of the year caused more and more people to be in peril and seek advice. Those who ask questions often expect to receive a range of advice.

For example, Mitra might suggest calmly talking through a problem while Joel lays out plans for very complicated revenge. Prior to this year, I would turn to A Funny Feeling for a fun scare when things felt a bit bland. Each time Gamble chats to former contestants from Rose Matafeo to Kerry Godliman, as well as Little Alex Horne himself and insight from Tim Key into what exactly his status as a task consultant means. Altogether a better class of behind-the-scenes TV tie-in podcast.

Katy Wix, who you know from Ghosts and Stath Lets Flats , and cohost Adam Drake put a new spin on the guest-plus-two-hosts format by venturing out of the studio and joining their interviewees for a wander around their old stamping grounds while chatting about what message they'd give to their younger selves. Spinning off from his book, Perfect Sound Whatever , a sort-of-memoir told through the or so albums from Acaster launched himself into following a break-up, this podcast sees him digging himself further into position on the hill on which he'll gladly die: that was the best year for music ever, and he's not going to stop until everyone agrees.

The first series of Gilligan's new podcast pulled in some big hitters while dodging the usual merry-go-round of guests who turn up absolutely everywhere: instead, Rio Ferdinand, Davina McCall, Munya Chawawa, Nigel Ng and Reggie Yates sit down for an easygoing chat that wanders into more heavyweight areas too. Mo's one of the most effortlessly likeable comics we've got, and this open-ended, rambling format suits him down to the ground. A little like Mortified see below the fun here is in listening to comedians and other creative types reckoning with their first, excruciating, often very revealing works.

Some are very sweet, like British comedy's all-purpose go-to guy Nick Mohammed and his childhood magic show; some are extremely earnest, like Sara Pascoe's teen poetry; and some are quite terrifyingly monomaniacal, like Amelia Dimoldenberg's relentless quest to be editor of Vogue.

It's so big one fan's made a wikia tabulating guests' dinner choices. If you've not eaten with them before, the concept's very simple: each guests picks their favourite starter, main, side, dessert and drink, and talks about their life and career in an enjoyably roundabout way. You will not look at Claudia Winkleman the same way again after hearing that she's solemnly vowed to never drink water.

Do you remember when Walkers changed the colours of their packets of salt and vinegar and cheese and onion around? Why did it happen? And why do Walkers deny that it ever happened at all? This deadpan investigation goes all the way down the rabbit hole, and finds that it leads to a forgotten and possibly completely fictitious advert, Nelson Mandela, the Illuminati, and — of course — Gary Lineker.

Having conquered sports reporting, celeb autobiographies, chat shows, radio chat shows, digital radio chat shows and triumphantly returned to TV, Alan Partridge is at the top of his very, very large game. With this series, I want to give my fans an intimate view of who I really am.

You may think you know me, but trust me, you have no idea what goes on behind closed doors at my podcast innovation studio. This homebrewed podcast from comedy writers James Bugg, Jack Bernhardt, James Boughen and Natasha Daniels will return for a third series in February , mining the bathos and strangeness of life stories by people who got to live the dream, and got half a dozen fairly workaday anecdotes out of it.

It's a tome which includes reminiscences of the young Hucks' condemned digs in Lincoln which nearly killed his teammate Matt Carbon — they thought he liked a kip by the heater, but it turned out he was being repeatedly poisoned with carbon monoxide — and the weird world of his friend Lee Croft, who was convinced that you could see monkeys in the treetops of Wigan "if you looked hard enough" and that he was once attacked by a wasp the size of a man's fist. If you miss The Reducer , this is one for you.

Vulture's podcast about jokes goes extremely deep on a particular gag in a comedian's oeuvre, dissecting and talking about how one gag in particular started out life, how it got kicked into shape, and how it was delivered.

It's usually American in its focus, but Jamie Demetriou was on recently to talk about the pizza dinner scene from Stath Lets Flats , and riddle out exactly why it's so, so good. What you learn is that Demetriou's level of attention to detail is absolutely ridiculous, and the extra insight into Stath, Sophie and the rest of the gang's deeply unusual way of interacting with the world is fascinating.

No subject is off-limits to Tolly, Milena and Audrey, from relationships to friendship break-ups, and situationships to the ups and downs of everyday life. There are a lot of comedy chat podcasts out there. It's the reflex format now: take a mildly famous all-purpose host, possibly two, add a contrived mechanic and rope in one of the 25 people who go on every single podcast available in a slightly tedious carousel. At its best, though, the comedy chat podcast is the most deeply lovable podcast there is, and Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend is the comedy chat podcast at its best.

O'Brien may have made his name top of the American late night chat game, but the longer interviews he and his assistant Sona Movsesian have room to do here show that he's both a funny interviewer and a genuinely good interviewer.

They've got the kind of clout which gets the big, big guests too: Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Obama twice and loads more besides are in the back catalogue.

Then when we started doing it, the bits that I assumed were not in the show were the show. It is awe-inspiring to consider the kind of work it takes to produce The Daily Zeitgeist. Who can relate? The stories are frustrating, for sure, but definitely funny every time. What would you pick in 5 rounds of a fantasy draft of game shows? And how pissed would you be when someone steals Weakest Link as a last round sleeper?

Ian Karmel hosts new comedians every episode in this fan favorite.