Over the course of more than four decades, David Cross has done it all. An Emmy-winner and two-time Grammy nominee who was central to the rise of alt comedy in the 1990s, Cross has been performing stand-up professionally since he was a teenager back in late ’80s Boston. He’s best known to…

As a comedian, Ali Siddiq is a paradox — someone who is putting up some of the biggest streaming numbers in the business and selling hundreds of thousands of tickets, yet has not been embraced by Hollywood and not quite broken into the mainstream. When lists of top comics are written, Siddiq…

For comedian Max Amini, building a dream career meant taking the long road. “My career has been a long career and a very difficult career in so many ways, in the sense where I’m American, I’m also Iranian. The industry has always had a difficult time understanding what box to put me in,” Amini…

If there’s one lesson to take from the story of Michael Strassner, it’s that even the worst moments in life can lead to something beautiful, given time, community support, and the willingness to fight. In 2018, Strassner hit a low point that forced a hard reckoning. Booted from the Groundlings…

Stapleview has come a long way since its 2022 launch. Originally developed by Sam Grey as the first live, weekly sketch show tailored to a TikTok audience, Stapleview was driven by an exploration of how traditional and digital spaces could be bridged through a new kind of content designed for…

Nurse John never envisioned an on-stage career for himself, much less one in which he’d be selling hundreds of thousands of tickets in cities worldwide. And yet it’s something he’s built for himself in a short span of time, going from frontline nurse to viral TikTok creator to globally successful…

To Carly Hoogendyk, the manager from Omnipop Talent Group West, Hollywood today has come to embody a kind of “no new friends” mentality — and oftentimes, it takes non-traditional efforts to break into traditional spaces. In an era of contraction — marked by the dwindling of TV roles, late-night…

In 2025, one of the smartest places for a comic to be isn’t a club or a podcast studio — it’s Reddit. Why? Because Reddit is built for connecting with niche online communities, both in comedy and beyond. There’s a subreddit for just about every topic you can imagine — from golf to F1, makeup…

Danny Frenkel has a dream for Punchup Live, his ticketing platform co-founded with Alex Dajani in 2023: to build the company into “the Amazon of live entertainment.” “I am not passing moral judgment one way or the other on Amazon, to be clear. But [their efficiency is] awesome. It is crazy…

Matt McCusker has ascended to another level. Two years after self-releasing his debut special, the Philly-bred comic nicknamed “The Shaman” returned this month with A Humble Offering, an hour marking his Netflix debut. This moment of mainstream validation is a big milestone for any comic…

Before Tamra Goins was closing deals for stand-ups, she was spitting verses. The Innovative comedy agent has an extraordinary backstory, having first taken to the stage as Entice, one half of the rap duo Danger Zone opposite cousin Bailey Brown, while growing up in late-’80s Oakland. Her…

For Desi Lydic, the longtime Daily Show correspondent, who in recent years has elevated to become a rotating host of the late-night program, the pace of the news cycle feels like it’s intensified significantly since she joined a decade ago. Whereas the first four years under President Trump…