6. Kumail Nanjiani – Beta Male
If you watch a lot of television, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Kumail Nanjiani in one of a number of minor roles, like a cell phone salesman in one of Portlandia’s better sketches or a statistician on HBO’s excellent political satire Veep. He will finally be getting a starring role of his own in another upcoming HBO show, Silicon Valley. Hopefully that will earn him a bunch of new fans, and those fans will go back and check out his first hour-long stand-up special, Beta Male.
Beta Male is a perfect title for a comic who has spent a good deal of time playing primarily nerdy characters on TV, and who also has a video game-focused podcast (The Indoor Kids) and a show he hosts at a comic book store (The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail), both of which are affiliated with fellow comic Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist network. He doesn’t pander to the nerd demographic like Hardwick often does, though. Instead, he finds a nice balance of pop culture reference and anecdotes from his own life as a native of Pakistan, resulting in a solid hour of stand-up comedy that proves while he may be a beta male, he’s definitely an alpha comic.
Where to find it: Comedy Central Direct
