The Best Stand-Up Comedy Specials Available Online

Stand-up comedy has been undergoing somewhat of a renaissance on the Internet lately. As distribution methods for content have changed and people have been able to stream or download sets from their favorite comics instead of going to see them at clubs or waiting for their next stand-up special on Comedy Central, the variety of comedy available has expanded beyond a handful of high-profile performers. HBO was really the first TV station to bring stand-up comedy into the home, typically with hour-long specials from a single comic. Then Comedy Central arrived and offered more bite-sized portions of stand-up comedy (going so far as to have a show called Short Attention Span Theater, which pretty much sums up the demographic they were going for). But even with channels like HBO and Comedy Central, comedians still had to rely on a handful of gatekeepers to decide whether or not their content would be distributed. Now the options for distribution are nearly limitless, including just putting it up on a comedian's own websites for download, a method that Louis C.K. proved could be successful. There are downsides to the democratization of content delivery, though. With so much content available, it can become quite difficult to separate out the good from the bad. Listed below are our favorite stand-up comedy specials currently available online. Of course, the availability of these specials could change tomorrow—another downside of the Internet as a distribution medium—so stream and/or download them as soon as possible. In fact, have yourself a stand-up comedy marathon. There are worse ways to spend a few hours. 1. Louis C.K. - Live at the Beacon Theater “There’s no opening act. F—k it, let’s just start.” So begins Louis C.K.’s Live at the Beacon Theater, an hour-long special full of the sort of blunt, no-nonsense comedy people have come to expect from C.K. While he spent many years honing his craft as a more absurdist comic with a sensibility like that on display in his writing for The Dana Carvey Show and Pootie Tang, his transformation into a comic known for the more personal material of his most recent stand-up and his TV series Louie is what has made him a household name. Live at the Beacon Theater represented a major shift in the distribution of comedy. Just like Radiohead made waves by distributing In Rainbows online independently well before anyone thought that was a good idea for one of the world’s biggest bands to do, C.K. did the same thing with Live at the Beacon Theater, relying on his own website for distribution and making the video free of DRM, which in turn made it very easy for the less scrupulous to distribute via BitTorrent. The gamble paid off, and C.K. made over $200,000 in profit that he didn’t have to share with Comedy Central or HBO or Netflix. He trusted that his fans would pay for his comedy if he made it easy for them to do, and he was right. It helps, of course, that it is an extremely funny hour of comedy that is well worth the $5 he charged for it. Netflix users no longer have to pay that $5, though, as it is now available via streaming on that site as well. Where to find it: Netflix or Louisck.net. 2. John Mulaney - New in Town John Mulaney is one of the funniest comics around right now, even if he isn’t one of the most instantly recognizable. A good portion of his career has been behind the scenes as a writer for Saturday Night Live. He certainly gained visibility with his first hour-long comedy special, New in Town, and is poised to become even more of a household name when his sitcom Mulaney debuts on Fox at some point in the (hopefully) near future. New in Town is comprised mostly of story-based comedy, although Mulaney also has a pretty great bit about Law and Order: SVU which, while somewhat less personal than his other material, is still pretty hilarious. The piece de resistance, though, is his story about going to a health clinic to try to get a Xanax prescription, with hilariously awful results. It’s a story that would make a great episode of a sitcom, which bodes well for the future success of Mulaney. Where to find it: Netflix 3. Todd Barry - The Crowd Work Tour Crowd work is not easy, and if it ever looks like it is then it is entirely due to the skill level of the comedian doing it. There is a lot of bad crowd out work there—something I’ve written about elsewhere—which relies on a handful of hacky jokes that can be broadly applied to basically any audience. Bachelorette party in the front row? There’s a misogynist joke for that. Two bros sitting next to each other at a table? There’s a homophobic joke for that. Only one black guy in the audience? Yeah, things are about to get uncomfortable for him. Todd Barry is a seasoned pro, though, and his crowd work is at a whole other level. Doing an entire tour of all crowd work and no prepared material took a lot of guts, and he pulled it off without resorting to hacky jokes. Granted, he had the help of some generous editing with The Crowd Work Tour, since it was based not on a single show but a whole series of them. The live shows themselves were undoubtedly more of a mixed bag, because that’s just the nature of crowd work, but when it works, it really works. The final product is an hour of footage that rivals some of the best hours of other comics’ prepared material. That’s no small feat. Where to find it: Louisck.net 4. Mike Birbiglia - My Girlfriend's Boyfriend There is probably no other comic out there right now who appeals to the NPR crowd as much as Mike Birbiglia. Not only has he been a repeat contributor to This American Life, but he has also found himself a niche as a stand-up comic doing the sort of long-form storytelling that has lent itself to a one-man off-Broadway show (Sleepwalk with Me) and a movie based on that show. What’s remarkable is that he has done all this without abandoning his roots as a stand-up comic. His recent My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend worked both as an off-Broadway show and as a stand-up comedy special, and now he is on a more purely stand-up oriented tour called Thank God for Jokes. Thank God for Jokes includes some of his best work yet, including a killer bit about director David O. Russel, but My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend still offers the most compelling look at how Birbiglia is able to be a crossover success and appeal both to fans of the sort of story-based performance one would find with The Moth as well as fans of traditional stand-up. Even as he is essentially telling one long story, Birbiglia keeps the jokes coming fast enough that there is rarely a gap in the laughs. Where to find it: Netflix 5. Aziz Ansari - Buried Alive Much of Aziz Ansari’s earlier material was about how weird it was for him to become so famous so fast, rubbing elbows with high-profile celebrities like Kanye West when he still hadn’t adjusted to being a celebrity himself. It was funny material, but maybe didn’t entirely click with people who were turned off by all the humble bragging. Ansari has since grown considerably, both as a comic and just as a human being. Having turned 30, his focus is now on more grown-up stuff like getting married and having kids. The result is that his newest special, the Netflix-exclusive Buried Alive, is his strongest work yet. Gone is the stage-prowling swagger of his last two specials, replaced by a thoughtfulness and earnestness that, while it may not result in the punchline density of his earlier work, is generally more satisfying. Oh and don’t worry, he hasn’t grown up too much. There’s still a pretty funny bit about dick pics (which you can watch below). Where to find it: Netflix 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 7. Kristen Schaal - Live at the Fillmore Kristen Schaal comes at comedy more from an acting perspective than a pure stand-up comedy one. Much of her material is more performance-oriented than joke-oriented, such as her infamous “Kristen Schaal is a horse” routine with comedy partner Kurt Braunohler. In fact, that very routine is included in Live at the Fillmore, and is carried out to a new extreme thanks to the TV format. That’s not to say that Kristen Schaal can’t write a joke. There are plenty of them in her first hour-long special, and they do not disappoint. But she is not content to play by the rules of the typical stand-up comedy special, and instead expands it into an absurdist, Kaufmanesque take on the format. Schaal spent a lot of time disavowing the special in interviews and on social media right around the time of its release. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time how much of that was genuine and how much of it was Schaal pulling one over on her audience. Watching Live at the Fillmore, it becomes considerably clearer, and the results are pretty hilarious. Where to find it: Comedy Central Direct 8. Pete Holmes - Nice Try, The Devil Pete Holmes is a fearless comedian, but in a different way than, for instance, Louis C.K. His fearlessness comes not from the subject matter of his jokes but from his willingness to put all his effort into selling those jokes, no matter how ridiculous they might be. The result is that it’s pretty hard to disagree with him on that point, even when he engages in some pretty silly wordplay that in other comics’ hands would only elicit groans from the audience. Whereas the “alternative” comedy scene that came out of the ‘90s was largely predicated on acting too cool to care if a joke landed or not, Holmes is the complete opposite of that. The harder a joke is to sell, the harder he’s going to sell it. No, they don’t all work, but it’s never not entertaining to watch him. That’s part of why he got a late night talk show on TBS produced by Conan O’Brien, the other part being that he’s just as hilarious and fearless a conversationalist as he is a stand-up comic. Just listen to his You Made It Weird podcast for proof of that. While Holmes sometimes seems to be selling his “Look how much fun I’m having!” vibe a little too hard in Nice Try, The Devil, acting amused at himself in a way that comes off as overly rehearsed at times, it’s still a great showcase for his talents. Hopefully having a talk show will not keep him from touring again in the future, because there are few comics out there right now who are as unapologetically fun as Pete Holmes. Where to find it: Comedy Central Direct 9. Hannibal Buress - Live from Chicago A caveat: Live from Chicago is not Hannibal Buress’s strongest work. That honor goes to his previous special, Animal Furnace. (Even the title is more creative.) Live from Chicago still has plenty of funny material, and of course Buress’s signature perpetually stoned delivery, but it loses focus in the second half and ends on a disappointingly generic bit about timeshares which does not hold up well compared to his better jokes. Even the timeshares bit has some laughs in it, though. Buress has such a distinct comedic voice that he could he could give the weather report and it would probably still be hilarious. He plays with the format of the stand-up special, too, throwing in stuff like a bit where he mocks lazy hip-hop artists by nodding along to one of his own pre-recorded jokes. Despite losing steam toward the end, Live from Chicago is still an easy hour of comedy to recommend. Where to find it: Comedy Central Direct Honorable Mention: Maria Bamford - The Special Special Special One of the main problems with digital distribution of video is that it can be pulled at any time. If it doesn't make enough money or the distributor's license runs out or someone decides to remove it for censorship reasons, consumers no longer have a legal way to purchase or stream it. In the case of Maria Bamford's The Special Special Special, the website that was distributing it went out of business and now there is nowhere to purchase it. This is unfortunate, because it is easily the best stand-up comedy special to hit the Internet in the past few years and one of the best of all time. The premise of The Special Special Special is simple but unique: rather than performing at a public venue, Bamford put on an extremely intimate performance in her living room for an audience of two. Those two members of the audience were her parents, and the fact that much of her material is about them added a whole level of discomfort that somehow only made things funnier. Bamford is, simply put, one of the best comics out there. Her material is alternately quirky and dark, bizarre and yet totally relatable. Much of her act is filtered through the lens of her bipolar mood disorder, and while in lesser hands that could lead to some very depressing stand-up, Bamford makes it transcendent. According to Bamford's publicist, they are currently looking for another distributor to put The Special Special Special back online, so keep your eyes peeled. There's no word on when or where it might see the light of day again, but when it does it will be a must-download for anyone who hasn't yet seen it.

The Best Stand-Up Comedy Specials Available Online

7. Kristen Schaal – Live at the Fillmore