Stand-up is the loneliest job in comedy. One person, one microphone, and nobody to blame. So it is striking how many of the comedians we interview do their best work with someone else: a spouse, a friend from an improv class, two colleagues on the same bill, or a person the audience never sees.This piece gathers what they…
Andy Kaufman died in 1984, at thirty-five. Most of the comedians we interview were children then, or not yet born. He still comes up more often than almost anyone. We ask a comedian about their influences, or about a character they play, or about losing a room, and within a few minutes we are talking about a man who read The…
Barry Katz is a talent manager and producer who has worked with Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Louis C.K., Jim Gaffigan, Dane Cook, Wanda Sykes, Jay Mohr and Bert Kreischer, many of them before anyone else would book them. A former stand-up from Massachusetts, he founded the Boston Comedy Club in New York's Greenwich Village in 1988…
Krystyna Hutchinson and Corinne Fisher are New York stand-up comedians and the hosts of the podcast Guys We F****d, which they have released every Friday since 2013. Hutchinson took her first solo show, Congrats On Not Killing Yourself!, to the Gilded Balloon at the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe. Fisher also hosts the podcast Without a…
Lucy Boisvert Doesn't Believe in Creative Block
October 1, 2026
Lucy Boisvert is a New York-based writer, director and performer with Infinite Monkey Theater Co., where she works with her creative partner Fletcher Michael. She grew up in Alaska and rural Wisconsin, moved to New York at eighteen, and trained in sketch at the Upright Citizens Brigade and the Second City Conservatory. She…
Fletcher Michael is a Brooklyn-based playwright, performer and novelist, and the founder of Infinite Monkey Theater Co. He is the author of the novels Vulture, Glass Bottle Season and Sidewalk Dance, and has published satire in McSweeney's and Points in Case. His stage work includes the plays First Liar on the Moon and Oops! We…
Mark Ryder's Whole Career Came Down to One Email
October 1, 2026
Mark Ryder is an actor and writer from Belfast, based in London. At eighteen he was cast as the young Liam Neeson in Five Minutes of Heaven, which won two awards at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. He went on to play Cesare Borgia for three seasons of Tom Fontana's series Borgia, and has worked mostly in film and television…
Irene Woo is a French-Chinese stand-up comedian who grew up in France and is based in New York. She was a senior software engineer at Google, her first job, until she left in 2025 to do comedy full time. She trained in stand-up and improv at the People's Improv Theater and in improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and has been…
CeeKay Brown is a half-French, half-American one-liner and storytelling comedian based in Washington, DC and Barcelona. She has performed since childhood, training in theatre, Shakespeare, ballet, choir, pantomime, clowning and improv, and she also works as a voice actor. She did her first stand-up set in Brussels in October…
Jason Salmon is a Texas-born, New York-based stand-up comedian and actor. He moved to New York for an engineering job, took acting classes, and worked through theatre, sketch and improv before he tried stand-up. His debut album, Force of Nurture, reached number one on iTunes, his Dry Bar Comedy special ranked among Dry Bar's top…