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 have told us about working together. It covers a married couple with three shows, two friends who write in a pub, a podcast partnership that has not missed a week since 2013, and a sketch cast of thirteen. Their arrangements are very different. The things that hold them together turn out to be the same.
Jump to: Couples · Two friends · The long partnership · Three or more · The partner you cannot see · What makes it work · Common questions
Couples: married, and on the same stage
Whisper Theatre: one marriage, three shows
Britt Anderson and Richie Schiraldi met when he performed on a physical comedy night she ran in Chicago. They went to the same graduate school, started working together there, and started dating there too. They have now trained together for about eight years and made eight shows as Whisper Theatre. “It helps that we’re married,” Schiraldi says.
They took three shows to the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe: a solo hour each, and a duo show, Well-Balanced Dads, in which two fathers express their feelings through acrobatics. The solo shows are dark. The one they made together is the silly one, on purpose, because they wrote the two hard ones first and wanted relief.
Eight years of lifting each other has practical uses. Schiraldi competes in wheel gymnastics and regularly arrives at rehearsal injured, so they keep a plan A, a plan B and a plan C, and can choose between them silently on stage. Anderson’s summary: “Well-Balanced Dads is me working around Richie’s injuries that he gets from doing his other work.”
The partnership nearly ended in the pandemic. Schiraldi remembers a dinner at which they both cried and wondered whether theatre was over for them. Anderson’s answer was: “We should write a farce.” That became the show. Schiraldi also runs the lights and sound for Anderson’s solo hour, and has watched it being written over years. We asked what he loves in it:
“I get to watch my partner thrive in an emotional Olympic event.”
Read our interview with Whisper Theatre.
Chloe Matonis: the husband who reads the script
Chloe Matonis met her husband when he was in the audience at one of her shows in Chicago. He is a former member of the Blue Man Group and was putting together a clown cabaret. They worked together, became friends, and married later. He now helps direct her, and they swap scripts. It was he who pointed out that her show, about a soldier sent back from the future, had the plot of Terminator 2. She had not noticed. Read our interview with Chloe Matonis.
Two friends
Tom Johnson and Rob Glenister: written in a pub
Tom Johnson’s sketch show Armageddon Out Of Here began with a different collaborator, who turned out to be a director and not a writer. Then Rob Glenister came in, and his whole approach was: “Okay, let’s go muck about.” The two had done improv together for years in Southend-on-Sea, and their writing method is to go to a pub and see what they can say to make each other laugh.
“We never have to explain ourselves to each other, which is a lovely attribute.”
It is a very physical show, and the trust is physical as well. In one sketch Glenister breaks a piece of wood over Johnson’s head. Glenister suggested cardboard. Johnson insisted on wood. Read our interview with Tom Johnson.
Lucy Boisvert and Fletcher Michael: “my creative soulmate”
Lucy Boisvert and Fletcher Michael met in a sketch class in New York, where students read their work aloud and the two of them noticed each other’s writing at once. Liking someone’s writing is only the first stage, Boisvert says. Then you find out whether you can work together, and whether it lasts. She now writes alone or with him, and with nobody else. “He’s my creative soulmate, for sure.” A friend once told her, a little sadly, “I don’t have a Fletcher.”
They are useful to each other because they are different. She is driven by the idea that has to get out of her head. He is the focused one. Her test of a good collaborator is envy: “Everybody should be jealous of each other in a really healthy, lift-you-up way. I don’t want to feel like the funniest person in the room.” Read our interview with Lucy Boisvert.
Michael, interviewed on the same day, put it more plainly. “My method, if there is a method, is just working with people I really trust.” He wants partners who will tell him when he is wrong. Read our interview with Fletcher Michael.
Stacie Burrows: two voices and one punchline
Stacie Burrows spent about ten years in a comedy band about motherhood with her partner Shannon. One was from Texas and one from Kentucky, and both could sing sweet Southern harmony. The act lived in the distance between how it sounded and what it said: a lovely chord, landing on a rude punchline. When she later wrote a solo show, she did that with a partner too, her best friend and co-writer Sam Small. Read our interview with Stacie Burrows.
The long partnership: Fisher and Hutchinson
Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson have released a podcast every Friday since 2013 without missing one, and were a comedy duo for three years before that. They met when Hutchinson interned at the company where Fisher worked, and Fisher came to her first stand-up show. Fisher’s theory was that a comedian needs an A project and a B project. The duo was the B project.
We have interviewed each of them alone and both together, and they describe the partnership in the same terms. Hutchinson: “Corinne and I have a chemistry that you can’t manufacture. I wish you could bottle it up. I’d be a billionaire.” She calls Fisher “the Yin to my Yang”. Fisher agrees, and explains the division of labour.
“Krystyna brings the childlike wonder and then I figure out how that pure vision can actually exist in this brutal business.”
Fisher can work an eighteen-hour day on three hours of sleep. Hutchinson is the one who colour-codes the spreadsheets. On stage neither knows what the other will say, and Hutchinson calls it “a huge trust fall”.
There is a boundary, and Fisher is firm about it. They do not write stand-up together. “Stand-up is an incredibly solo activity.” The podcast is “our baby”. The stand-up belongs to each of them alone. Read our joint interview with them, or Fisher and Hutchinson on their own.
Three or more
Three comics, one bill
Danielle Slaughter, Lauren LoGiudice and Wayne Charles II share an Edinburgh show that opens with the three of them together and then splits into three stand-up sets. They did not start from a format. They went through each other’s material first and built outwards, which took months. “It helps that we all actually get along,” Charles says.
Slaughter says her favourite part of the night is watching the other two. “The intimacy of knowing someone else’s set is really fun for me.” LoGiudice has a theory about why some comedians cannot do this. There are headliners who champion the acts before them, because it makes them better, and headliners who fear being outshone. The second kind, she says, stop improving. Read our interview with the trio.
Thirteen in a sketch cast
Fletcher Michael’s company also runs a sketch show with a cast of thirteen. Managing thirteen comedians, he told us, is “like trying to herd minnows”, and the only thing that gets them moving in one direction is a shared goal. His motto: “If you treat it like a big deal, everyone else will too.”
A play is a group project
Hannah Ponturo wrote and directed her Fringe play and is one of its four producers. She still calls it a group project, and says anyone who claims otherwise is lying. Her actors regularly give her lines and instincts she could not have written. Read our interview with Hannah Ponturo.
The improv team
Rebecca Wolf does stand-up, clown and improv, and says stand-up is by far the hardest, because in improv “you have a whole team, or at least one other person, to rely on”. Her improv team also taught her that agreement is overrated. You have to agree about the world of the scene. You do not have to agree with your partner in it. “Couples argue all the time, and that’s actually a really funny thing to watch.” Read our interview with Rebecca Wolf.
The partner you cannot see
Some of the closest partnerships we have heard about have only one person on stage.
- Sevrin Willinder and Melissa. He is alone on stage for an hour and calls it a two-person show disguised as a one-person show. Melissa created it with him from nothing and runs the sound live, which makes her his scene partner. Read our interview with Sevrin Willinder.
- Brendon Lemon and Adele Cliff. An American comedian wrote his Edinburgh show with a British joke writer who kept telling him, “These aren’t really jokes.” Read our interview with Brendon Lemon.
- Mark Ryder and his director. He wrote and performs a solo show about masculinity, and decided it should not be directed by another man. Read our interview with Mark Ryder.
- Larry Charles and Larry David. Two sketch writers who did not know how to structure a sitcom and wrote Seinfeld anyway, on the principle of what was funny to them. Read our interview with Larry Charles.
- Barry Katz and Dane Cook. The manager calls it a partnership, and says he was lucky to have it. Read our interview with Barry Katz.
What makes a comedy partnership work
- Be different in useful ways. Fisher and Hutchinson, and Boisvert and Michael, describe the same thing: one supplies the idea and the other the structure. Two people with the same strengths are one person twice.
- Find someone you do not have to explain yourself to. Johnson’s phrase. Boisvert knew within one class.
- Trust is built by repetition. Whisper Theatre talk in years of training, not numbers of shows. The trio took months before they put anything on a stage.
- Keep something of your own. Fisher’s stand-up is hers. Anderson and Schiraldi each have a solo hour. The partnership is stronger for not being everything.
- Want your partner to be funnier than you. Boisvert’s healthy envy and LoGiudice’s point about openers are the same idea. The comedians who fear being outshone are the ones who stall.
- Agree on the goal, not on everything. Michael’s thirteen comedians need a shared aim. Wolf’s improv team needs a shared world. Inside that, arguing is allowed, and often funnier.
For what these partners do once they sit down to write, see how 25 comedians write their jokes.
Common questions about comedy duos and groups
How do comedy duos write together?
Usually in the same room, by trying to make each other laugh. Tom Johnson and Rob Glenister do it in a pub. Lucy Boisvert and Fletcher Michael ask each other questions until a joke appears. Most duos also divide the work, with one person generating ideas and the other shaping them.
How do you find a comedy partner?
Almost everyone we spoke to met their partner in a class, at a show or at work. Improv and sketch classes come up most often, because you see how someone writes and performs before you commit to anything.
Is it easier to perform comedy in a group than alone?
Performers who do both say yes. Rebecca Wolf calls stand-up the hardest and most frightening form she does, because nobody else is there to rely on. A partner shares the risk on stage and the work off it.
For more conversations like these, see all our comedian interviews and our Edinburgh Fringe coverage.