Comedy is hard to predict – young stars arise from nowhere, old favorites fall from grace, and tastes change quicker than a six-second Vine (RIP). With that crucial caveat, here are few comedic things piquing our interest in the new year.
Whether you’re heading out to a show or curling with Netflix, there will be plenty of standup to see in 2017. After his sharp turn at the Oscars last year, Chris Rock is returning to his roots with his first standup tour in nearly a decade. That tour will eventually result in two Netflix specials for anyone who can’t catch him on the road.
Rock’s fellow superstar Dave Chappelle has been back on the road for a while now, and he’s also signed on with the streaming service to produce a new standup special next year. Fans of Chappelle can also discover two older, previously unreleased live performances, which will be added to Netflix sometime next year.
For fans of international comedy, Gad Elmaleh – France’s answer to Jerry Seinfeld, who has been attempting to “break” America for the last year – has landed two standup specials with Netflix. The first, to premiere in January, is a mostly French language hour entitled Gad Gone Wild, while an English language set will be released later in the year.
In other streaming news, Kevin Hart is set to launch his own video-on-demand channel, Laugh Out Loud, in early 2017. The service will serve as a hub for Hart’s deep back catalog, as well as feature new original shows with the standup superstar. But it’s not exclusively a vanity project; Laugh Out Loud will also present shows from up-and-coming acts and a series of standup specials filmed at the Montreal Just for Laughs festival last summer.
Comedy Central remains a hub for standup specials, and the network has already announced four for this winter. The first few months of 2017 will see new hours from Kurt Braunohler, Joe DeRosa, Mark Normand and Roy Wood Jr, with many more surely to come as the year goes on. And over at HBO, fans can look forward to standup specials from Jerrod Carmichael, TJ Miller and Pete Holmes.
For those willing to travel for comedy, there are already some festivals with their eye on the new year. San Francisco’s Sketchfest, in late January, boasts a lineup including the Kids in the Hall, Rachel Bloom, Tim and Eric, John Hodgman and Jesse Thorn, and Andy Richter – and, enticingly, jazz music from Jeff Goldblum and his band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra. And in April in Austin, Texas, Moontower Comedy & Oddity Fest has announced a strong “first wave” lineup, including Patton Oswalt, Colin Quinn, the Sklar Brothers, Michelle Wolf and Ali Wong.
And there will be plenty of new narrative comedy to keep up with. HBO will grow its sitcom offerings – currently strong with Veep and Silicon Valley – with the new Judd Apatow-produced Crashing. The show, set to debut in February, stars Pete Holmes in a some-autobiographical series about a young standup who discovers his wife has been unfaithful and is leaving him. Also at the network, Bill Hader’s Barry follows the former SNL cast member as a midwestern hitman who travels to a Los Angeles for a job and gets swept up in the local theater scene.
Over on network television, Fox is debuting its mid-season series Making History, a time-travel sitcom starring Adam Pally and Leighton Meester, alongside a crew of comedy stalwarts like Yassir Lester, John Gemberling and Neil Casey. And Netflix has ordered a television series based on the 2014 indie satire Dear White People, about life at an Ivy League school from the perspective of several African American students.
Whether it’s on stage or screen, there’ll be plenty of comedy to check out in 2017.
