Streaming services might be best known for their prestige dramas and mediocre films, but their secret weapon is arguably standup comedy. More standup specials are available to watch on demand than ever before, covering everything from cult comedians to bland, mass-market sets by panel show regulars. All tastes are catered for, but these are the best specials currently available to smart people who like good things.
John Mulaney: The Comeback Kid
Prior to The Comeback Kid, all I knew of John Mulaney was that he once made a sitcom that everyone hated. However, onstage Mulaney is a revelation; he’s smart and precise, selecting each word with surgical care. The final story he tells in The Comeback Kid – about how he met Bill Clinton as a child – is easily the stand-out, but the whole hour is blisteringly confident in its execution. My new favourite.
Marc Maron: Thinky Pain
The Marc Maron who performs standup comedy these days is thankfully quite different to the Marc Maron who embarks of sprawling go-nowhere monologues about nothing on his podcast. This Maron is softer spoken, with all the self-analysis in service of actual jokes, about sport and atheism and Bill Hicks. What Thinky Pain also has over its contemporaries is size. Many standup specials are huge in scale, but this is small and intimate, with the audience inches from Maron’s feet; the best moments come when he’s eyeballing people during his set pieces.
Chelsea Peretti: One of the Greats
For the most part, standup specials attempt to replicate the sensation of watching standup comedy live. There are exceptions – Kevin Hart’s specials tend to replicate the sensation of watching standup comedy live directly after being subjected to a prolonged lecture about how great Kevin Hart is – but that generally seems to be the rule. One of the Greats gently subverts this tradition by seeding in unrelated footage. Early on, for example, Peretti looks offstage and sees herself dressed as a clown in the wings. She’s later heckled by a childhood photo of herself. Done badly, this onslaught of peripheral nonsense could overwhelm Peretti’s act. Here, though, it simply enhances it.
Ali Wong: Baby Cobra
Wong was seven months pregnant when she recorded this special, and although her opening remarks – “We are gonna have to get this shit over with, because I have to pee in like 10 minutes” – might lead you to believe that the entire special will specifically be about her condition, in truth it’s barely mentioned at all. The meat of her act is bold and provocative – covering sex and race and marriage – and, considering just how pregnant she is, it also singles her out as an especially gifted physical comedian.
Demetri Martin: Live at the Time
You will learn nothing about Demetri Martin in this hour. There are no personal stories to be told, no modulation of delivery, no anything that even approaches confessional material. What there is, however, is wordplay. This is a show of abstract one-liner after abstract one-liner, ranging from good to brilliant. It’s so scattershot that it doesn’t fit the model of a traditional standup set at all but, once you fall into step with Martin’s detached persona, it quickly becomes hypnotic.
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