State Champ Radio Comedy Lists
No matter how quick the wit, no stand-up comic starts out a success. Forget the top: on the way to the bottom rung, comics need to endure endless open-mic tryouts, log thousands of miles for little or no money and be thankful for 1:00 a.m. slots in front of drunken hecklers. And that’s just for starters. The further up the ladder they climb, the more pressure they face to consistently write and hone hour-plus sets that will power tours, specials and social media. Increasingly, they also choose to engage in a weekly form of digital improv known as the podcast.
As the first quarter of the 21st century comes to an end, Billboard set out to determine the best of that A-list: the top 25 stand-up comics of the last 25 years. To come up with these rankings, we polled experts that work with comics on a daily basis: bookers with a long histories of breaking comic talent.
The panel consists of William Burdett-Coutts, who heads the Assembly venues at the Edinburgh Fringe festival; Michael Cox, stand-up booker for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon; Adam Eget, manager at Joe Rogan’s Comedy Mothership in Austin, Tx, and before that, the Comedy Store in Los Angeles; Bruce Hills, who, for 36 years booked and eventually ran Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival; Caroline Hirsch, the founder of Caroline’s Comedy Club and co-founder of the New York Comedy Festival; Chris and Steve Mazzilli, owners of the Gotham Comedy Club in Manhattan; Patrick Milligan, the booker and proprietor of The Stand NYC comedy club; Susan Provan, director of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival; and Samantha Schles, director of comedy at the SXSW Festival. (Billboard‘s parent company, PMC, owns a 50% stake in SXSW.)
Thanks to all our panelists for taking time out of their hectic schedules to participate. (And special thanks to Hill, who provided valuable advice on voting parameters, helped create a well-rounded and authoritative judges panel and generously provided means to contact them.)
The process began with our panel helping put together a ballot of more than 150 nominees. The talent pool was limited to comedians with active stand-up careers over the last 25 years — as opposed to sketch, sitcom, film or improvisational performers, such as the cast of Saturday Night Live, Second City or Upright Citizens Brigade. Overseas comedians with a presence in the United States were also considered.
From there, the judges each ranked their top 25 comics. Voting was anonymous, and a weighted system was used to determine the top 25. As a number of judges remarked when returning their ballots, winnowing such a large batch of nominees was extremely difficult. There are a lot of exceptional stand-up comics out there.
For the next week, Billboard will present the results of the voting — the top 25 stand-up comedians of the last 25 years — in ascending order, five at a time, with the complete list unveiled on Friday (Dec. 6). Nos. 25 through 21 follow below.
25. Jon Stewart
The nights are getting longer, the days are getting colder, and the holidays draw near. Now, more than ever, you need the warming balm of laughter, and we’ve got you covered: two established voices this time out and two you may not know, presented in alphabetical order. Leslie Jones and Michelle Wolf, of course, are […]
The old line that if you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny didn’t apply to two panels held during the festival. On Nov. 15, the cast of NBC/Peacock’s very funny mockumentary, St. Denis Medical — which takes place in a financially strapped Oregon hospital — and its co-creator and showrunner and Eric Ledgin gathered at the Hard Rock Hotel to discuss the hit sitcom.
After screening an episode from the series’ second season, which is currently airing, Ledgin and cast members David Alan Grier, Allison Tolman, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Kahyun Kim, Mekki Leeper and Kaliko Kauahi took part in a Q&A moderated by Mara Webster.
Kauahi, who plays the deadpan Nurse Val — in season one, she dragged a giant wooden crucifix into the room of a patient who wouldn’t undergo an appendectomy without it —revealed her favorite line of dialogue: “I’m sorry your finger smells like that, but you have to move to the back of the line.”
Aussie Josh Lawson, who plays the cluelessly egocentric Dr. Bruce — in pretty flawless American English — and Ledgin talked about the curious items in the surgeon’s on-set office, which include a golden football, second-place talent show trophies and an electric guitar. “He’s that guy, good God,” Lawson said. Ledgin also recounted how Lawson’s office display came to include a samurai sword after a prop guy asked him about one of the awards in the office. “I said, ‘His sword?’ And he said, ‘No, his award.’” Ledgin’s reply: “We’ve got to get him a sword.”
“Comedy Is Not Pretty,” goes a song (and album) by Steve Martin, and Ledgin gave testament to that declaration when he said that working on the second season of St. Denis Medical gave him “a lot deeper acceptance for how not fun my life is while we’re making the show.”
But as Joyce, McLendon-Covey’s hospital administrator, might say in an attempt to ease the pain: “We’re working late, and there’s pizza!”
Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris speak onstage during the Celebration Of The 25th Anniversary Of The Cancellation Of “Strangers With Candy” event as part of the 2025 New York Comedy Festival at Town Hall on November 08, 2025 in New York City.
Valerie Terranova/Getty Images
There were no snacks for Strangers With Candy creators Sedaris, Dinello and Colbert, who sat for a panel discussion that was billed as a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the cancellation of the out-there Comedy Central show that ran from 1999 to 2000. On Nov. 7 at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, the trio — who Colbert said often “would write all night and go to the set” — revealed that they were never actually told their show was canceled. “They just stopped filling our snack drawer,” Dinello said.
The series was a spoof of after-school specials — ham-fisted morality plays that ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast from the ‘70s through the ‘90s — and featured Sedaris as Jerri Blank, a former prostitute and junkie high-school dropout who resumed her education as a 46-year-old freshman. Colbert played married history teacher Chuck Noblet, who was carrying on a secret affair with Dinello’s art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck. “We were improvising while we were writing a lot,” Colbert said of the trio’s creative process, adding: “If we laughed, we couldn’t cut it from the show.”
Although Strangers was satire — one of its funniest episodes is a spoof of the 1962 film The Miracle Worker, in which the illiterate Jerri, in the Helen Keller role, learns to read — the show, which is available on Paramount+, was more than groundbreaking. Its surreal vibe defies imitation. As one audience member observed, Jeri Blank was one of the first gender-queer characters on television.
The series also featured some memorably absurd dance sequences, and at the end of the discussion, the audience was treated to a montage of fascinating footwork by the characters that should be available to stream as well.
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This star-studded sketch is a mini masterpiece that delivers on both a local and national level, and it’s all the better for not wearing its politics on its sleeve. Each of New York’s mayoral candidates — independent Andrew Cuomo (Teller), Democrat Zohran Mamdani (Youssef) and Republican Curtis Sliwa (Gillis) — as well as the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams (Patterson) get their own turn on the spit of this perceptive satire.
Cuomo: “I got us through Covid, and then, yada, yada, yada, honk-honk, squeeze-squeeze,” he says, a reference to the sexual harassment allegations that dog him.
Sliwa: “I’m the only candidate here who’s been dangled by my testicles off the Verrazano Bridge by a little-known gang called The Lords of Flatbush. I was also poured into the foundation of Giants Stadium and crawled my way out. And just on my way here, I was ejaculated upon at the great Stardust Diner by a Times Square Spider-Man.”
For anyone under 60, The Lords of Flatbush was a 1974 film about a motorcycle gang that starred Henry Winkler, Sylvester Stallone and Paul Jabara, and featured a scene that resembles the dangling described by Gillis. Sliwa, who is also the founder of the volunteer crime protection group, the Guardian Angels, was abducted and shot in a cab in 1992 after Gambino crime family boss John Gotti put a hit out on him, has, more recently claimed unverified threats against his life because of his refusal to drop out of the race.
Mamdani: “I’m ready to spend the next hour hearing my opponents pronounce my name in ways you couldn’t begin to imagine. And I know some of you out there are scared of the idea of a young, socialist Muslim mayor. So, allow me to put you at ease by smiling after every answer in a way that hurts my face.” (Youssef, who has one of the best high-beam smiles in show business, is the ideal man for the job.)
And in another response: “I want to be mayor so I can deliver a better New York. Free healthcare, affordable housing, free WiFi,” Youssef as Mamdani says. “As mayor, can I make that happen? I’m not sure yet. But together we’re going to find out… that the answer is no.”
The butchering of Mamdani’s name alone is pretty spectacular here: Gillis as Sliwa calls him “Zoltar Rob Zombie” and Patterson as Adams refers to him as “Zorgon Mamagrama.”
There are also plenty of inside jokes for New Yorkers, such as the debate sponsors: One is the Gristedes supermarket chain, which is owned by billionaire Republican John Catsimatidis, who was pressuring Sliwa to drop out of the race. Others include the latest bane of the city’s pedestrians: bike lanes. (“You want a new way to die? Step into a bike lane,” says Thompson as the debate moderator.)
There are so many jokes in this sketch — which lasts just over 9 minutes — that it bears repeated watching, and Johnson-as-Trump makes an appearance near the end as the answer to the question posed to the candidates: “What is the biggest problem you have to confront as mayor?” Promising to be “very hands on,” Trump motions to Cuomo and says, “This guy knows about hands on, right, Cuomo?”
Wait, there’s more! The sketch ends with Trump performing “The Music of the Night” from the Broadway hit, The Phantom of the Opera. And godd–n, Johnson can carry a tune.
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Fred Armisen has few equals when it comes to committing to the bit. Whether he’s playing Prince or gold-toothed Venezuelan timbales player Fericito on Saturday Night Live, Dave, Spyke or Bryce on Portlandia, or Uncle Fester on Wednesday, he inhabits his characters so completely that they can be uncomfortable to watch—especially when those characters lack any self-consciousness, are painfully naive, talentless or annoying. It’s a trick he brought to his public persona as well, especially his bits with Seth Meyers as the drummer of the 8G Band on Late Night, explaining that he was releasing his first fragrance (a suspiciously dark liquid that smelled like ink) or launching his own celebrity circus.
So when Armisen appeared on Netflix’s Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney last March and announced he was about to release an album of sound effects on the Drag City label, it was hard to tell if it was real, a joke, or an Andy Kaufman-esque bit that lived in the space between reality and comedy. Even Mulaney seemed uncertain. And when Armisen played a few sound effects, the straightforwardness of it all only fed the uncertainty.
Turns out, Armisen was not kidding — at least not joking about releasing an album of unadorned recordings of . . . sounds. Drag City released 100 Sound Effects in late September. As the Chicago label’s co-founder Dan Koretzky put it: “Fred proposed a sound effects record, and thinking he meant a tribute to The Jam, we were thrilled! When we realized it was a record of actual sound effects, we were overjoyed!” Koretzky was referring to Paul Weller-led band’s 1980 near-masterpiece Sound Affects, and the cover of Sound Effects pays homage to that album. It is also dedicated to the late producer and indie rock icon Steve Albini, who helped Armisen find L.A. recording studios for the project before he died last year.
100 Sound Effects actually contains a 101st bonus track — a throwback to the full flowering of the CD format in the 1990s and 2000s. The recordings range from seven seconds to one minute and 49 seconds. (A nine-track compilation on Spotify combines a number of effects by subject.) Comedian friends also feature on some of the tracks, including Tim Heidecker, Mary Lynn Rajskub (remember her in that torture procedural 24?) and his wife Riki Lindhome.
In interviews for the album, Armisen has said he hopes some of the recordings will actually be used by the entertainment industry. Licensing fees are a little unlikely, given the ready availability of royalty-free sound libraries. But Koretzky does not sound like someone concerned about how much the album sells or streams. Asked why his label would commit to an album with little commercial potential, he replied via email: “We may have different definitions of commercial success.”
Given Armisen’s commitment to the project and his craft, Billboard committed to listening to and ranking the tracks on 100 Sound Effects. That said, 101 entries do not follow. Some of the sound effects are slight variations on a theme, such as breaking glass, and, for the purpose of this article, are evaluated as a group.
Fred Armisen, “100 Sound Effects”
Courtesy Photo
Track 101: “Fred Walking to Control Room”
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