The Best Comedy Specials of 2024 So Far

The TV landscape is still working through a hangover period in the wake of the Hollywood strikes, but you wouldn't know it from the deluge of comedy specials that have been released in 2024. Over the past few months, we've seen Jenny Slate tell a "weird love story in reverse" while describing her pregnancy in graphic detail, Ramy Youssef consider the burden of representation in HBO's More Feelings, and Hannah Gadsby take the fight to Netflix (while on Netflix) amid the ongoing Dave Chappelle controversy. While these sets run the gamut from profane to political, the best invite the audience to rethink their relationship to the world around them — all while being laugh-out-loud funny, of course.

If there's one knock on the year in comedy so far, it's that there's been a dearth of specials featuring non-white comics, particularly women. That stands to change in the coming months, as Netflix Is a Joke Fest brings together the likes of Katt Williams, Wanda Sykes, and Ali Wong (their specials will later stream on Netflix), but there's always room for more voices in comedy. As such, Primetimer will be updating this list throughout the year to ensure it reflects the great diversity across the genre.

With that, these are our picks for the best comedy specials of 2024 so far, presented in the order in which they premiered:

Ramy Youssef: More Feelings (HBO)

Ramy Youssef returns to HBO with More Feelings and even greater candor. The Egyptian-American comedian opens his new set by acknowledging the war on Gaza, and how powerless he feels as Muslims continue to be demonized. But this bracing honesty soon gives way to Youssef’s signature slyness: "It's weird times, man. People are scared of us, still. I thought it was over, but the brand is weak. They'll believe anything about us .… We need a rebrand."

In case you needed one, that’s a clear sign that Youssef isn’t going the “clapter” route. Youssef riffs on the Biden campaign’s misguided outreach attempts, which made him feel like the “mayor of Muslim disaster.” He owns up to letting his horniness get in the way of his convictions, which leads to his delightfully serpentine delivery of a story that may or may not bring him closer to his dad (it earns a roar of laughter from the crowd, though). Youssef doesn’t exactly come out swinging in More Feelings — that’s not his brand — but he easily proves he’s bolder than the supposedly transgressive comedians who insist on wringing their hands about what they are and aren’t allowed to say in their near-annual comedy specials. — Danette Chavez

Hannah Gadsby's Gender Agenda (Netflix)

Hannah Gadsby knows Gender Agenda "won't fix" the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle's recent comedy specials, which traffic in transphobic rhetoric and, in 2021, inspired a walkout among Netflix employees. "This is the carbon offset show," they say at the start of their recent comedy showcase, which brings together seven genderqueer comics at London's Alexandra Palace.

Though every comic incorporates gender and sexual identity into their set, their material ranges widely — Chloe Petts details her bouquet-catching strategy at weddings, while ALOK explains why "the gay agenda" is a myth (among other reasons: "unread emails") — and that's the point. As the host says during one introduction, they set out to "get a wide spectrum of voices on stage, not just gender, but also geography and tone and experience;" there are many different methods of counteracting the Chappelles and Ricky Gervaises of the world, and each is just as valid — and just as funny — as the rest. An evening like Gender Agenda may not be "enough," Gadsby acknowledges, but at the very least, it's a start. — Claire Spellberg Lustig

Jacqueline Novak: Get On Your Knees (Netflix)

It's reductive to dismiss Jacqueline Novak's Get on Your Knees as just a 90-minute rumination on the blowjob. (Her set even includes a quote from an early reviewer who accused her of discussing oral sex "to the point of tedium.") To be sure, Novak's acclaimed show does include an astounding number of jokes about fellatio and the male sex organ, which she believes has a distinctly feminine energy — "The penis, it blooms and it withers, and it blooms again. This kind of eternal flower, stretching toward that which nurtures it" — despite the machismo that's been projected onto it for millenia.

But these jokes, which rely on carefully crafted metaphors, build and build, culminating in a climax about the self-confidence Novak acquired through the act of performing oral sex and the complicated power dynamics at play during such an intimate moment. Add in the directorial stylings of Natasha Lyonne and John Early (Lyonne is responsible for the Netflix release, and Early the original stage show, but both are the perfect match for the frenetic pace of Get on Your Knees) and you have a highly unusual, but immensely satisfying, special. All hail the self-proclaimed "blowjob queen." — CSL

Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional (Prime Video)

If the 32 years that preceded them didn’t do it, Jenny Slate makes it clear that the last five have turned her into a Seasoned Professional. She’s seen great professional success, including garnering an Oscar nomination for Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and landing her second comedy special. Slate also fell in love, got married, and had a baby — while also weathering years of pandemic-related lockdowns, isolation, and just general misery. And boy, does she have a story (or 10) to tell, which are varying degrees of “okay, that’s embarrassing” and “I may die of secondhand embarrassment.”

Slate’s roving delivery is truly unique — it never remains in one place or register. She can switch effortlessly from a baritone voice (to, say, do an impression of some boorish authority figure) to a key so high it can only be described as that sound a Roman candle makes when it’s first shooting off (there’s a reason why she’s got so many voice credits to her name.) But even at her squeakiest and most self-deprecating, there’s no denying that Slate has grown as a stand-up comedian. We can’t wait for this seasoned professional to get back on stage. — DC

Alex Edelman: Just For Us (HBO)

Just For Us, Alex Edelman's long-running one-man show, benefits from a killer logline. In 2017, a Jewish comedian voluntarily attended a meeting of neo-Nazis in Queens, New York, where he encountered virulent antisemitism and racist conspiracy theories. As Edelman explains, he attended the white-nationalist gathering because, as a man raised by Orthodox Jewish parents in Boston, he's "curious about his whiteness" — the same phrasing used in the social media post advertising the event. And so began an experience equal parts absurd (he praises the spread of "whites-only muffins" and fantasizes about his meet-cute with a woman named Chelsea) and illuminating, with Edelman zagging between a blow-by-blow account of the meeting, stories from his childhood, and anecdotes about his Jewish identity.

The spirit of questioning (itself a Jewish value) is alive and well in Just For Us, in which rapid-fire punchlines and silly asides about Koko the Gorilla give way to a more serious examination of Edelman's relationship to Judaism and whiteness — and their relationship to each other — and the limits of empathy. By the end, Edelman is just as critical of himself as he is the neo-Nazis sitting in an "antisemicircle" around him. It's a conclusion that's meant to provoke the audience and prompt further questions, not just about religious or racial identity, but about the performances we put on to ingratiate ourselves with strangers and friends alike. — CSL

Good One: A Show About Jokes (Peacock)

Mike Birbiglia and Jesse David Fox (a senior editor at Vulture and host of the Good One: A Podcast About Jokes) have made what’s easily one of the most ambitious comedy specials in years. It’s not just that Birbiglia — who seems to have taken as much inspiration from his own podcast, Working It Out — and Fox found a way to improve on the Good One podcast. A Show About Jokes is a thoroughly illuminating and intimate look at one man’s (Birbiglia) creative process.

Coming off the high of The Old Man and the Pool, in which he reckoned with his own mortality, Birbiglia must now begin what always seems like an impossible task, at first: start writing a whole new hour of comedy. But death can lead to rebirth, and it isn’t long before Birbiglia has begun to weave together another tapestry of the silly yet wonderful vagaries that make up life — this often exasperating and yet wondrous experience. And maybe, by opening up about his process, Birbiglia will spark inspiration in others, and create even more life (or at least, jokes about the indignity of splashing around in the shallow end of the pool as a middle-aged person). — DC