The History of Stand-Up Comedians Doing Sitcoms, Part 2

In Part 1 of this two-part history, we worked backwards from Seinfeld to look at the various ways stand-up comedians from the 1960s and ’70s turned their stage acts into hit TV sitcoms. For Part 2, we’re using Seinfeld as a starting point again; but we’re heading in a different direction, to consider how one of the most successful shows of the ’90s changed how TV executives and star comedians approached the challenge of turning funny jokes into weekly episodes.

Seinfeld wasn’t an immediate hit. Its first two seasons were truncated; and both were mostly used to fill space on the NBC schedule. The show really started to find an audience in its fourth season, after it landed a plum slot on the same night as the soon-to-depart super-hit Cheers. Earlier in the ’90s, the real successor to The Cosby Show and Roseanne seemed to be Home Improvement, which turned Tim Allen’s broadly popular routines about being a macho dad into a competently made but utterly run-of-the-mill sitcom, with none of Roseanne’s cutting edge or Seinfeld’s sly perversity. For the brief stretch when Seinfeld and Home Improvement were scheduled head-to-head, Allen’s show handily won the ratings race.

But almost inconceivably, Seinfeld eventually captured the public’s imagination, becoming not just a dominant force in the Nielsens in the back half of the ’90s but also hugely influential. For the rest of the decade, network TV schedules were filled with sitcoms that, inspired by Seinfeld, were either about groups of clever urbanites hanging out or featured successful stand-up comics in leading roles (or both).

Here’s just some of what shared the airwaves with Seinfeld — and what followed after Seinfeld ended.

It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986-1990) / The Larry Sanders Show (1992-1998)

While Seinfeld, Allen, Bill Cosby, and Roseanne Barr were chasing the big network TV money, one of the biggest stars of the 1970s comedy scene tried his hand at cable television, in the years before original made-for-cable series were common. In Showtime’s It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, Shandling played a version of himself: an intensely self-critical L.A.-based comedian with a thriving career but a sputtering love life. The gimmick was that Shandling (or “Shandling”) was aware he was in a sitcom, and would talk to the camera to point out how the conventions of the form could turned the messiness of real life into something more easily digestible — not unlike how comedians often turn their deep personal pain into punchlines.

For his second cable series, Shandling ditched conventions and embraced mess. In HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show he played an established late night talk show host in the full throes of the kind of paranoia and egomania endemic to the rich and famous. The show didn’t spoof the late night TV comedy scene so much as reflect how cutthroat it was becoming in the 1990s; and while each episode was filled with real-life stars playing Larry’s guests (as “themselves,” sort of), the real subject of The Larry Sanders Show was how showbiz can turn clowns into cranks.

As a stand-up, Shandling was very funny but a bit middle-of-the-road, with lots of jokes drawing on the standard comic themes of sex and self-doubt. But both of his series were more daring, taking advantage of the freedom of cable to peel back comedy’s protective layers.

Martin (1992-1997) / Everybody Hates Chris (2005-2009)

While it’s true that cable TV offered adventurous creators some leeway to explore, the late ’80s and early ’90s also saw a handful of new broadcast networks, open to new voices. Fox, UPN, and The WB (the latter two of which were later replaced by The CW) ended up becoming a haven for Black comedians and writers who’d been previously shunned by the old “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Steve Harvey, Bernie Mac, Mo’Nique, Jamie Foxx, and the Wayans Brothers all found homes on the new nets; and so did Martin Lawrence, whose Fox series Martin allowed him to channel all of his stand-up riffs on relationships and modern life into his TV character, a Detroit disc jockey.

Chris Rock took a different approach with Everybody Hates Chris. Though it’s based on his life, he’s the narrator and not the star of this sitcom, which tells stories about a nerdy kid who feels like a misfit in both the predominantly white school he attends and the rough Bed-Stuy neighborhood where he lives. The show is a more sanitized version of Rock’s stand-up jokes about his childhood; and it’s also part of a subset of sitcoms that take a much more filtered approach to a comedian’s schtick. (See also: Louie Anderson’s Life With Louie, Howie Mandel’s Bobby’s World, Roseanne Barr’s Little Rosey, Eddie Murphy’s The PJs, and Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids… all animated.)

Ellen (1994-1998) / The Drew Carey Show (1995-2004) / Everybody Loves Raymond (1996-2005)

Drew Carey and Ray Romano were two of the more unlikely candidates to have long-running hit sitcoms, not because of lack of talent — they were both highly successful stand-ups before arriving on network television — but because neither had what old-timey producers might’ve called “an angle.” The earlier stand-ups who’d thrived on TV mostly brought distinctive perspectives and personalities, drawn from the uniquely personal stories they told on-stage. But Carey and Romano were more known for telling observational jokes in the voices of mildly exasperated everymen, annoyed by the quality of fast food restaurants and the stresses of being a husband and father.

Unlike Seinfeld, neither The Drew Carey Show nor Everybody Loves Raymond even tries to reinvent the sitcom form. The Drew Carey Show is mostly a workplace comedy, with Carey playing a middle-aged single guy holding down an unexceptional white collar job at a Cleveland department store. And Everybody Loves Raymond is a straightforward domestic sitcom, with Romano playing a New York sportswriter living with his wife and kids on Long Island in a house across the street from his mother, father and brother.

But what makes both shows work is that they frame common experiences within a context of humane empathy and low-key quips. They’re as personable as they are funny. They take the shape of their stars, who are both very likable and relatable.

They’re both similar in that way to Ellen DeGeneres’ first sitcom Ellen (originally titled These Friends of Mine), another slice-of-life sitcom, about an awkward single lady and her eclectic, eccentric pals. The difference is that DeGeneres really did have an edge and an angle with her stand-up act at the time, which was built around her wide, faux-naive smile and stream-of-consciousness riffs — both in their way designed to toy with audiences by only hinting at what the comedian might really be thinking. Ellen was ultimately too generic a vehicle for a talent like that… that is, until its last season, in which DeGeneres tried to be more frank about her experiences as a gay woman, in ways that proved controversial and unpopular, despite their relative tameness.

Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-2024)

As radical as Seinfeld seemed in the ’90s, it was still a network TV show, with limitations on how raunchy it could get — and how dark. Set free on HBO, Seinfeld’s co-creator Larry David could strip his “show about nothing” down to its essence, shifting it from covering the mild pet peeves of a fussy professional comedian to the raging frustrations of a rich Hollywood jerk.

This change followed naturally from the two men’s approach to stand-up comedy. Jerry Seinfeld cocked an eye at the ordinary, approaching his annoyances from the perspective of a more or less reasonable guy. David preferred to push every comic idea to its extreme, imagining how someone with no sense of social propriety might react to the benign demands of daily life. Curb Your Enthusiasm is partly a farce built around extreme misbehavior and partly an honest howl of disgust at how hard it is sometimes for an opinionated dude to grit his teeth and be polite.

Louie (2010-2015)

Just as Seinfeld continued a semi-meta tradition that reached back to The Joey Bishop Show and The Danny Thomas Show, so the post-Seinfeld era has seen plenty of sitcoms in which stand-up comics play fictionalized versions of themselves. John Mulaney did it on the short-lived Mulaney. Jim Gaffigan had a two-season run with the under-seen The Jim Gaffigan Show, which captured what it’s like to be an in-demand entertainer and a family man.

But the series that most radically reimagined what a TV show about a stand-up comic could be is one that would likely be more widely remembered today as a 21st-century classic, if its creator and star hadn’t torched his own reputation in recent years. Louis C.K.’s Louie is ostensibly about a New York stand-up comic, balancing his career and his personal life; and just like in Seinfeld, the episodes feature stand-up routines as a framing device. But where Seinfeld spins its scenarios into farce, Louie turns everyday life into expressionist art films, filled with exaggerations and surreal interludes.

An earlier Louis C.K. sitcom, Lucky Louie, played around with the form of an old-fashioned TV show, by shooting on video before a live studio audience (much like the gently subversive It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. But Louie’s influences are more Twin Peaks than The Honeymooners. The show reflects the unique angst and personal taste of Louis C.K. — a man who has admitted to abusing his power as a popular comedian to sexually harass multiple women.

That inescapable imprint may also be why Louie is harder to enjoy today. Like The Cosby Show and Roseanne, Louie is stained by its star’s off-screen offenses — but only because these shows do such a fine job of reflecting and recontextualizing those stars’ comic personas. This has always been a tricky thing to finesse: to take an artform as risky and fragile as stand-up comedy and turn it, for better or worse, into unforgettable TV.

Noel Murray is a freelance pop culture critic and reporter living in central Arkansas.