The Comedians You Should and Will Know in 2023

If you live in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, or you don’t but you do spend a lot of time on TikTok, you’re well aware that there are almost too many talented comedians you should know: sketch groups, stand-ups, and people making weird animated videos or singing funny songs in their apartments. With traditional markers of success like Comedy Central half-hour specials becoming rarer, and a historic and successful writers’ strike grinding to a halt late-night stand-up debuts and staffing announcements for over six months, it’s harder than ever to predict which of these performers will end up being a big deal and which of them are just people the algorithm has assigned to you in particular.

That’s where Vulture’s “Comedians You Should and Will Know” list comes in, now in its tenth year: We’re here to celebrate the cream of the crop, separate the wheat from the chaff, and present to you 25 unique, hilarious babies we refuse to toss with the yucky bathwater. These are the comedians you will know because they’re creating all kinds of weird and wonderful work while introducing a range of new perspectives and sensibilities to the art form. And they’re posting it all: Some comics have built entire careers solely off their crowdwork; others are sharing their podcasts minutes at a time on TikTok. Every one of them has sent their performances into the ether, and the ether has laughed back to the tune of scene-stealing movie and TV roles, writing gigs at SNL and The Daily Show, and, most important, more passionate and ardent fan bases than ever.

Vulture polled more than a hundred industry insiders, including bookers, producers, artistic directors at theaters, talent scouts, TV executives, heads of podcast networks and comedy record labels, comedy photographers, and previous Comedians You Should and Will Know, to name the writers and performers they think are breaking out beyond their own orbits and into a collision course with popular culture writ large. More than 200 comedians, duos, and groups got at least one vote, but these are the 25 Comedians You Should and Will Know of 2023:

Fumi Abe

Fumi Abe describes himself as comedy’s version of a “Japanese salaryman,” meaning he takes being funny extremely seriously, he burns the midnight oil doing it, and, yeah, it’ll probably kill him. Abe began working in comedy in New York in 2014, balancing stand-up with a day job. This led to the monthly Hack City comedy show with his friend Michael Nguyen with whom he would go on to launch the podcast Asian Not Asian. Abe moved to the U.S. from Japan when he was 8, and Asian Not Asian became a space where he could talk about the specifics of his life — from the racist dating algorithms he experienced to the paucity of roles for Asian actors — as well as the general questions that haunt his mind (“Do you pee through the slit or over the band?”) with guests such as Ronny Chieng, Michelle Zauner, and Stephanie Hsu. In his stand-up, as seen on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, for instance, Abe wrings gold from his internal contradictions, bringing sex jokes down to earth by inevitably focusing on the unsexy details. Bro humor is a fine line to walk in 2023, and Abe has mastered the ways to make it work by infusing his anecdotes with vulnerability. “One time, I sent somebody a PDF of my penis. Not a dick pic, but a penis PDF. A peen-DF, if you will. You guys laugh,” he says both defensively and earnestly, gripping the mic in both hands in a Don’t Tell Comedy set from 2022, “but I did this because PDF is the actually the highest quality of image you can send somebody over the internet.”

Abe is now based in L.A. and, in 2022, left the podcast that made him a name. After two seasons writing for The Late Late Show With James Corden, he has a new podcast, Cash Cuties, in which he puts his analytical streak and friendly-but-brutal honesty to good use, reading and judging his comedian friends’ credit-card statements with co-host Steffie Baik and diving deep into the economics of everything from stripping to “thrifting and selling your ex-boyfriends’ clothes.” Like Planet Money but funny.

Brian Bahe

When Brian Bahe reveals that he has shat on a man’s dick, he does it with a little giggle. It’s cute and an example of what he does best: to delve into the potentially gross or difficult parts of his existence with a disarming nonchalance, recounting it all with the vocal equivalent of a raised eyebrow. (His dom tells him he sounds like Michael Barbaro.) He stays firmly in one octave while telling the story of a non-Indigenous head of HR doing a land acknowledgment over Zoom near his home’s indoor waterfall; rather than be outraged, as a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, Bahe is lightly incredulous. In another story, when an Asian woman mistakes Bahe for an Asian person she used to know because he’s “Asian passing,” he’s impassive: “Yeah, work has been crazy.” When he talks about noticing that a 2020-set gay porn includes a mom who “won’t be home for a while; she’s at work,” he draws the important conclusions: “The mom is an essential worker.”

Animation, where adorability and deadpan coincide, is Bahe’s natural habitat.  His animated pilot script Decolonize was selected for the 2022 Indigenous List –– it follows two “self-involved” millennials who receive leadership positions after the U.S. is returned to Indigenous people –– and he’s a writer on Fox’s The Great North. Onstage, he taped a set last year for Comedy Central’s Stand-Up Featuring and was a 2022 New Face at Montreal’s Just for Laughs. While performing, he sometimes looks like a character from the Bob’s Burgers–The Great North universe whose enviable posture and bright clothing never distract from an overall sense of beleaguerment. “I understand the assignment is for me to get dominated,” he says to his dom, embodying a specific kind of contemporary embarrassment. “But for you to just refer to me as a podcast host feels like a low blow.”

Ralph Barbosa

Ralph Barbosa doesn’t smoke as much weed as audiences might think he does, but he’s not exactly mystified by the origins of this misconception. “This is just my face,” he explains in one joke. “I do think that because I smoked so much during puberty, my face got stuck like this.” Between his glazed expression and the laid-back charm of his delivery, the Dallas native has produced comedy with an undeniable 420-friendly vibe that belies its structural merits. (Barbosa previously worked at Dallas’s Backdoor Comedy Club, a clean venue he says improved the strength of his writing by forcing him to perform without cursing.) He has a knack for carving out left-field analogies and re-creating miniature scenes from his life onstage, all of which support his pathological aversion to the cliché. Consider Barbosa’s joke about being resigned to the inevitability of climate change: “We’ve turned Earth into like a ’99 Honda Civic: Yeah, I don’t want this to die. This is my only ride. But I’m not going to keep putting money into this thing.”

His meteoric rise began in earnest with his viral Don’t Tell Comedy set, uploaded to YouTube in June 2022. At the time, he was already scheduled to perform on HBO’s comedy special Entre Nos: The Winners, an opportunity he received after winning the Latino Stand-Up! Comedy Competition at New York’s Latino Film Festival. He has since recorded sets for Comedy Central and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon but also unwittingly found himself in a public feud with George Lopez in February. Lopez, speaking on his podcast about Barbosa’s rise, said to his guest Steve Treviño, “Nobody knows who that motherfucker is! Why are you saying his name?” Barbosa, seemingly unfazed, reposted the podcast clip to his Instagram with a caption that read, “It’s all good baby, the future is now old man.” Proving this point, Barbosa’s first hourlong special, Cowabunga, drops on Netflix October 31.

Charlie Bardey and Natalie Rotter-Laitman (Exploration: LIVE!)

This is that thing where Exploration: LIVE! are stars. Charlie Bardey and Natalie Rotter-Laitman and have been earnestly exploring the tiny moments of life on their podcast since late 2021, where they teach their audience what it means to be a “coffee-shop celeb” (when you enter a coffee shop and know the barista) or the glory of “pharmacy hangs” (when you do menial errands with a friend so it’s kinda fun). It’s a show about “ideas, theories, axioms, and concepts,” and the smaller and more discrete the better. When performing at their show in Brooklyn, they lackadaisically stand around, ready to shoot casual ire at shy people and architects. At their best, the two match what the greatest observational comics do: putting words to universal circumstances that their audiences have experienced but never truly noticed before. Their mutual excitement when they hit on something specific, true, and ubiquitous is electric. The stakes are low, but their caring makes the identification important.

It’s easy to see why their respective energies work together to make vague jokes feel freakishly specific. Rotter-Laitman is constantly angry at being judged for doing things like killing a mouse or revealing what kind of sexual roleplay she enjoys. She is terminally indignant, always on the lookout for how life is trying to embarrass her. Bardey is more playful, teasing the audience with the prospect of learning his “compelling” Social Security number or using his prolific X account (neé Twitter) to chronicle the most minor of emotions like “when you’ve been driving on the same road for a long time and then another car gets on it’s like lol welcome to the road i guess.”

Bardey and Rotter-Laitman sell out shows as a duo and as solo performers at Union Hall and will take their own shows (A Little Chunk and Life Is Life, respectively) to this year’s New York Comedy Festival. Their strength as collaborators extends to other people: Bardey directed fellow 2023 “Comedian You Should and Will Know” Richard Perez’s solo show I Have to Do This, and Rotter-Laitman performs with other New York wunderkinds like Francesca D’Uva on their live comedy show Elsa & Elphaba.

Sophie Buddle

On The Late Late Show With James Corden in 2021, Sophie Buddle performed a bit about her boyfriend’s “schoolgirl fantasy” that doubles as a metaphor of her comedic approach. “Sometimes, as a grown-up lady, you have to act like a little baby,” she says. “It’s weirdly a part of growing old.” Buddle is a smart and well-rehearsed comedian, reminiscent of a young Sarah Silverman, who sometimes acts like a ditzy or bumbling comedian to make her jokes hit harder. Onstage, Buddle giggles, flips her hair, and looks around nervously, but it’s all a ruse to throw the audience and nail the timing of the razor-sharp punch lines she has coming. “What are you looking for? Pigtails? Backpack?” she asks her boyfriend in her “schoolgirl fantasy” joke. “He was like, ‘No, actually, I would just really love it if you went back to school.’”

Raised in Ottawa, Ontario, Buddle moved to L.A. in 2021 after winning the Juno Award for Comedy Album of the Year in 2020 for Lil Bit of Buddle, among several other accomplishments in the Canadian comedy scene. “I moved to America this year. I wanted to see it before it ends,” she jokes in her 2023 Tonight Show set. This is the other benefit of Buddle’s onstage persona: Her material can be deceptively political without alienating parts of her audience. “I think the government should put out a statement to these guys just being like, ‘Smile, gorgeous,’” she says of men who are concerned about the surveillance state later in this set. Before the overt feminist message of this joke sinks in, she tags it with her signature giggle.

Curtis Cook

“I’m not very smart,” one of Curtis Cook’s best jokes begins. The context: He thought that “Sufjan Stevens is what Cat Stevens changed his name to when he converted to Islam.” In fact, Cook is a closet intellectual — always informed, never bragging. He insists that he isn’t smart but uses his gruff voice and constant sighing to smuggle in syllabus-fodder material without shutting anyone out. He wants to reference Duchamp in a joke about scoring coke at an art-gallery opening? He makes sure everybody knows he’s only there because of his artist girlfriend (now wife). “I didn’t know Diego Rivera’s wife could paint!” he shouts with feigned ignorance. The punch line comes in the video caption: “For marketing purposes, it would behoove me to post this clip with a caption that’s like, ‘Very few people will understand this.’ ‘Cause even though that’s a straight-up lie and this is a pretty simple bit, that sorta caption would trick people into leaving comments about how they get the joke.”

Cook is quick paced to the point of sometimes shocking even himself with his own punch line. Describing the embarrassment of watching a male-confidence influencer, he says “And I’m even more embarrassed to say that it helped” with a rhythm that implies “Can you believe … me?” Like Jessica Seinfeld’s smuggling cauliflower into mac and cheese, the self-deprecating humor isn’t fooling anyone, but that’s also kind of the point, and that balance — the smart with the dumb, the vitamin K with the melted cheese product — has led to producing comedies like This Fool and American Dad!, writing for the reboot of Crank Yankers, and a discussion of Ye that somehow got the Jim Jefferies Show audience onboard with the idea of the Black Panther Party.

Katrina Davis

Katrina Davis’s go-to move onstage is to turn one palm upward, cock her head, and squint her eyes at the audience as if to say, “I can’t believe I have to explain this to you.” It makes her material feel universal, when in fact so much of it is rooted in her acerbic point of view and personal experiences. “I don’t get how you’re all finding people to fuck off stills,” she says in one joke, from her 2022 Comedy Central set, about the pictures in online dating profiles. “They need to move. They need to be at least like a newspaper in Harry Potter.” In explicit terms, it’s a joke about how Davis does not relate to her audience, but you wouldn’t know it from the tenor of her delivery.

This is Davis’s comedic superpower, best distilled in her 2022 Comedy Dynamics special Figuring It Out: She cycles through topics including the N-word and the shocking mechanics of shared burial plots, and in one standout moment, she mounts one of the most convincing comedic defenses of her home state of Florida ever committed to tape. “We all know that when temperatures rise, people make quicker decisions and violent crimes increase, and I feel like we should have an asterisk on our death toll based on that information alone,” she says. “New York will have a heat wave, and murder rates will go up, and everyone’s like, ‘Ahh, the hustle and bustle of the city!’” The special also explores Davis’s appreciation of art, a subject that inspired both her podcast Podvant Garde and her experimental 2022 stand-up project The Comic Is Present, two shows where she sat across from 50 volunteers with free rein to do and say whatever they want for a minute each –– she then performed an hour set shaped by that experience. If comedy needs its own Marina Abramović, Davis is already here.

Stavros Halkias

The former Cum Town podcast host and current homecoming king of crowdwork comedy is a cheerful, cackling id whose hourlong 2022 special Live at the Lodge Room is full of material on all of Stavros Halkias’s favorite pleasure centers — bodies, his body, sex, his sex life, threesomes, food, drugs, and self-loathing — and he has another special on the way. Halkias has been posting clips of his crowdwork for the last year and recently put them together as a half-hour crowdwork-only special, creating the most ample demonstration of his style and the ideas that clearly fascinate him the most.

“Anybody here plumping up these days?” he likes to ask an audience before gleefully exploring the exact psychological ramifications of one man’s obsession with DQ Heath Bar Blizzards. Who lives with their parents? Who’s recently been through a breakup? Halkias plays the crowd with precision, stilling himself long enough to listen while someone confesses to a recent embarrassment, then leap into animation again to regain control. He’s a connoisseur of the things that bring people shame, and he’s an expert in rooting around the audience’s darkest emotional corners before hoisting up all the weird relics he finds for public mockery. It’s mortifying, yes, but maybe there’s something cathartic about everyone laughing at themselves together.

Rob Haze

Rob Haze is certain he’d be famous by now if he had an “interesting story” — or at least that’s what he contends in a joke about growing up relatively unburdened by trauma. “I would go to church; they would be like, ‘God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,’” he says. “I’m like, Yo, God thinks I’m weak.” But where the Atlanta native’s backstory lacks marketable drama, he makes up for it with a bevy of offbeat observations, silly misreadings, and wry non sequiturs –– all of which he has a gift for stating plainly. “The dictionary needs more confidence,” he begins one joke in his 2019 Comedy Central set. “Every time someone cool says something, they want to add it to the dictionary … Destiny’s Child made ‘Bootylicious’ — they wanted to add bootylicious to the dictionary. Why? No one uses that word!”

His Brian Regan–esque knack for attacking subjects from multiple angles was put to great use in 2021, when Haze and Jamel Johnson created Sneak This, a sneakers-centric sketch show for Bleacher Report Kicks that covered everything from engineering a robot to buy sneakers online to the excuses sneakerheads use to justify their spending. Haze’s output is vast and varied –– he’s performed sets on Fallon and Corden, produced three television specials hosted by Kevin Hart, wrote and appeared on IFC’s Sherman’s Showcase, and has hosted The Inconsistent Podcast since 2022. All of this will culminate in the release of his upcoming stand-up special, which he taped in August.

Jordan Jensen

Jordan Jensen is fond of saying that she’s “like this” because she was “raised by a pack of lesbians.” It’s her preferred onstage explanation for her sleazebag charisma: She slouches, pulls faces, speaks with a growl and interrupts herself, punctuates thoughts with the word dude. She is not prim. Her jokes are often gloriously gross; she’s obsessed with sex, unseemly behavior, and all the thoughts that should be too unpleasant or uncomfortable to say out loud. That perspective translates well to comedy podcasting alongside her co-host, Ian Fidance, on Bein’ Ian With Jordan but is most at home when Jensen is alone onstage, letting her brain do whatever it does. When given the prompt “dentist,” for instance, her immediate response is a joke about how her mother’s first girlfriend was also Jensen’s dentist: “I had to go back to this woman constantly and just know that she’d had those same fingers inside my mother.” Some in the crowd groan in pain. Many laugh, but the laughs, like Jensen’s jokes, seem to come from a deep, uncontrollable place.

Andrea Jin

Andrea Jin is the poster child for Gen-Z comedy. Online, she’s a slightly messy older-sister type, speaking to TikTok in its native language by talking about core memories and past-lives regression. Onstage, she’s droll yet fashionable, seeming a little bored by the act of speaking and slightly offended when people laugh at her (a very fun bit for a comedian to have). Born in Shanghai before immigrating to Canada (now she’s in L.A.), she jumps from questionable advice on how to be a chill girlfriend (the trick is to throw your coat on the floor) to jokes about being born under the one-child policy. She’s talking about her grandparents’ life under a communist dictatorship one minute, then switching to her Asian girl–focused bisexuality the next, all in a weaponized whine. Her relationship to the audience depends not on mutual enjoyment but on the vibe of moderate, one-sided disgust. After they respond with shock when she calls her grandma “a burden,” she deadpans, “It’s okay, you don’t know her, what the fuck?”

In 2021, she released a stand-up album called Grandma’s Girl, which won the Juno Award for Comedy Album of the Year. She’s performed on The Late Late Show With James Corden, and she writes on Andy Samberg’s Digman!, and if you’re interested in the chance of being the target of a future viral Jin TikTok, she’s on a stand-up tour through the end of the year.

Rachel Kaly

Judaism. Being gay. Mental illness. These are but some of the foundations on which so much comedy is built. But few minds are able to combine these ingredients into a rich, humorous borscht quite like Rachel Kaly. The born-and-raised New Yorker is a lifelong student of comedy, which is probably why the writer-performer is so great at subverting the city’s rhythms and expectations. Kaly’s work is outlandish, going deep on made-up scenarios that get at truths about relatable insecurities, whether she’s playing a crazed, violent version of Ellen DeGeneres (so … just Ellen DeGeneres) or telling delirious shaggy-dog tales about imagined celebrity encounters (one about a lewd sexual encounter with Jerry Seinfeld has to be heard to be believed).

And Kaly’s delivery often sounds like thinking-out-loud, unsettling stand-up clichés intentionally stripped of polish, particularly when she records sets in unlikely places, like their apartment or on the side of the road. “10 MIN SPECIAL ABOT AIRPLANE ON AIRPLANE” is filmed from their economy window seat, whispering TSA and 9/11 jokes into a headphone cable. As of this summer, you can hear Kaly on their podcast Too Far, playing the put-upon underdog to fellow gay curmudgeon Robby Hoffman’s sniping, a dynamic they replicate live at their frequent They vs. Them shows. Kaly can also go deep, playing the second lead in the series finale of High Maintenance. This year, she put her one-person-joke-factory abilities to good use writing on the underrated Andy Samberg animated series Digman!, in which she also voices a character named “Trisket.”

Kaly frequently takes ideas developed in their stand-up — like riffing on their five-foot-zero stature (“No one is threatened by me, but I’m actually closer to the size of a gun than any of you”) — and develops them as mega conceptual shorts, like one called “Dunk Munth” in which she hires a hit man (played by frequent collaborator Conner O’Malley) to kill them if she doesn’t learn how to dunk a basketball. Kaly’s also gone on tour with O’Malley, and their no-filter stage presence is a perfect opener for his brand of insane. Basketball is one thing, but when it comes to athletic feats of comedy, Kaly’s dunking on all these hoes.

Edy Modica

Occasionally one breakout role can shift a comedic persona into sudden, perfect focus, and this year, that’s Edy Modica on Jury Duty. The Freevee docu-comedy features Modica as sweet, horny weirdo Jeannie Abruzzo, one of the actors hired to portray members of a jury (along with one person who believes it’s all real). Modica’s characterization of Jeannie brushes right up next to the line of too far — she’s full of sexually inappropriate quips, touchy, and often a ridiculous mess. And yet Modica’s performance is layered and thoughtful enough to keep it just barely in bounds. “I’ve always wanted to be asked to do something because you want me to do my thing,” Modica, out of character, explains in episode eight. “This was so exactly that.”

Her fondness for an over-the-top persona predates Jury Duty. She’s just as good in her stand-up as a woman at her wit’s end around Christmas time or a woman describing her stressful week. They each have their own special strangenesses, but Edy Modica characters all share a zany intensity, like they’re all living in a universe just a half-step weirder than our own.

Opeyemi “Opey” Olagbaju

Opeyemi Olagbaju’s act has a lot of jokes comparing the customs of Nigeria, where he lived until he was 6, and the U.S., where his family eventually settled in Maryland. With charismatic delivery and jokes structured like logical proofs — a writing tactic he says was shaped by the philosophy minor he took in college — he sidesteps cultural stereotypes and caricatures of his parents in favor of positioning Nigeria as closer to the global default. It’s an approach that informs the best joke in Olagbaju’s 2020 Comedy Central set: “Being a Black immigrant is like winning the golden ticket to go to Willy Wonka’s factory,” he says. “You get there. You’re super-excited. And, oh, nobody told you: You’re an Ooompa Loompa. I don’t know if you know this, but Oompa Loompas are Black people, okay? Go rewatch that movie. You realize the Oompa Loompas are the only people of color in the entire movie. To make matters even worse, Willy Wonka said, ‘Yeah, I went over to their land and I brought them to my factory on my boat.’ That is literally what he said. And you can’t tell me ‘Oompa Loompa doompety doo’ is not a goddamn Negro spiritual.”

The more Olagbaju has mastered joke logic, the more comfortable he’s grown playing within its confines. This evolution is reflected in his comparatively looser 2023 Don’t Tell Comedy stand-up set and will presumably factor in to Bammas, the comedy pilot he created with comedian Biniam Bizuneh, in which the pair play best friends in “a magical realist” version of Washington, D.C, ordered by Hulu last year. Olagbaju previously wrote for TV shows such as Close Enough and I Love You, America and did story editing for Betty; this next project will show more of his acting work and follows a brief appearance in season two of Hulu’s This Fool earlier this year.

Nimesh Patel

Nimesh Patel named his 2022 special, Thank You China, in reference to the birthplace of TikTok, the platform on which he built his audience. But before he began touring theaters thanks to his online presence, the New Jersey comedian was known for three things: being the “No. 1 Google result if you Google ‘Nimesh Patel,’” being the first Indian American hired to write for SNL, and being asked to leave the stage at Columbia University in 2018 after a joke about interacting with a gay Black man was deemed inappropriate by the student organizers of the show. (“This is how I figured out being gay can’t be a choice,” Patel said in the joke. “No one would choose to be gay if they’re already Black. No one is doubling down on hardship.”) The incident attracted significant press. But rather than become a poster child for free speech, as some wished, he expressed empathy for the students’ point of view, arguing in a New York Times op-ed that “people are just as within their rights to be offended by anything, as comedians are within their rights to say anything.”

Bucking expectations is Patel’s whole modus operandi as a performer. “My comedy is socially aware and willfully ignorant,” he told Vulture in 2019. “I liken it to getting the worst score possible on the SATs. To do that, you have to know all the right answers and then choose the wrong one.” His jokes feature cheeky turns reminiscent of Dave Chappelle, and his devotion to them largely trumps any binding ideology — with the exception of his disdain for the American health-care system, the late Queen of England, and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Onstage, he oscillates between swaggering and playful, delivering jokes in a near baritone, then letting out an amused, high-pitched giggle.

Patel’s third special, Lucky Lefty; Or, I Lost My Right Nut and All I Got Was This Stupid Special, released on YouTube earlier this year, was similarly a giant exercise in subversion. Recounting a long story about undergoing emergency surgery to have a cancerous testicle removed, he appears to be teeing up some sort of profound take-away gleaned from this experience. Without spoiling its ending, the closest he gets to that is this joke: “I remain an optimist. Some people say, ‘The glass is half-empty.’ I say, ‘The sack is half-full.’”

Richard Perez

Richard Perez could have stayed perfectly content knowing he was the single funniest person on Instagram Stories, but a phone screen is not enough to contain the sheer multidimensional brilliance of this Brooklyn-based performer. When Perez gets onstage, he approaches the microphone like the shyest little prince in the kingdom, doubting, tucking a perfect curl of hair behind his ear, and giggling bashfully before dropping the act and saying, “So that was all my Pride material.” Perez is a thermostat performer, changing the temperature in the room on any comedy lineup, able to lure the audience into watchful silence until the smallest gesture, a fake snore or a mumble, sets off peals of laughter. He is also maybe the world’s most honest crowdwork comedian, usually perched on a stool laughing with the audience like they’re old friends catching up for coffee. In one clip, he asks an audience member a question and lets her answer for ten seconds before straight-up admitting, “Wait, wait I’m so sorry, I wasn’t listening,” then blushing and releasing a raspy, high-pitched, embarrassed “Fuuuuuuck!” For as delicately controlled as his performances can be, he voices villains, demons, and ogres; has a wicked Miss Piggy impression; and possesses a particular love of potty humor. When he goes big, he goes huge, like in a vignette where he pretends to be on a cute date on a roller coaster, despite his nervous fear that builds to disturbed flailing and screaming.

Last fall, Perez debuted his solo show, I Have to Do This, which he describes as “a story about love” and “a fantasy about romance.” The show, directed by 2023 “Comedians You Should Know” list-mate Charlie Bardey, has morphed across its various performances in New York and L.A., but it features Perez performing those aforementioned vignettes, capturing microscopic quirks in body language and facial expressions and blowing them up to Imax-exaggerated proportions. He’s bicoastally adored, but if his recent Instagram Stories are to be believed, he might be taking his show to more cities in the near future. Until then, you can see him in John Early and Kate Berlant’s comedy special, Would It Kill You to Laugh?

Jordan Temple

There is a quiet depth to Jordan Temple, a sense that there’s a lot happening under the surface and that the audience is just seeing the well-crafted tip of a massive iceberg. The Queens-born comic wrestles with big issues like mental health, race, and masculinity but isn’t afraid to splash around in the murky waters of his own struggles — from analyzing whether being hospitalized for depression should be described as “trippin” or “buggin” to turning an uncomfortable encounter with police into a Dr. Seuss rhyme. This instinct has served him well in the writers’ rooms for some of television’s most ambitious and heady comedies, including Atlanta and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which he co-produced. More recently, he’s been a supervising producer of one of television’s biggest and most beloved comedies, Abbott Elementary, and penned classic episodes such as the season-one finale, “Zoo Balloon.”

While you won’t find him regularly blowing up social media with clips of his stand-up act, the Jordan Temple movement has been slowly building for years, starting in his hometown of New York. In 2017, he debuted his first stage play, Hidden Fences at the Creek and Cave in Long Island City, a satire that explored how a very white industry often dismisses Black art and was inspired by both Jenna Bush Hager and Michael Keaton conflating the titles of Hidden Figures and Fences during the Golden Globes. “People sometimes understand the Black experience to be one thing,” he told Splitsider that year. “Muhammad Ali said ‘I contain multitudes,’ and I want people to understand that — not just about me as a Black comedian but as a thinker and a creator with a hunger. And the culture.” Fast-forward to his life as a bicoastal Emmy nominee; Temple recently debuted his solo show Sweet Lorraine, which celebrates the life of his grandmother, directed by Astronomy Club’s James III. It’s proof of how timeless Temple’s work can be when it’s attached to the seasons of his own life as much as it is anchored in the evergreen realities of being a Black man in America.

Asha Ward

“I was raised Catholic,” begins one of Asha Ward’s jokes. “But I feel like if God was real, white people wouldn’t have access to ukuleles.” It’s not just the joke that makes the line funny; it’s Ward’s air of apathy. She talks so plainly and without affect, as if she’s worn out by her very existence, that any slight variation of tone sends the audience into waves of laughter. When she talks about her mother’s funeral, after which her family went to hibachi, the “objectively comical situation” is amplified by how powerless Ward seems to stop it. She portrays herself as a backseat driver in her own life — present but more comfortable commenting than doing. Her words take on the symbolic work of throwing hands in the air, a motion that Ward would never make onstage because talking with her hands would kill the effect.

Beyond stand-up, Ward was hired as a writer on SNL in December 2022, just a year and a half after graduating from Columbia College Chicago. “monday morning i was clocking in at the dentist last night a sketch i wrote… aired on snl isn’t life so crazy and real sometimes?” she wrote on Instagram the morning after her first show. That sketch, in which Ego Nwodim and Keke Palmer play flight attendants on a plane so old and broken-down the bathroom door says “Whites Only,” was a strong start; Ward later wrote season highlight “Nail Salon,” starring Bowen Yang as a man with the world’s longest fingernails. Ward also hosts the monthly show Earth Tones at Union Hall with Sureni Weerasekera, which flaunts the best QTBIPOC talent New York has to offer.

Auguste White

Many comedians do material on race or on politics, but Auguste White’s unique strength is combining a high-stakes political environment with low-stakes humor. In one joke from a January Comedy Central set, White describes the intensity of being in a Black Lives Matter protest, of being surrounded by tear gas and watching the police pull away a man who chants a phone number so the crowd can contact his girlfriend. “As my friends are dragging me to safety,” White says, “the only thing I can think to myself is, Oh my God … He memorized her number? That’s beautiful.” Angry traditionalists are right that Santa should be white, another of her jokes goes, because “it is the only way to keep Santa alive.” White’s impulse to merge social commentary with everyday life meshes well with the approach of SNL, where White was hired as a writer in 2022. White’s also a canny observer of basic womanhood. From her 2021 McSweeney’s piece, “Fourteen Short Obituaries for the Modern Woman,” No. 3: “Melanie died as she lived: with one hand down her pants and another opening an incognito tab on Google Chrome.

Maggie Winters

It was almost inevitable that Maggie Winters would end up the latest queen of the Chicago scene. She has a natural, easygoing, wry sense of humor that can fit itself into any alt lineup with endless material about her family and bizarre encounters with strangers. She takes setups that would be mere self-deprecation in the hands of a lesser comedian and uses them to flaunt perverse pride: “”I know you guys have been thinking this whole time, She used to work for Subway,” she says, stiffening into a military salute. “Yeah I did, okay? I was one of Jared’s soldiers.” Brag!

Like midwestern muses Caleb Hearon and Megan Stalter before her, Winters soon brought her gifts to TikTok, where she often plays exasperated women, like an over-it server (“Hi, welcome to Shrimp Shrimp Shrimp. My name is, ultimately, Denise”) or an off-screen teacher at Euphoria High (“I have to leave the room really quick. Can everyone put their hand over their heart and say ‘I will not have sex while you’re gone’?”). Other videos are in dialogue with TikTok as a format itself, using its confessional language and tropes to tell stories like an #fyp confessional tagged “bad night” about falling into a witch’s trap “again,” or an Outfit of the Day fit in which “the pants are joggers from Hell and the bag is a side salad.” Beyond TikTok, Winters co-starred opposite Adam DeVine on this season of The Righteous Gemstones, playing Kelvin’s new assistant youth pastor Taryn, whose chill nature and popularity are exceeded only by her love of elaborately patterned leggings and neon tees. She’s also bringing her popular one-woman show, Marguerite, beyond Chicago to venues like L.A.’s Dynasty Typewriter and Brooklyn’s Union Hall as part of the New York Comedy Festival in November.

Sabrina Wu

Sabrina Wu is currently in a one-sided feud with National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman that began when they were both at Harvard, where Gorman was, according to Wu, better than them in a storytelling class. The impossible task of reaching Gorman’s heights is the perfect fodder for Wu’s brand of exasperated anxiety — they portray themselves as someone feebly attempting to get control of a life that is designed to thwart them. While Gorman dreamed early of becoming the first Black woman president, Wu says they hoped to be “like an Asian Jack Black.” Wu has a hyperactive, nervous presence, vacillating between outrage, abject fear, and extreme defensiveness. Hunched over and working within every decibel known to man, their anxiety manifests in gigantic physical swings, going from standing straight up to a crouched, clicking squirrel impression in record time.

This year, Joy Ride introduced Wu to much of the world as “Deadeye,” the most strange and awkward member of the film’s fearsome foursome — also including Stephanie Hsu, Ashley Park, and Sherry Cola — who travel, chaotically, through China. Joy Ride gave Wu an opportunity to flex their comic timing, charisma, and, perhaps most important, impressive beatboxing skills. They’re also set to lead an upcoming FX pilot written by Lauren Ludwig about “queer 20-somethings” confronting generational anxieties. Being dead-set on beating Amanda Gorman at the game of life does a career good.

Zach Zimmerman

What could be more charming than a comedian with the vibe of a wholesome youth pastor, wearing the sweater of a Boden Kids model, who smiles sweetly as they talk about poppers? This is the world of Zach Zimmerman, whose often autobiographical comedy tends to dig into the tension between a conservative background and life as a queer atheist comedian vegetarian (who sometimes cheats with fish). One of Zimmerman’s signature jokes is about their mother, a woman whose decades of work as a server at Red Lobster has honed her keen revenge instincts for the patrons who don’t tip. Like Zimmerman’s work more broadly, it’s a joke built on the delight of sly sharpness cloaked in deceptive sweetness; Zimmerman’s so good at leaning into the perfect betrayal of their mother’s small rebellion and takes so much pleasure in moving between her point of view and the perspective of her thoughtless, hoodwinked customers. Is It Hot in Here (Or Am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth)?, Zimmerman’s book of personal writing, was released earlier this year, and it operates in the same mode as that Red Lobster joke: wicked yet warmly generous.

Sophie Zucker

Sophie Zucker has worked on the beloved, cultish Apple TV+ series Dickinson as both a writer and actor, regularly performs in Brooklyn with the sketch group Ladies Who Ranch, and in January was hired as the youngest writer in The Daily Show history at 29. Since then, Zucker’s become best known for her show at the Edinburgh Fringe, Sophie Sucks Face, a wild and well-wrought one-woman musical about funerals and incest. Like in much of musical comedy from the past several years, musical framing is used by Zucker to reveal an inner narrative that would be too vulnerable and misguided to otherwise say aloud. (A song in Sophie Sucks Face that takes place at Zucker’s grandfather’s funeral is called “It’s About Me.”)

But Zucker’s work is also particularly accomplished at creating a complete setting with multiple perspectives. Take “Ex Boyfriend Song,” performed from the point of view of an ex who sees Zucker again in a bar after many years apart. “You’ve gained a little weight,” the boyfriend sings to her in the song’s tender, soaring chorus. “The weight is negligible, just a little bit / And I’m sure you’ll get rid of it / But stretch marks are forever.” The boyfriend sings so sweetly you could almost forget Zucker’s using the song to slice him apart from the inside.

Zach Zucker

Let me guess: You don’t find the ancient art of clowning particularly punk rock. But what other comic on this list can say they were physically dragged offstage by security during a show mid-set this year for going too hard, like some kind of chaotic bisexual Lenny Bruce? Because that’s exactly what happened to Zach Zucker at London’s Just for Laughs festival this past March. The globe-trotting comedian’s shows are parties complete with musical performances, outlandish physical comedy, and the occasional striptease; they’re also a complete circus. After graduating literal French clown school under Sacha Baron Cohen’s mentor, Zucker founded Stamptown, a variety show and performance collective that attracts a diverse range of comedians like David Cross, Reggie Watts, Natalie Palamides, Jo Firestone, Neil Hamburger, Randy Feltface, and Vir Das to try out experimental concepts they wouldn’t normally do elsewhere, so long as they match Zucker’s levels of exuberant commitment. His comedy philosophy leads to presenting his own work and the work of other comics alongside acrobats, puppetry, magic, dance, drag, and music.

At the core of it all is Zucker, both in-character and out. In his solo show, Spectacular Industry Showcase, he performs as a version of his goofy, hyperactive self, modulating his voice with each new line, leaping over himself from one fast-talking bit of bilingual wordplay to prop comedy (Zucker likes to hit stuff, make a mess, fall off the stage, and set off the occasional fire extinguisher). More often, he performs as his sweaty hack comic alter ego Jack Tucker, who can draw out a short non-joke into minutes and minutes of act-outs and misunderstandings, all of them punctuated by audio drops like on morning-zoo radio. Zucker’s physicality and energy translate beyond cultural contexts, and he’s been a hit at comedy festivals around the world, particularly at Edinburgh Fringe, or working with his Norwegian clown partner Viggo Venn. If Zucker isn’t covered in sweat and/or glitter by the end of the night, you’ve witnessed an impostor.