The 13 Best Stand-Up Comedy Specials Of 2025

Cameron Esposito: Four Pills (Dropout)

Cameron Esposito’s past hours have shown her to be willing to be as vulnerable as any comedian working today. For her 2025 special for Dropout, she confronts an existential crisis: What if she can no longer find her funny if she’s properly medicated for her mental illness? The action occasionally flashes sideways to a literal white room with no audience, symbolizing both her fears manifested as well as her recent institutionalized past. It’s a raw hour, made all the better by Dropout’s decision to include companion behind-the-scenes featurettes where Esposito and those around her can provide additional insight into both the comedian and the process.

Watch Cameron Esposito: Four Pills on Dropout

Part of what makes Caleb Hearon so endearing in his wildly popular podcast clips is how matter-of-factly he responds to the issues of the day. While he really does find joy in the little things, he also knows how to quickly adapt to the rougher elements and people who may cross his path as well. Calling them “brother” and “dog” helps charm and disarm them. And yet he’s just as giddy about getting an audience to gasp as he is in earning laughs or applause, all of which allows him to deliver stronger punchlines against the far-right politicians and influencers who’d wish to silence and subjugate Hearon and his community.

Watch Caleb Hearon: Model Comedian on HBO Max

Mohanad Elshieky: No Need To Address Me (Comedy Dynamics)

How many comedians do you know who grew up in Benghazi? Yes, that Benghazi. Mohanad Elshieky may have survived his upbringing in Libya with plenty of jokes to spare about his family and the political chaos there, but he’s proven himself equally adept at addressing the xenophobia that faced him on a bus after immigrating to Portland, Ore. Now based in New York City, Elshieky is one of the better joke-writers and tellers you probably don’t know yet. This is your chance to get to know him, and hope he gets to finally complete his American assimilation in 2026.

watch mohanad Elshieky: No Need to Address Me on Amazon Prime Video

Gianmarco Soresi: Thief of Joy (YouTube)

Perhaps no young comedian represents everything happening in comedy at the end of 2025 quite like Gianmarco Soresi. Even if he’s inexplicably wearing shorts in most of his online clips. Of all of the countless comics to jump on the crowd-work bandwagon, Soresi’s encounters are the most natural and engaging. Of all of the comics trying to copy the massive success Josh Johnson has had in being responsive to the moment, few have rivaled Soresi’s ability to produce high-quality topical material in this social media age week-in and week-out. And even though he’s on top of all the comedy trends, Soresi also has the old-school savvy and flair in adding viral moments to his old-school TV and new-school podcast appearances. Who else would you want to see on CNN, MS Now or Hasan Piker and know they’d be ready every time with a quip? In his debut stand-up special on his YouTube channel, which has 3.3 million views in its first three months, Soresi shines in the spotlight. With him, there’s always more where that came from.

Watch Gianmarco Soresi: Thief Of Joy on YouTube

Has fame changed Kumail Nanjiani? Certainly. And yet, he’s still just like us in terms of being unable to sleep due to overwhelming “night thoughts,” or wondering how to maintain self-worth without relying on outside validation. At the same time, Nanjiani takes pains to prove that we all could use therapy to work on ourselves. We’ve never really fully grappled with the tragedy and the ridiculousness of the pandemic. Therapy helped him, and it can help you, too. “S— is f—ed up, and you’re going to be OK.” And for anyone who has haters (and you don’t need to have co-starred in an MCU film to have haters), he’s got plenty of zingers to put them all in their place. All of which proves haters could do for some therapy, too.

watch Kumail Nanjiani: Night Thoughts on hulu

A lesser comedian might’ve simply shot a before-and-after childbirth special and slapped two disparate half-hours together. But by cutting back and forth, seamlessly juxtaposing specific jokes at times, Baker lets us see how much she has changed and just how much she’s the same no matter the circumstance. That’s nowhere clearer than when she delivers some darkly funny jokes about her experiences with miscarriage, with lines such as “guess I’d had enough abortions where this one was on the house,” “God never gives you more than you can handle,” and “I never wanted kids until kids started playing hard to get.” She also draws a rich contrast between herself and several male stand-ups who put out specials in which their spouses underwent IVF, underscoring just how fundamentally more painful and complex that process is for the would-be mother. “He should have to jerk off to me getting the surgery,” she joked about her husband. “We both have to walk away a little scarred.”   Baker’s point of view may come across as more than a bit blunt, but that just makes her punchlines hit that much harder.

Watch Rosebud Baker: The Mother Lode on Netflix

Bill Burr has never suffered fools gladly, as they say. Burr has said he filmed this hour in Seattle precisely because he wanted to see how some of his material would play in a traditionally liberal city, and when that audience gives him applause breaks, no matter whether it’s for declaring himself against wars in Gaza and Ukraine, for comparing what Israel’s doing now to what America has done for generations, or for being married for a long time, he’s not having any of it. This hour is even more revelatory if you’re paying close attention. Burr not only deconstructs generic male toxicity, joking that his friend and other guys his age might drop dead because they don’t know how to cry or express their emotions, but specifically mentions dealing his own depression and hoping to avoid “the fog” that settles into men who never deal with trauma they may have experienced as a child. But he’s never tried to pull a Nanette. And he doesn’t need to. That Burr is willing to address his mental health for his personal betterment, and willing to acknowledge it onstage, is more than enough. Burr may continue to rub some people the wrong way, but that’s always been a part of his comedic ethos, and if you can listen to what he’s actually saying, there’s a lot not only worth considering, but also worth laughing about. If not also crying sometimes.

Just don’t ask him why he played Riyadh after releasing this stellar special.

Watch Bill BuRr: Drop Dead Years on Hulu

Silverman started stand-up at age 17, and now in her 50s, she reflects that her tastes and attitudes have changed over the decades. She’s still got a flair for a good dick joke and an ironic Hitler reference, even if in the opening minutes of this hour, she finds herself acknowledging that she’s not as up on men’s kinks as she thought she were. But no matter how much she may mellow or soften, Silverman very much is a product of her parentage. This hour finds her reflecting on what she has learned from her mother, father, and stepmother, all of whom have now passed on. Sarah’s humor sometimes has come across as too blunt for its time. But in this time? In 2025? “If we’re lacking anything in this world right now, it’s truth, you know?” she says. “The cold hard, braless nipples of truth.”  Whilst the “dead dad” show is such a common trope in the UK that British comics will mock each other and themselves for writing and performing them, it has yet to become de rigueur here in the States. Perhaps with shows such as hers, that has begun to change.

Watch Sarah Silverman: Postmortem On Netflix

Roy Wood Jr. has long been one of my favorite working stand-ups today, precisely because of how seriously he takes his job of observing the way we are, and how funny he is in uncovering the specifics of what’s so ridiculous about how we are. So even when he tackles a premise as seemingly hacked to bits as the self-service checkout, Wood doesn’t trod the already hackneyed path. Instead of seeing what we might gain from self-service in terms of shoplifting, Wood sees what we have lost in the human connections with a cashier. And while other comedians mock our technological algorithms for knowing us too well, Wood notices how their security questions provoke us into nostalgia for times gone by, and how so often those are things we offer up freely to hackers through our other nostalgic posts. As Wood enters middle age, he may poke fun at his own expense by having a fictional retail worker describe him to a coworker as “Stanley from The Office...on Ozempic,” but truly, the sparkle in his eye and cracking of his voice as he ramps into a rant makes for a more apt comparison to the late great Bernie Mac. Like Mac, Wood is a consummate pro as a stand-up, not afraid of any audience. He even sticks the landing with not only one killer callback, but also an actual call back. You may have to tune into CNN or Max to see Wood dole out topical punchlines on a weekly basis in 2025 instead of behind the Comedy Central desk (or any other late-night gig) four to five times a week, but count your blessings you get that much. For Wood remains one of the best in the stand-up game.

Watch Roy Wood Jr.: Lonely Flowers on Hulu

Atsuko Okatsuka jokes that we all need to be easier on ourselves. In her case, it’s also recognizing that her bowl-cut has so many fans now that she has to keep it. “I want to grow my hair out. But I can’t, because this is my brand.” She has such a light joyful stage presence, even through and yet also because of her hardships. So it might not surprise anyone to learn in this hour that she was a cheerleader at her Southern California high school. “I do love making people feel good,” she acknowledges, playfully noting her “yes and energy” has carried over off of the field. And what is a cheerleader, anyhow, she asks? “It’s blindly pumping people up to think they’re going to win, even if you have no say in the game. We’re literally not playing it. Cheerleading is just screaming manifestations and wishes.” In her HBO hour, she cracked jokes about wanting to dress up her husband like her so they could film synchronized dance routines. In this hour for Hulu, she’s now wondering if she and her father actually have the same body type to the point where “we’re looking like sisters.” It’s oddly funny. But when her husband, Ryan, joins her onstage just as he had in the previous special, we understand just how much of partnership they enjoy. By pronouncing herself as “father” in her relationship with her fans and her family, however, she’s also redefining her role and taking ownership in a way that cheerleaders cannot. She’s having much more say in the game of life, and comedy. And we’re all cheering her on.

Watch Atsuko Okatsuka: Father on Hulu

This isn’t the first time nor the last that Marc Maron will hold his comedy peers’ feet to the fire. In this moment, he happily takes them down a peg or two by declaring that they’re using their substantial podcasting influence “speaking power to truth … now that truth can no longer defend itself.” Which is the opposite of what a true comedian should do. Not that Maron has all the answers. He even cops to it, saying: “And look, I don’t know what to do.” And yet, he is rising to the occasion, anyhow. He may also rankle some progressive feathers by claiming that the left has “annoyed the average American fascism,” but he’s really talking more about classical liberals or neoliberals than he is actual progressives here. He also has enough self-awareness to tell us: “I’m not totally delusional. I know there’s no joke that I’m going to do that’s going to go viral and just make all these new young Nazis just be like oh man, I’m just mad at my dad, I think.” And yet, he might be more right than he realizes when he imagines them further admitting “that Jew’s joke really f—ed with my head.” The more Maron speaks out, the more the message can spread. And it’s a message that needs to be heard now more than ever. 

Watch Marc Maron: Panicked on HBO Max

Mike Birbiglia pauses to note that his subject matter this time around isn’t for everyone. “Most of the jokes are for you but a few of them are for me,” as he’s still a bit raw in coming to terms with the changing nature of his relationship with his father. “It would be weird if it was your dad” he were making these jokes about, he concedes. Then again, as Birbiglia also reveals, his father hasn’t seemed to enjoy a lot of his material over the past two decades. Of course, now he turns some of his old jokes and ideas on their head. What if it turns out his medical condition wasn’t what he thought? What if he’s been talking to everyone but the one person he needed to sit down with the most? Stepping out of and then back into a framed painting of a river with grass and trees and the sunrise behind it all, you might think the good life were a Bob Ross painting. But it’s actually simpler than that. It’s about going toward the light, the happy, kind light. And when he finds himself with the chance to meet the Pope, he’s a lot more willing to joke about his history with the Catholic Church in ways we could only have wished his peers would be willing to speak out about the political and religious zealots who have spurred their recent riches.

Watch Mike Birbiglia: The Good Life on Netflix

“Should I go, should I not go?” That was the question Conan O’Brien faced this year when Donald Trump overhauled the Kennedy Center almost immediately after they had bestowed O’Brien with this year’s prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. While many Trump critics may have begged him to boycott, it turned out we were so much better off that he went, and for all who reminded us just how influential O’Brien was for inspiring a generation of creatively funny kids, including John Mulaney, Nikki Glaser and Kumail Nanjiani. And unlike last year’s event, which felt more like a roast of Kevin Hart than a tribute, this year’s ceremony turned all of its zingers on Trump and his administration.

For his part, O’Brien started off his acceptance speech by remembering a time when he wasn’t so successful, sitting in an L.A. diner, two years out of college, unemployed, and only dreaming of a destiny where he could write for David Letterman. He touchingly thanked his parents, “who missed witnessing this by three months. They would’ve absolutely loved this.” And he somehow remained humble yet humorous throughout. Samuel Clemens would’ve been proud. I say that because anyone with a lick of humor will be inspired watching O’Brien then or now. As much as we all would’ve loved to see the Kennedy Center honor Catherine O’Hara (she backed out due to scheduling issues before they landed on O’Brien), in comedy, timing remains everything, and O’Brien turned out to be the comedy hero we needed right now. Watch this and understand why.

WATCH Conan O’Brien: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Netflix