Many savvy observers declared the death of the late-night talk show this year. Then Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel attracted more attention than any stand-up with a special. The most talked- about comedy festival took place in Saudi Arabia. Marc Maron stopped podcasting. Amy Poehler became a YouTuber. 2025 was a weird one. Here are some highlights.
Best Closer
Ian Karmel, ‘Comfort Beyond God’s Foresight’
Karmel is one of the funniest joke writers alive. No shock that his special “Comfort Beyond God’s Foresight” (YouTube) is packed with clever, well-constructed bits. But a close study of friends who get laughs at parties over the years reveals that your most humiliating romantic story can be funnier than any punchline. And Karmel’s closer is a doozy, a tale of texting gone awry that understands if you play cringe comedy straight, it hits harder.
Best New Talk Show
‘Good Hang With Amy Poehler’
In this doomscrolling era, there’s a market for cheerful escapism. And who better to fill it than the woman who voiced Joy in the movie “Inside Out”? On a brightly lit set, the YouTube show “Good Hang With Amy Poehler” provides an addictive respite from the news. This simple interview format features one innovation: It starts with a chat with a friend of the guest to get some inside information. This provides some shape and even suspense to conversations with Tina Fey, Martin Short and Idris Elba. Watching episodes with people like Rachel Dratch feels like eavesdropping on extremely funny pals. Poehler also proves deft at navigating darker topics, as in the first interview with Aubrey Plaza after her husband died by suicide. As with all great hosts, Poehler is a good listener, but one with limited patience, able to “yes, and” a joke when necessary.
Best Special
Roy Wood Jr., ‘Lonely Flowers’
Wood has made a state-of-the-nation special that feels like a freewheeling club set. Less than two years after leaving “The Daily Show,” he’s flexing different comic muscles in “Lonely Flowers” (Hulu). Some ambitious hours hit you over the head with their theme. Wood taps. The characters in his taut jokes always seem ready to snap. Judging by his flustered expressions, he does, too. It all reflects the problem on his mind: how disconnected we’ve become. He laments the decline of phone calls, the rise of self-checkout, the brittle state of middle-aged friendship. He sees alarming evidence of frayed connections everywhere, even customer service at a gun range. “How are you going to be rude to somebody who showed up to practice murder?” he asks, coining an unexpected phrase: “The gun range is murder rehearsal.”
Best Callback
Jimmy Kimmel
In a signal event in late-night television history, the “Tonight Show” host Jack Paar walked out of the studio in the middle of a live taping in 1960 to protest a benign bit of network censorship. He returned days later, quipping: “As I was saying before I was interrupted ….” Kimmel, the rare broadcaster who combines the hot-tempered emotionalism of Paar with the cool poise of Johnny Carson, used this line at the start of his passionate first monologue back after Disney took his ABC show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” off the air under pressure from the Trump administration. Most people missed this sly echo across 65 years of television history, but it telegraphed his intent: to make a case not only for free speech but also the embattled form itself.
Funniest Impression
Brent Weinbach, ‘Popular Culture’
It should be impossible to find a new angle on Michael Jackson. And yet, in his relentlessly funny, consistently oddball new hour, “Popular Culture” (YouTube), Brent Weinbach does exactly this for a 10-minute bit. In other eccentric impressions, he offers a fusion of Kermit the Frog and Snoop Dogg as well as one of a man who does not use phrases correctly.
Best Auteurist Special
Cameron Esposito, ‘Four Pills’
Not since Bo Burnham’s “Inside” has a special dramatized the unraveling of a performer as artfully as Cameron Esposito does in “Four Pills.” Directing her own hour with striking art design and a series of crooked camera angles, Esposito patiently morphs a swaggering act about dark subjects (divorce, rehab, a relationship with a clown) into something fractured, emotional and stylish. This is an experimental new direction for her, and the finest special yet produced by the Dropout streaming service.
Best Parenting Comedy
‘Rosebud Baker: The Mother Lode’ and ‘George Civeris: A Sense of Urgency’
Always a crowded category. For sharp and cynical jokes wrapped inside a nice concept, “The Mother Lode” (Netflix), which weaves together sets Baker performed while pregnant and after, satisfies. But the most ambitious joke about kids comes from someone who doesn’t have them. In “A Sense of Urgency” (most major platforms), George Civeris wonders whether he should join his gay friends in having children, before concluding he would like to skip the diapers phase and go right to the part where his daughter is a bohemian playwright. He describes his fantasy of a chic New York parent-child relationship with novelistic detail and immaculate narcissism. Then he pouts that it’s impossible, adding: “I should be able to go to N.Y.U. graduation and say: ‘That one.’”
Best YouTube Special
Gianmarco Soresi, ‘Thief of Joy’
Mixing theater-kid energy, brash internet-savvy pugnaciousness and club comedy punchlines, Gianmarco Soresi struck a nerve with “Thief of Joy,” a hit special that announced a new star in standup.
Best Scene on the Cutting-Room Floor
‘Friendship’
My only complaint with the extended 12-minute version (released online) of a brief but memorable scene from the movie “Friendship” with two seasoned comic screamers, Conner O’Malley and Tim Robinson, is that it wasn’t an hour-and-a-half film.
Best TV Moment
‘The Rehearsal,’ Episode 3
There’s no image I saw this year that was as disturbingly funny as an entirely shaved and diaper-wearing Nathan Fielder playing a baby version of the pilot Chesley B. Sullenberger III sitting on the lap of a giant puppet and getting breastfed in “The Rehearsal” (HBO Max).
Best Range
Chris Fleming
One of the loudest comedy audiences I heard this year was when Fleming, performing at Union Hall in Brooklyn, imagined a drawn-out fight between the “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross and Adam Driver. What was more impressive is two days later at Carnegie Hall, he took the same material, ballooned his physicality and did just as well.
Funniest Spoof of the Left
‘Slam Frank’
This hip-hop Holocaust production (at Asylum NYC) brought an edgelord, terminally online aesthetic to the American musical. Its creator, Andrew Fox, who reimagines Anne Frank as a “real marginalized person,” a pansexual Latina named Anita Franco, aims to be elusive in his politics but make no mistake: His core, animating target is identity-politics excesses.
Funniest Spoof of the right
Marc Maron, ‘Panicked’
Maron was also in the running for spoof of the left, with this line to his liberal audience: “You do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism.” But his new special, “Panicked” (HBO Max), along with a fiery promotional tour, came most alive skewering the manosphere comedians, culminating in an imitation of Theo Von chatting with Adolf Hitler on a podcast.
Best Romantic Comedy
Natalie Palamides, ‘Weer’
There’s nothing better in comedy than a stupid idea executed so well that it becomes smart. By playing both parts in a classic romance, with makeup and costume design split down the middle of her body, one-half doofus male, the other ditzy female, Palamides delivered the most raucous performance in New York theater this year. She pivoted wildly and precisely from meet-cute to raunchy sex and melodramatic goodbyes in “Weer” at the Cherry Lane, giving new meaning to masturbatory art.
Best Lineup
Mark Twain Awards
In a lackluster year for Netflix specials, I’m not sure the streaming service presented a funnier show than the collection of comedians delivering sets to honor and roast Conan O’Brien, winner of the Mark Twain Award. Nikki Glaser, Adam Sandler, John Mulaney, Sarah Silverman, Kumail Nanjiani, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and David Letterman all performed. And while winners typically pay superficial homage to Twain, O’Brien dug deeper, delivering a speech that was funny, literate and politically potent.
Best Year-End Surprise
Jim Gaffigan, ‘Live From Old Forester’
Several standup superstars (Kevin Hart, Sebastian Maniscalco) put out specials at the end of the year. The most unusual was from Jim Gaffigan who in November released more than 40 new minutes on YouTube of characteristically strong jokes. (“Alcohol can be fun. You lose your inhibitions, and sometimes your career and family.”) What made this different is that the entire set was about one subject: Bourbon. While you were learning to bake bread over the pandemic, Gaffigan developed a new obsession. It’s unusual for big-name comics to give away specials for free on such a niche subject. But in a fragmented culture where many specials feel padded out, it’s a savvy move to go deep and narrow, a labor of love that comes off as a little holiday gift.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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