Comedians Should Be Spicier Onstage

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Karolina Wojtasik/HBO, Joe Rogan Experience/Youtube

Remember the Riyadh Comedy Festival? Back in September, it was all anyone interested in comedy talked about. What began as good-faith discourse about the ethical implications of superstar comedians performing for a Saudi Arabian regime responsible for human-rights abuses and the suppression of free speech quickly gave way to squabbling among comedians who weren’t on the lineup calling out those who were and festival performers defending their decision. It was petty, ineffectual, and exhausting, and people couldn’t get enough of it. Every time a comedian referenced their peers publicly, it got aggregated into viral social-media posts and Reddit threads. There was David Cross’s blog post calling out Riyadh performers like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Bill Burr, and Jim Jefferies (“How can any of us take any of you seriously ever again?”); Andrew Schultz hitting back at Cross on his podcast, Flagrant, by referencing an instance of Cross using the N-word; Burr’s rant on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend when he referred to people criticizing festival performers as “sanctimonious cunts” who don’t “sincerely give a shit”; and more.
The idea that comedy fans love hearing comedians shit-talk each other isn’t exactly groundbreaking — consider Katt Williams’s 2024 scorched-earth Club Shay Shay appearance or even the late-night wars of the ’90s — but in 2025, high-profile comedy beef took up more airspace than ever before. Entire YouTube channels have sprung up to document comedians’ latest spats, and even the least popular videos on these channels are watched more than the average YouTube comedy special. Fifteen-minute clips of both Marc Maron calling out the Rogan-verse while promoting his new special, Panicked, as well as Rogan’s so-called nuclear response have received over a million views combined. Another video of Andrew Schulz going after Andrew Santino on The Joe Rogan Experience simply for saying he doesn’t like the Austin comedy scene has garnered almost 600,000 views in just over two months. In another video titled “Mark Normand’s Problem With Eric Andre,” which has almost 430,000 views, the body language of a We Might Be Drunk podcast episode featuring both comedians is scrutinized for evidence of tension like the Zapruder film. “I stumbled across a channel that makes analysis videos reading into comedy podcast [sic],” reads one comment with 6,000 likes. “I need a job and girlfriend so bad. Why am I here.”
Most of these grudge matches play out in podcast appearances, where comedians air their dirty laundry via stream-of-consciousness rants. But gossipy allure aside, a lot of the drama itself is underwhelming. It’s Schulz labeling Maron an asshole on Joe Rogan by telling an anticlimactic story about Maron being mean to Jon Stewart in the ’90s (a story Maron himself has been sharing freely and openly since at least 2013) or audiences intuiting beef where none actually exists, like when Stavros Halkias playfully reprimanded Jordan Jensen for making a confusing transphobic joke on Stavvy’s World in September. But if interpersonal bickering must overtake an outsize part of the comedy ecosystem, why don’t more comedians make it more interesting by channeling it into stand-up?
It’s the type of thing that happens regularly in roasts, and as the massive ratings of 2024’s The Roast of Tom Brady demonstrated, audiences have a gigantic appetite for it. But where roasts are full of dispassionate barbs, these performances would be fueled by genuine resentment so the results would be even more thrilling. Plus it would be a way for comedians to up the stakes of their material without having to resort to talking about the same three or four “edgy” hot-button topics. There’s inherent tension in the fact that they could easily run into the peers they’re talking about in a greenroom or at an industry event. It’s what made it so exciting when Eddie Murphy mocked Bill Cosby in his 1987 special Raw for calling him to “chastize” him about his dirty material. The joke itself is solid, but it plays better because of the subtext: Cosby clearly had Murphy’s phone number and could have very easily called him again. The same is true of Bill Hicks’s oft-referenced tirade against Jay Leno from the early ’90s. Hicks wasn’t just calling Leno a sellout when he performed it; he was also burning any (albeit remote) chance he might have to perform on The Tonight Show in the process.
Murphy and Hicks are part of a small but growing list of comedians who have mocked their peers onstage using scathing impressions. There’s Anthony Jeselnik, who once demonstrated the hackiness of Dane Cook’s act by performing a joke in his characteristically bare-bones style, then repeating the same joke using Cook’s overly animated approach. Drew Michael similarly mocked Jimmy Fallon’s emptiness in his 2021 special Red Blue Green by impersonating his ability to laugh at anything, and Hasan Minhaj impersonated Aziz Ansari’s cartoonishness in 2022’s The King’s Jester. A more recent example of this played out in Maron’s Panicked, when the comedian imagined Theo Von interviewing Hitler on his podcast This Past Weekend to illustrate how Von and similar comedians normalize fascism. “Y’all did a lot of meth, right?” Maron says as he lobs a hypothetical but believable softball in a pitch-perfect Von voice. “Hey, Hitler, you probably didn’t even hate the Jews. That was just the meth making you crazy, dog.” Maron was asked about how comedians perpetuate fascism a lot during the press tour for the special, but none of his widely clipped sound bites were as effective at making this point as this joke.
Even when comedians don’t funnel their grievances into demonstrative impressions, they tend to be more incisive in their stand-up than when rambling off the cuff on podcasts. In recent years, Chris Fleming has built a dedicated audience in part because he’s unafraid to scratch this itch. He’s trained his sights on everyone from Mike Birbiglia to Bo Burnham to Fallon to Colin Jost. “Colin Jost exists in this very interesting space where we’re aware of him but he is the last thing we’ve ever thought about,” he joked about the latter in a set about SNL. “If Knowledge and Awareness were a land mass, he would be on the furthest-most tip of the peninsula. He is the final pebble before the Estuary of Not Knowing.” Stewart Lee occupies a comparable space in the British comedy scene, where he talks openly onstage about everyone from Ricky Gervais to Jimmy Carr to James Corden, even though (or perhaps because) the latter is a professed fan of his work. “Imagine James Corden watching me,” he said in a 2016 episode of BBC Two’s Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. “It’s like a dog listening to classical music.”
One of the most memorable reactions to the Riyadh controversy came from comedian Gianmarco Soresi, who posted a stand-up set in early October discussing the festival in which he enthusiastically named names. “I hope the one who gets in trouble is Gabriel Iglesias. He’d be like, ‘You can’t behead me. My neck’s too fluffy!’” Soresi joked. “I think Chappelle’s performing there tonight. I think it would be funny if he got in trouble because he wouldn’t stop talking about trans people.” Incidentally, on December 19, Chappelle released a new Netflix special titled The Unstoppable …, in which he hit back at critics of his decision to perform in Saudi Arabia, most notably Bill Maher. “I’ve known Bill since I was 18, 19 years old, and I’ve never said this publicly, but fuck that guy. I’m so fucking tired of his little smug, cracker-ass commentary,” Chappelle tells the crowd. It’s a dense special in which Chappelle tackles a host of topical events over its 75-minute run time, including Charlie Kirk’s murder and the Diddy trial. You’ll never guess what line received the most attention.