Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Karolina Wojtasik\/HBO, Joe Rogan Experience\/Youtube<\/p>\n
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\u2019t on the lineup calling out those who were and festival performers defending their decision. It was petty, ineffectual, and exhausting, and people couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s blog post calling out Riyadh performers like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Bill Burr, and Jim Jefferies (\u201cHow can any of us take any of you seriously ever again?\u201d); Andrew Schultz hitting back at Cross on his podcast, Flagrant, by referencing an instance of Cross using the N-word; Burr\u2019s rant on Conan O\u2019Brien Needs a Friend when he referred to people criticizing festival performers as \u201csanctimonious cunts\u201d who don\u2019t \u201csincerely give a shit\u201d; and more.
\nThe idea that comedy fans love hearing comedians shit-talk each other isn\u2019t exactly groundbreaking \u2014 consider\u00a0Katt Williams\u2019s 2024 scorched-earth Club Shay Shay appearance or even the late-night wars of the \u201990s \u2014 but in 2025, high-profile comedy beef took up more airspace than ever before. Entire\u00a0YouTube channels\u00a0have sprung up to document comedians\u2019 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\u00a0Marc Maron calling out the Rogan-verse\u00a0while promoting his new special,\u00a0Panicked,\u00a0as well as\u00a0Rogan\u2019s so-called nuclear response\u00a0have received over a million views combined. Another video of\u00a0Andrew Schulz going after Andrew Santino\u00a0on\u00a0The Joe Rogan Experience\u00a0simply for saying he doesn\u2019t like the Austin comedy scene has garnered almost 600,000 views in just over two months. In another video titled\u00a0\u201cMark Normand\u2019s Problem With Eric Andre,\u201d\u00a0which has almost 430,000 views, the body language of a\u00a0We Might Be Drunk\u00a0podcast episode featuring both comedians is scrutinized for evidence of tension like the Zapruder film. \u201cI stumbled across a channel that makes analysis videos reading into comedy podcast [sic],\u201d reads one comment with 6,000 likes. \u201cI need a job and girlfriend so bad. Why am I here.\u201d
\nMost 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\u2019s Schulz labeling Maron an asshole on Joe Rogan by telling an anticlimactic story about Maron being mean to Jon Stewart in the \u201990s (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\u2019s World in September. But if interpersonal bickering must overtake an outsize part of the comedy ecosystem, why don\u2019t more comedians make it more interesting by channeling it into stand-up?
\nIt\u2019s the type of thing that happens regularly in roasts, and as the\u00a0massive ratings\u00a0of 2024\u2019s\u00a0The Roast of Tom Brady\u00a0demonstrated, 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 \u201cedgy\u201d hot-button topics. There\u2019s inherent tension in the fact that they could easily run into the peers they\u2019re talking about in a greenroom or at an industry event. It\u2019s what made it so exciting when Eddie Murphy mocked Bill Cosby in his 1987 special Raw for calling him to \u201cchastize\u201d him about his dirty material. The joke itself is solid, but it plays better because of the subtext: Cosby clearly had Murphy\u2019s phone number and could have very easily called him again. The same is true of Bill Hicks\u2019s oft-referenced tirade against Jay Leno from the early \u201990s. Hicks wasn\u2019t 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.
\nMurphy and Hicks are part of a small but growing list of comedians who have mocked their peers onstage using scathing impressions. There\u2019s Anthony Jeselnik, who once demonstrated the hackiness of Dane Cook\u2019s act by performing a joke in his characteristically bare-bones style, then repeating the same joke using Cook\u2019s overly animated approach. Drew Michael similarly mocked Jimmy Fallon\u2019s emptiness in his 2021 special Red Blue Green by impersonating his ability to laugh at anything, and Hasan Minhaj impersonated Aziz Ansari\u2019s cartoonishness in 2022\u2019s The King\u2019s Jester. A more recent example of this played out in Maron\u2019s Panicked, when the comedian imagined Theo Von interviewing Hitler on his podcast This Past Weekend to illustrate how Von and similar comedians normalize fascism. \u201cY\u2019all did a lot of meth, right?\u201d Maron says as he lobs a hypothetical but believable softball in a pitch-perfect Von voice. \u201cHey, Hitler, you probably didn\u2019t even hate the Jews. That was just the meth making you crazy, dog.\u201d 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.
\nEven when comedians don\u2019t 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\u2019s unafraid to scratch this itch. He\u2019s trained his sights on everyone from Mike Birbiglia to Bo Burnham to Fallon to Colin Jost. \u201cColin Jost exists in this very interesting space where we\u2019re aware of him but he is the last thing we\u2019ve ever thought about,\u201d he joked about the latter in a set about SNL. \u201cIf 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.\u201d 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. \u201cImagine James Corden watching me,\u201d he said in a 2016 episode of BBC Two\u2019s Stewart Lee\u2019s Comedy Vehicle. \u201cIt\u2019s like a dog listening to classical music.\u201d
\nOne 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. \u201cI hope the one who gets in trouble is Gabriel Iglesias. He\u2019d be like, \u2018You can\u2019t behead me. My neck\u2019s too fluffy!\u2019\u201d Soresi joked. \u201cI think Chappelle\u2019s performing there tonight. I think it would be funny if he got in trouble because he wouldn\u2019t stop talking about trans people.\u201d Incidentally, on December 19, Chappelle released a new Netflix special titled The Unstoppable \u2026, in which he hit back at critics of his decision to perform in Saudi Arabia, most notably Bill Maher. \u201cI\u2019ve known Bill since I was 18, 19 years old, and I\u2019ve never said this publicly, but fuck that guy. I\u2019m so fucking tired of his little smug, cracker-ass commentary,\u201d Chappelle tells the crowd. It\u2019s a dense special in which Chappelle tackles a host of topical events over its 75-minute run time, including Charlie Kirk\u2019s murder and the Diddy trial. You\u2019ll never guess what line received the most attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Karolina Wojtasik\/HBO, Joe Rogan Experience\/Youtube Remember the Riyadh Comedy Festival? Back in September, it was all anyone<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.demoviewer4.com\/keith-ponder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.demoviewer4.com\/keith-ponder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.demoviewer4.com\/keith-ponder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.demoviewer4.com\/keith-ponder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.demoviewer4.com\/keith-ponder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.demoviewer4.com\/keith-ponder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.demoviewer4.com\/keith-ponder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.demoviewer4.com\/keith-ponder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.demoviewer4.com\/keith-ponder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}