This release perfectly coincides with Ansari's meteoric rise to critical acclaim and primetime popularity, thanks to his role on Parks and Recreation. Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening showcases a decidedly likeable comic adept at pointing out the hilarity of his everyday life peppered with straight-up punch lines and plotted-out (and effective) jokes. Ansari's high-volume delivery and spark-shower of comedic touches in his language (R rated) comes off more genuine than as any type of shtick.
Daniel Tosh may sound like Dane Cook, but the host of Comedy Central's Tosh.0 is harsher, more intent on making people uncomfortable and, most importantly, way funnier. Happy Thoughts, Tosh's second album, is taken from a special and DVD of the same name, and is jam-packed with the comedian's fearlessly abrasive comments on modern society. He opens the show by offending his San Francisco audience, then delves into everything from sex to race to misogyny. He gets away with it, though, and there are laughs all the way through this 11-track comic beatdown.
It's all about the Hot Pockets. Jim Gaffigan, aka "the Hot Pockets guy," has a love/hate relationship with food, as evidenced by his hilarious sophomore album. While his extended bit on the trans-fatty microwavable snack is what propelled him into the limelight, he also plays his own naysayer by breaking into a falsetto alter ego after almost every punch line.
The brilliance of Louis C.K. is how effortlessly he can put everyone (especially himself) in their place. He makes light of death, divorce, "white people problems." He reminds us how good we really have it, how miraculous such phenomena as airplanes and cell phones are and how unappreciative we are of it all. (Next time someone complains about their cell, quote this: "Give it a second; is the speed of light too slow for you?) He says the things we all wish we could say ("When people are boring I want to kill them, and that's not fair"), and without a doubt deserves the title "hilarious."
The comedian's third proper album, Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome is highlighted by Bamford's genius-level talent for voices that range from hilarious to genuinely creepy (her Baby Jesus is memorable), and impersonations of various family members. Bamford's jokes often veer off into completely bizarre territory and are almost always geared toward storytelling rather than the more traditional joke-centric standup style. Bamford is one of the most creative and inarguably funny comedians in the Patton Oswalt-style "cool-kid" crew, and as such, brings legitimacy to that scene.
Recorded a year before his death, Midlife Vices is the set that was, unfortunately, Giraldo's only Comedy Central special. Featuring the comic's double-barreled talents for non-gimmicky ranting and hilarious confessionals, Midlife Vices charges over the listener with equal parts pinpoint political insight and flagrant offensiveness. No matter how offensive Giraldo gets, however, the punch lines always land and there is no question he is both intelligent and highly adept as a comedian. He somehow gets away with talking about being sexually attracted to koala bears.
This set catches the A-list comedian performing new material for a small crowd of only 30 people at the Laugh Factory. While the second half is raunchy enough to embarrass just about anybody, Cook's well-known casualness is amplified by the intimacy of the setting, which also gets him to open up about the inner workings of his psyche, the deaths of his parents from cancer and his many detractors. Even when addressing direly serious issues, though, Cook manages to keep the jokes his main focus and comes off as more than the frat-boy poser he is often characterized as.
A cross between Richard Pryor, Bobby McFerrin (in a good way) and the sound effects dude from the Police Academy movies (also in a good way), Reggie Watts delivers a cappella songs constructed with delay pedals and straight (if decidedly sideways) stand-up comedy. The songs on this 2010 release, Watts' third, are actually good beyond the fact that they are hilarious, and, astonishingly, often at least partly improvised. Half the enjoyment of listening to the live set is basking in Watts' formidable talents as a musician as well as a comic.
Words Words Words is proof positive that the one-time You-Tube sensation has graduated to the (semi) big time. Burnham may initially come off as a little too hipster to be taken seriously, but the fact is, the songs he writes are clever as all hell and the jokes are undeniably funny. Plus he's too willing to go blue/un-P.C. to be thrown in with some of his less-talented, more annoying peers. Featuring songs interspersed with spoken word clips from his live set, Words Words Words is a good indicator of what this young comic has to offer down the road.
Birbiglia's third album, Sleepwalk With Me Live, is also, in book form, a New York Times Bestseller as well as an intended film. A showcase of Birbiglia's self-deprecating humor, in which he puts the focus on humanity through the hilarity found in everyday life. His discussion of a brush with death (a malignant tumor in his bladder) makes you think as much as chuckle. Birbiglia is the rare comic that can go into serious territory without losing the most important part -- the laughs.
"I hate -- it is all I'm programmed to do!" That's Patton Oswalt's cell phone's impression of him from the opening bit of this hour-long set, recorded in February '09. It's an overstatement, though. A slightly sunnier Oswalt takes the stage for his third stand-up release, toting jokes about marriage, his "doom spawn" (that'd be his kid) and even his star turn in Ratatouille -- good fortunes that hang in the balance as our vituperative mensch works out his issues with religion, politics, corpulence, aging and grocery store clerks, all of which, it turns out, he hates. Good times.
Active on the stand-up circuit since the late '80s, but widely (and unfairly) unknown, Nick DiPaolo's sarcastic, abrasive comedy is often as unsettling as it is funny. A frequent reaction to his seemingly tossed-off punchlines is, "Did he really just say that?" This has been the case with DiPaolo since he first started appearing on the earliest, practically G-rated days of Comedy Central, and this refusal to tone down his act most likely contributed to the fact that 2011's Raw Nerve is his first album ever, taken from his first ever special for Comedy Central.
