47 Fun Facts About Stand-Up Comedy

In stand-up slang, what is a 'tight five'?

A polished short set of best material: a tight five is a five-minute routine honed until every line lands, the standard audition piece for bookers and a step toward paid spots.

What does it mean when a comedian is 'bombing'?

Failing to get laughs: comedy slang is violent in both directions, since a comic who is not bombing or dying up there is killing, crushing or destroying the room.

What is a 'callback' in a comedy set?

A reference to an earlier joke: a callback works as an inside joke that the comic and the crowd have built together during the set. Keep repeating it and it becomes a running gag.

In stand-up slang, what does getting 'the light' mean?

The set's time is nearly up: the host flashes a light at the comic, usually with about a minute left, and the comic is expected to finish the joke and clear the stage.

In club slang, when does a comic perform the 'check spot'?

While the audience gets its bills: comics dread the check spot because the room stops listening the moment the checks land on the tables, and the jokes have to compete with wallets and arithmetic.

In a typical club line-up, who performs immediately before the headliner?

The feature: also called the middle, this comic does a set of about half an hour after the host has warmed up the room and the opener has done a short spot, then hands over to the headliner.

What is a 'paraprosdokian'?

An ending that rewrites the setup: the word is built from the Greek for 'against expectation'. Henny Youngman's 'Take my wife... please!' is the classic case, turning an example into a plea.

What legal principle makes joke theft so hard to sue over?

The idea-expression distinction: copyright covers a joke's exact wording but not its premise, so a rival who retells the idea in new words is almost untouchable, and comics police theft among themselves instead.

Which president read Artemus Ward, often called America's first stand-up, to his Cabinet?

Abraham Lincoln: in 1862 he read his Cabinet a Ward story, 'High-Handed Outrage at Utica', before presenting them with the Emancipation Proclamation. Ward's deadpan comic lectures were then packing halls across America.

Whose comic lecture Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands is cited as an ancestor of stand-up?

Mark Twain: he spun the talk from a reporting trip to Hawaii and first gave it in California in 1866, on posters promising that 'the trouble' would begin at eight. He toured versions of it for years.

Which comedian made 'Git-R-Done' his catchphrase?

Larry the Cable Guy: the thick drawl is switched on for the act. Dan Whitney grew up on a Nebraska pig farm and was the only one of the four Blue Collar Comedy Tour stars not born in the South.

Which comedian pioneered topical satire using only a newspaper as a prop?

Mort Sahl: while other comics wore tuxedos and told mother-in-law jokes, he walked on in a sweater with a rolled-up newspaper and picked the headlines apart. He later wrote campaign-trail jokes for John F. Kennedy.

In which city did a jury acquit Lenny Bruce after his first obscenity arrest, at the Jazz Workshop in 1961?

San Francisco: a jury there cleared him in 1962, but arrests for his act followed in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, where a 1964 conviction stood until the governor pardoned him in 2003, long after his death.

Why was George Carlin arrested alongside Lenny Bruce at Chicago's Gate of Horn in 1962?

He refused to show ID: police were checking every patron on the way out, hoping to catch someone underage, and a tipsy Carlin announced that he did not believe in ID. He left in the paddy wagon.

Why was Lenny Bruce barred from entering the United Kingdom in 1963?

He was declared an 'undesirable alien': he had played Peter Cook's Establishment club in London in 1962, but when he flew back in April 1963 the Home Secretary had him held and put on a plane home.

How many words did George Carlin's 1972 monologue say you can never say on television?

7: when a New York radio station aired a version of the routine one afternoon in 1973, a father driving with his son complained, and the Supreme Court ended up ruling 5-4 that such broadcasts could be restricted.

Hosting the first Saturday Night Live, what did George Carlin stay out of?

Sketches: he left the acting to the cast and instead walked out several times during the show to deliver stand-up monologues.

Who did Rolling Stone rank first in 2017 on its list of the 50 best stand-ups?

Richard Pryor: the magazine put him at number one, calling him the guts and heart of comedy because he put everything he was on display, his darkest moments included.

What happened to Richard Pryor on 9 June 1980?

He set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine, and doctors doubted he would survive the burns. He was soon back on stage, waving a lit match and calling it Richard Pryor running down the street.

On which street was the Comedy Store opened in 1972, in the old Ciro's nightclub?

Sunset Boulevard: comic Sammy Shore took a room in the old Ciro's building and wanted to call it the Sammy Shore Room. His partner Rudy De Luca asked who would come to that, and it opened as the Comedy Store instead.

Why did David Letterman and Jay Leno picket the Comedy Store in 1979?

No pay: owner Mitzi Shore called her club a college of comedy where newcomers learned the craft, yet she paid the big names in her new showroom. The strike won the comics pay for their sets.

What backdrop did the Improv make a comedy-club trademark?

Bare brick wall: Budd Friedman pulled the mirrors off the walls of a defunct Vietnamese restaurant and left the brick showing. He meant it as a late hangout for Broadway casts and at first hired singers, not comics.

What was Rodney Dangerfield's catchphrase?

'I get no respect!' came from a late bloomer: he quit comedy in the 1950s to sell aluminium siding and only found fame on his return, in his forties. He joked that when he left show business, nobody noticed.

Who gave the Smithsonian a cabinet of over 50,000 typed jokes?

Phyllis Diller: she typed every gag on an index card and filed it by subject, from accessories to world affairs, then gave all 48 drawers to the museum in 2003.

Which future superstar, then 18, opened for Phyllis Diller at the Bon Soir in Greenwich Village in 1960?

Barbra Streisand: the 18-year-old singer's first professional engagement was warming up the Bon Soir's crowd for Diller, then much the bigger name. Within four years she was starring on Broadway in Funny Girl.

Whose 1960 comedy album reached number one and won the Grammy for Album of the Year?

Bob Newhart: when the label asked to tape his next nightclub date, the former accountant admitted he had never played one, so it booked him into a Houston club. The result was the first comedy record to win Album of the Year.

Which Tonight Show host launched Joan Rivers's career with a 1965 guest spot?

Johnny Carson: he told her on air that she was going to be a star and later made her his permanent guest host. When she took a rival late-night show in 1986 he hung up on her and, by her account, never spoke to her again.

Which cartoon theme did Andy Kaufman lip-sync one line from while standing perfectly still?

Mighty Mouse: on the first Saturday Night Live, Kaufman stood by a record player and mouthed only 'Here I come to save the day!' Taxi's creators later turned his Foreign Man character into the mechanic Latka.

What became Steve Martin's trademark stage outfit once he was filling arenas?

A white three-piece suit: Martin bought it so that the back rows of ever bigger halls could still see him move, and topped it with a fake arrow through his head. By the late 1970s he was selling out arenas like a rock star.

How did Steve Martin end his stand-up career in 1981?

No announcement: he simply stopped and turned to films, later saying his act was a concept that was done once everybody understood it. He did not perform stand-up again for 35 years.

At which New York venue was Eddie Murphy's 1987 concert film Raw shot?

Madison Square Garden: on the stage of its Felt Forum, Murphy told how Bill Cosby had phoned to scold him for swearing in his act. Raw took about $50 million at the box office.

Which 1996 HBO special revived Chris Rock's stalled career and won two Emmys?

Bring the Pain: Rock had left Saturday Night Live, watched In Living Color get cancelled and called himself a has-been. He went back to the clubs to get really good, then taped the result in Washington, DC.

Which music mogul produced HBO's Def Comedy Jam?

Russell Simmons: the Def Jam co-founder put young Black club comics on HBO at midnight on Fridays, with Martin Lawrence as host. The show gave early television exposure to Bernie Mac, Jamie Foxx and Chris Tucker.

Which comedian's whole 1993 set was cut from the Late Show with David Letterman?

Bill Hicks: the show's producers cut his whole set, with its jokes about religion and abortion, and he died of cancer a few months later. In 2009 Letterman aired it in full and apologised to Hicks's mother on the show.

Which deadpan comic, who hid behind sunglasses and long hair, recorded the 1999 album Strategic Grill Locations?

Mitch Hedberg wore the sunglasses and kept his head down to cope with stage fright, yet his offbeat one-liners won a cult following and Time called him the next Seinfeld. He died in 2005, aged 37.

What is the world's largest performing arts event, held every August?

Edinburgh Fringe: it began in 1947 when eight theatre groups turned up uninvited at the city's new International Festival and performed anyway. It still has no selection panel, so anyone with a venue can put on a show.

Which comic actor won the first Perrier Comedy Award in a Cambridge revue with Emma Thompson?

Hugh Laurie: a serious rower, he joined the Cambridge Footlights only after illness took him off the water, and its revue The Cellar Tapes won the brand-new prize in 1981.

In which city was the Just for Laughs comedy festival founded?

Montreal: it began as Juste pour rire, a modest two-day French-language event, and added English shows a few years later. It became the place where comics audition for the television industry, hoping to leave with a development deal.

Which New York show-business club began its celebrity roasts in 1949 by honouring Maurice Chevalier?

The Friars: the club had long ribbed its own members at private dinners, and Chevalier's was its first official roast. Its motto is 'We only roast the ones we love', so an evening of insults counts as an honour.

On which day in 1991 did the channel now called Comedy Central go on air?

April Fools' Day, 1 April, was when two rival comedy channels, one run by HBO and one by MTV's owner Viacom, merged into one. The deal was struck while Viacom was suing HBO.

Which Australian comedian's 2017 show Nanette became a Netflix sensation?

Hannah Gadsby built the show around an announcement of quitting stand-up. It became a surprise Netflix hit in 2018 and made Gadsby a household name, and a new tour, Douglas, followed a year later.

Which 2016 Netflix special made Ali Wong a star?

Baby Cobra was filmed when Wong was seven and a half months pregnant, and in it she jokes that female comics who get pregnant tend to disappear. The opposite happened to her: the special made her a star.

Which comedian walked out on his hit Comedy Central sketch show in 2005 and flew to South Africa?

Dave Chappelle left in the middle of making the third season, walking away from a contract worth tens of millions of dollars. He blamed the stress and the direction the show had taken, and went back to stand-up.

Where did Ricky Gervais set the record for the highest-grossing single stand-up show in 2023?

The Hollywood Bowl show of May 2023, part of his Armageddon tour, grossed about $1.7 million (£1.41 million), a Guinness World Record for a single stand-up performance at the time.

Which coffee chain declined to sponsor Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee?

Starbucks: Seinfeld asked its chief, Howard Schultz, to sponsor his coffee show and was turned down, so a car maker, Acura, backed it instead.

The Borscht Belt, the resort circuit that bred generations of comics, lay in which mountains?

The Catskills: borscht, a beet soup, was so popular on the menus of the Jewish resort hotels in these New York mountains that it named the whole circuit.

At its 1950s-60s peak, roughly how many resorts operated in the Borscht Belt comedy circuit?

500 is the usual figure for the resorts alone, beside thousands of bungalows. Jewish families shut out of other hotels built their own, and cheap air fares and the suburbs later emptied them.