Stand-Up Comedy Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
47 free Stand-Up Comedy trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Stand-up is one person, one microphone and a room that decides in real time whether you are funny. This quiz covers the art form from music-hall monologues to streaming specials. The easy questions ask what a tight five is, what it means to bomb or kill, what a heckler does, which comedian listed seven words you can't say on television and where the Comedy Store stands. From there it moves into the craft: openers, features and headliners, bringer shows, callbacks and closers, punching up and down, joke theft, the paraprosdokian and the strange fact that most people fear the stage more than death. The harder end is for comedy nerds: Artemus Ward, the 1911 Stage review that first used the term, Mort Sahl at the hungry i, Lenny Bruce's obscenity arrests and posthumous pardon, Carlin at the Gate of Horn, Pryor's Grammys and the freebasing fire, Mitzi Shore, Budd Friedman's coffee house, the Harvard of comedy clubs, Phyllis Diller's twelve laughs a minute, Bob Newhart's number-one album, Andy Kaufman lip-syncing Mighty Mouse, Bill Hicks cut from Letterman, the Cambridge Footlights winning the first Perrier, Just for Laughs' bankruptcy and Ricky Gervais's record night at the Hollywood Bowl. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on stand-up, its clubs and its comedians, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our comedy, Saturday Night Live and sitcoms quizzes next.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In stand-up slang, what is a 'tight five'?
A polished short set of best material
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.
Q 02What does it mean when a comedian is 'bombing'?
Failing to get laughs
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.
Q 03What is a 'callback' in a comedy set?
A reference to an earlier joke
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.
Q 04In stand-up slang, what does getting 'the light' mean?
The set's time is nearly up
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.
Q 05In club slang, when does a comic perform the 'check spot'?
While the audience gets its bills
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.
Q 06In a typical club line-up, who performs immediately before the headliner?
The feature
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.
Q 07What is a 'paraprosdokian'?
An ending that rewrites the setup
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.
Q 08What legal principle makes joke theft so hard to sue over?
The idea-expression distinction
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.
Q 09Which president read Artemus Ward, often called America's first stand-up, to his Cabinet?
Abraham Lincoln
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.
Q 10Whose comic lecture Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands is cited as an ancestor of stand-up?
Mark Twain
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.
Q 11Which comedian made 'Git-R-Done' his catchphrase?
Larry the Cable Guy
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.
Q 12Which comedian pioneered topical satire using only a newspaper as a prop?
Mort Sahl
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.
Q 13In which city did a jury acquit Lenny Bruce after his first obscenity arrest, at the Jazz Workshop in 1961?
San Francisco
Q 21Why did David Letterman and Jay Leno picket the Comedy Store in 1979?
No pay
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.
Q 22What backdrop did the Improv make a comedy-club trademark?
Bare brick wall
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.
Q 23What was Rodney Dangerfield's catchphrase?
'I get no respect!'
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.
Q 14Why was George Carlin arrested alongside Lenny Bruce at Chicago's Gate of Horn in 1962?
He refused to show ID
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.
Q 15Why was Lenny Bruce barred from entering the United Kingdom in 1963?
He was declared an 'undesirable alien'
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.
Q 16How many words did George Carlin's 1972 monologue say you can never say on television?
7
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.
Q 17Hosting the first Saturday Night Live, what did George Carlin stay out of?
Sketches
Sketches: he left the acting to the cast and instead walked out several times during the show to deliver stand-up monologues.
Q 18Who did Rolling Stone rank first in 2017 on its list of the 50 best stand-ups?
Richard Pryor
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.
Q 19What happened to Richard Pryor on 9 June 1980?
He set himself on fire
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.
Q 20On which street was the Comedy Store opened in 1972, in the old Ciro's nightclub?
Sunset Boulevard
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.
'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.
Q 24Who gave the Smithsonian a cabinet of over 50,000 typed jokes?
Phyllis Diller
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.
Q 25Which future superstar, then 18, opened for Phyllis Diller at the Bon Soir in Greenwich Village in 1960?
Barbra Streisand
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.
Q 26Whose 1960 comedy album reached number one and won the Grammy for Album of the Year?
Bob Newhart
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.
Q 27Which Tonight Show host launched Joan Rivers's career with a 1965 guest spot?
Johnny Carson
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.
Q 28Which cartoon theme did Andy Kaufman lip-sync one line from while standing perfectly still?
Mighty Mouse
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.
Q 29What became Steve Martin's trademark stage outfit once he was filling arenas?
A white three-piece suit
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.
Q 30How did Steve Martin end his stand-up career in 1981?
No announcement
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.