The 10 Best Comedy Specials on Netflix Right Now

Netflix's comedy library is enormous and inconsistent. For every brilliant special there are ten forgettable hours of crowd work and lazy observations. These ten specials represent the platform's best current offerings.

Ali Wong's Don Wong is a razor-sharp hour tackling marriage, wealth, and the specific indignities of being a woman in Hollywood with Wong's signature explicit honesty. Her delivery is fearless, her material is meticulously structured.

Watch a comedian chronologically rather than starting with the newest hour. Ali Wong's Baby Cobra, filmed in 2016 while she was seven months pregnant, is the special that made her, and Don Wong lands differently once you have it. An hour is the end of roughly eighteen months of club work, not the start of anything, which is why the good ones feel finished.

Nate Bargatze's The Greatest Average American is the purest joke-writing on Netflix. Bargatze's clean comedy and deadpan delivery make him the rarest thing in standup: a comedian whose material works for literally everyone without being sanitized.

Jerrod Carmichael's Rothaniel is one of the bravest comedy specials ever produced. Filmed in an intimate jazz club, Carmichael comes out as gay to his audience in real time, weaving the revelation into a meditation on family, secrecy, and performance. It won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing.

The rooms matter more than the material in three of these. Rothaniel was directed by Bo Burnham and shot at the Blue Note in New York, a jazz club of about 200 seats, so you hear individual people react. Baby J was filmed at Boston Symphony Hall. The Old Man and the Pool was shot at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center after a Broadway run. Comedians pick venues the way directors pick lenses.

John Mulaney's Baby J documents his addiction and intervention with precision and timing. The material is dark, the jokes are impeccably crafted, and Mulaney's ability to mine genuine trauma for genuine laughs raises questions about what comedy specials can and should do.

Taylor Tomlinson's Have It All showcases one of the best joke writers of her generation. At 30, Tomlinson constructs bits with architectural precision. Her material about dating, mental health, and millennial disillusionment is specific enough to be personal and universal enough to fill arenas.

Other standout specials include Sam Morril's Same Time Tomorrow for New York observational comedy, Ramy Youssef's More Feelings for identity comedy, Michelle Buteau's A Buteau-ful Mind for irrepressible joy, Mae Martin's SAP for queer storytelling, and Mike Birbiglia's The Old Man and the Pool for masterful storytelling.

Two omissions. James Acaster's Repertoire is four hours across four specials filmed in 2018, and the four are one structure rather than four separate hours; the pay-off in the last only works if you sat through the first three. Bo Burnham's Inside runs 87 minutes, was shot alone in one room during lockdown, and is barely standup at all. Both are on Netflix.

The crowd-work special is the format's junk food, and Netflix has a great deal of it. Cheap to shoot, no writing required, travels well as clips. Watch one, enjoy it, then notice you cannot recall a single thing about it two days later.

https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/11559