The 10 Best Stand-Up Specials That Dropped in 2024
2024-11-11 · 5 min read
Nate Bargatze's The Greatest Average American follow-up cemented him as the most reliably funny clean comic working today. His ability to find absurdity in completely mundane situations, from airline boarding procedures to grocery store interactions, made for a special that the whole family could watch without anyone cringing. Netflix knew what it had and promoted accordingly.
Jacqueline Novak's Get on Your Knees was not new in 2024, but its HBO re-release introduced it to a massive audience. The one-woman show, a 75-minute philosophical treatise disguised as a comedy about oral sex, is one of the most intellectually ambitious stand-up specials ever filmed. It is also genuinely, consistently hilarious, which is the harder part.
Sam Morril continued his run as the most efficient joke writer in stand-up with another tightly packed Netflix half-hour. His dark humor and rapid-fire delivery meant you could miss three punchlines in the time it took to process the first one. No one has a better joke-per-minute ratio working right now.
Mark Normand's Soup to Nuts was the special his fans had been waiting for. Normand's old-school, joke-joke-joke approach felt like a throwback to a pre-podcast era of stand-up, where the only thing that mattered was whether the material was funny. It was. Extremely. His crowd work segments were as sharp as his written material.
Taylor Tomlinson's Have It All addressed her bipolar diagnosis with a candor and comedic skill that made uncomfortable topics feel approachable. She managed to be genuinely vulnerable and genuinely hilarious simultaneously, which is the hardest trick in stand-up. Her delivery has a precision that comes from years of grinding in clubs before Netflix came calling.
Other 2024 highlights included specials from Ramy Youssef, Shane Gillis, Michelle Wolf, and Hasan Minhaj. The stand-up landscape in 2024 was the healthiest it has been in years, with Netflix, HBO, and YouTube all investing heavily in the format and a generation of comedians who honed their craft during the podcast boom finally getting the stage time they deserved.
