The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Rory Albanese joined The Daily Show with Jon Stewart shortly after graduating from college in 1999, and rose from the ranks to become executive producer by the time he left in 2013, and was the showrunner for The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, also on Comedy Central, where you also started to see him more in front of the camera as a contributor and panelist. He released his first half-hour stand-up special in 2010. So what's next for Albanese? I asked him, so let's get to it!

Nicole Byer first captured the comedy world's attention as part of the improv group, Doppelganger, which also featured future Saturday Night Live player Sasheer Zamata. Byer co-starred in a late-night sketch show on FOX produced by The Lonely Island called Party Over Here. She's also appeared on Lady Dynamite, Transparent, 30 Rock and the movie, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. Nicole's relationship with MTV began with appearances in webseries, then on TV with Girl Code and Ladylike, and now her own starring series based on her life, Loosely Exactly Nicole. She caught up with me before her first-season finale, so let's get to it!

This episode is sponsored by Seeso, and by the Impractical Jokers.

Norman Lear is a television legend. Writer, producer and creator of all-time classic sitcoms of the 1970s – including All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Maude. Lear made satire tackling race, class, and gender inequalities and things that matter to people, at a time when nobody else on TV dared to do so. At one point, he had five of the top nine TV shows in America. Lear left TV to found the progressive organization, People For the American Way, and later purchased the actual Declaration of Independence so Americans of all ages could still see it. Now 94, a new documentary about him from American Masters, "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You" premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, and it'll make its broadcast debut Oct. 25, 2016, on PBS.

So let's get to it!

You first saw Joe Rogan on the classic NBC sitcom NewsRadio, then later as host of the competition show Fear Factor. Now not only can you see him commentating on UFC fights, but also hear and see him on his hit podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. His latest stand-up special, Triggered, is exclusively out now on Netflix.

Rogan recounts the key moments in his career, from making the leap of teaching taekwondo to stand-up comedy in Boston in the late 1980s, to surviving his first failed sitcom experience in Los Angeles, lessons learned from an infamous takedown of Carlos Mencia and sticking up for the underdogs, to building his own electronic independence via message boards and podcasts. So let's get to it!

Miranda Sings has been telling Haters to back off since she first uploaded a hilariously bad cover of Aretha Franklin's Respect in late 2007. Since then, she has accumulated more than 7 million YouTube subscribers and one billion views of her videos – more than 5.1 million Instagram followers, 3.67 million Twitter followers and 2 million Facebook fans – and just launched an eight-episode series called Haters Back Off! On Netflix. She's the brainchild alter-ego of singer Colleen Ballinger, who has millions of fans and followers for her real-life pages, too. She developed her funny new Netflix series alongside her brother, Chris, and it co-stars Angela Kinsey and Steve Little as Miranda's mother and uncle, who are blindly devoted to helping the homeschooled Miranda achieve her dreams of stardom. How did Colleen Ballinger pull this all off? She tells me her true story of talent, hard work and determination, so let's get to it!

Derek Waters is the co-creator and star of Drunk History, which has won both an Emmy and a Sundance Film Festival award and is now in its fourth season on Comedy Central after appearing on Funny or Die and HBO. A fifth season is forthcoming. But Drunk History wasn't even the first successful webseries from Waters; he previously collaborated with Bob Odenkirk and The Big Bang Theory's Simon Helberg on "Derek and Simon," which actually was an HBO pilot before it became a webseries. And before that, Waters co-starred on a network TV sitcom for ABC ("Married to the Kellys"). If that history sounds confusing sober, just wait until you try to retell it drunk. Or just ask Derek Waters yourself. Like I did. So let's get to it!

Cue the bugle sounds and put your puns where we can see them, because Andy Zaltzman is my guest today. Zaltzmanis a critically-acclaimed comedian in the UK where he has been performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe since 1999 and collaborating with John Oliver since 2001 — they created the hugely popular podcast, The Bugle, in 2007, only stopping earlier in 2016 when it became acutely apparent that Oliver's Emmy-winning work on HBO's Last Week Tonight had made him too busy to continue working with Zaltzman. Zaltzman is relaunching The Bugle on Oct. 21, 2016, with a rotating lineup of all-star guest cohosts featuring comedians from around the globe. He also has brought his interactive political comedy show, Satirist For Hire, to the United States for the first time — he'll be taking requests in advance from audience members via email and performing unique satire for audiences across North America in the month leading up to the 2016 elections. Zaltzman sat down with me after his New York City tour stop to talk satire, crickets, puns and more. So let's get to it!

Today's guest, Tony Hendra, began his career at Cambridge University with the famed Footlights as the comedy partner of Graham Chapman, and starred in the annual revue with Chapman and John Cleese. He came to the United States as a duo act with Nick Ullett, appearing multiple times on The Ed Sullivan Show and Merv Griffin, before splitting up and taking a job as the first editor hired by the founders of National Lampoon. While there, he made the Lampoon's first album, Radio Dinner, with Michael O'Donoghue, and followed that up by giving John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest their first starring roles in the Lampoon's off-Broadway hit, Lemmings. Hendra appeared in This Is Spinal Tap, playing the band's manager, co-created and co-produced the British TV satire, Spitting Image, and served as Editor-in-Chief of Spy Magazine from 1993-1994. He has written four books, including the posthumous memoir of George Carlin, "Last Words," and for the past several years has led a new satirical operation called The Final Edition. He's just put out a new comedy album with the Lampoon, "Are There Any Triggers Here Tonight?" There's a lot of great comedy history and stories to get to, so let's get to it!

With the 2016 election careening toward Judgment Day, Lewis Black is back on Broadway this fall, giving voice to the grand majority of Americans and citizens worldwide perplexed at our politics and our political discussion. Black is performing "Black to the Future" Monday nights on Broadway, and heading out on the road for tour dates across the country in between, delivering his comedic rants and interacting with fans both in his live audience and livestreaming online. Black called in to ShowBriz Studios to talk about what's happening now, and how he found his way from playwriting to stand-up comedy, through three hosts of Comedy Central's The Daily Show to now. So let's get to it!

Gary Owen is the only white comic to host BET's Comic View, and many years later, he's bringing his whole family to the network in the reality series, The Gary Owen Show, debuting in October 2016. Not something you might have expected from a kid growing up in a trailer park with an abusive stepfather in southern Ohio. Gary always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, but he enlisted in the Navy straight out of high school. It was only when he was stationed in San Diego that he could use his leave hours to hit the comedy clubs there and in Los Angeles for open mics. He talks to me about all of that, how he sustained himself in the decade between getting a role in the Jamie Foxx movie Held Up and his eventual success with House of Payne and the Think Like a Man films, and how the death of his brother from a drug overdose changed Gary's outlook on comedy. All of that, plus Gary's decision to have his black wife and mixed-race children on camera with him in BET's The Gary Owen Show. So let's get to it!