The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Rory Rosegarten started his career as a comedy manager by the time he was 20 with a whopper of a first client: the already legendary Robert Klein. More than four decades later, as founder and still president of The Conversation Company, Rosegarten manages a small but highly successful comedy clientele — his longtime roster includes both Brian Regan and Ray Romano, his newer client Tom Green recently premiered a documentary, a stand-up special and a docu-series all this year on Amazon Prime Video, and he's currently working with comedian Gary Valentine on a TV series based on golfer John Daly. Rosegarten sat down with me over Zoom to talk about his teenage years interviewing celebrities first for his high-school and then for Playboy magazine, how he recruited other comics to work with a manager younger than them during the 1980s comedy boom, and how some things change and some things never do in the comedy business — including the fact that Rory has done it all while always living in Long Island. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Mike Drucker is an Emmy-nominated and WGA-winning writer and comedian living in New York. Drucker's comedy career really began with an internship at Saturday Night Live, where he later contributed to SNL's Weekend Update as well as The Onion before leaving the city and the East Coast for a gig writing for video games with Nintendo of America. So it makes sense that his memoir, Good Game, No Rematch, would share his love letters to video games and their place in his life and comedy. Drucker sat down with me to talk about how he kept his comedy career humming in the background while he worked for Nintendo and later IGN, before returning to NYC, where he eventually found himself at Full frontal with Samantha Bee, rising to the level of executive producer and head writer by the end of that late-night talker on TBS. He also has written for The President Show, Adam Ruins Everything, Bill Nye Saves The World, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and has enjoyed two stints back in 30 Rock writing for Jimmy Fallon on both Late Night and The Tonight Show. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Fooling media outlets into thinking she created the Netflix series Emily in Paris may have won the comedian and Fordham grad Abby Govindan plenty of new followers on Twitter in 2021, but it didn't go a long way in making her the pride of her Indian American family back home in Houston. It's just one of the stories Govindan shares in her debut Off Broadway one-hander, "How to Embarrass Your Immigrant Parents,"produced by the comedians Hasan Minhaj and Daniel Sloss.

In the show, she reveals how she struggled with her mental health before finding therapy and stand-up comedy, and learns how to love or at least understand her father's responses in the family's group chat. Just 24 hours before her opening night at New York City's SoHo Playhouse, Abby sat down with me over Zoom to talk about how much has changed for her in the past five years. She explains what she has learned from social media and working with and for more famous comedians, and how Jungle Cat, the stand-up showcase she co-hosts with Mohanad Elshieky, has helped her both mentally and professionally. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Brad Alexander composes music for television and musical theater, whose notable works include the music for See Rock City & Other Destinations, which won the 2011 Drama Desk Award, Richard Rodgers Award and BMI Foundation's Jerry Bock Award, and more recently served as lead composer for the PBS/Amazon animated series, Clifford The Big Red Dog. I remember seeing and hearing Brad as a piano whiz as early as the second grade, as we were elementary-school classmates and friends growing up in small-town Connecticut. We had a great time catching up on how his career went from the Berkshire Theatre Festival to ad agency music producing, working in piano bars both as a soloist and as a dueling pianist — eventually owning his own business, The Flying Ivories . His other staged works and collaborations include Click, Clack, Moo, We The People: America Rocks!, the Emmy-winning PBS series, Peg + Cat, and he wrote the music for Dog Man: The Musical, which is currently on tour across North America. We spoke about all of that, plus the work he's currently engaged in adapting the film Bread & Roses, into a stage musical with his wife, actress/singer/writer Jill Abramovitz, who's on standby for the cast of the new all-star Broadway production, All In. There's definitely a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

What's in a name? Since its launch in 2016 by comedy managers Ryan Bitzer and Damion Greiman, along with founding members Ian Adkins and Anthony Leo, 800 Pound Gorilla Media has grown from a small record label into a king kong of comedy distribution, working with everyone from Kevin Hart's LOL Network to Bill Burr and Al Madrigal's All Things Comedy, and releasing a cool 100 comedy specials on their YouTube channel in the year 2024. 800 Pound Gorilla Media also celebrated a new licensing deal with Hulu in 2024 that sees at least one of their specials premiering exclusive there once a month, and in this weekend's Grammy Awards, they're not only the record label for nominee Nikki Glaser's Someday You'll Die, but also the record distribution partner for Netflix's nominees, too. I sat down with Anthony and Damion at the end of April 2024 to talk about how the comedy business has changed in recent years, and how 800 Pound Gorilla Media has adapted to change with the times. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

We did it, comedy fans. We withstood another year of craziness, hundreds upon hundreds of comedy specials, and have gotten my friend and colleague in comedy criticism, Jason Zinoman from The New York Times, to join me for another December to Remember and try to make sense of it all. 2024, a year that started with a fake AI George Carlin and a captivating Katt Williams performance on Club Shay Shay, that saw the relaunch of @Midnight as After Midnight on CBS, that saw Just For Laughs go bankrupt and cancel their Montreal bash only to promise a revival in 2025, that saw the major presidential candidates sit down with so many comedians for election-season podcasts, can we make sense of all of that? It was a year when Netflix went live in a big way, but were their specials funnier than the hundreds of offerings on YouTube, and can upstarts at Hulu, Veeps and Dropout provide some much-needed competition? What does it say about comedy that a comedy D&D show, Dropout's Dimension 20, as well as a glorified Gong Show in Tony Hinchcliffe's Kill Tony, both sold out Madison Square Garden? And who were our Comedy MVPs for 2024? It was obviously a big year for Nikki Glaser, who will host the Golden Globes to kick off 2025, and another banner year for Nate Bargatze. It was also a breakout year for Cole Escola and Alex Edelman, each of whom won over Broadway. Josh Johnson and Conner O'Malley won the internet, or showed us how to defeat the algorithms. Whom else did we give shoutouts to? What made us worry about comedy trends? There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Kelly McCaughan is an actor, writer, comedian and clown whose show, Catholic Guilt, was nominated for Best Newcomer by the 2023 ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and then brought back the following Fringe, where her show received a Best Show nomination from the 2024 ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Originally from outside of Pittsburgh, McCaughan went to college with fellow renowned clown Natalie Palamides where she studied theater, learned improv through the Upright Citizens Brigade, and Bouffon from Red Bastard. Her TV credits include roles on HBO's Crashing and Apple TV+'s Servant, and she has taken her Catholic Guilt show across America. I caught up with her during her SoHo Playhouse run in New York City in November, which took place the weekend after Election Day. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Chad Daniels is a Minnesota stand-up comedian with more than a billion streams to his credit, and in July 2024 released his 10th comedy special and first for Netflix, Empty Nester, marking his freedom from raising two kids as a single dad in small-town Minnesota. Daniels sat down with me over Zoom to talk about how he balanced it all in his early years as a stand-up, what he learned from working with Mitch Hedberg as a young comic, why he resisted the pull of Los Angeles and New York City, and how landing his 2017 album on Pandora gave him both a new set of fans and placed a new set of expectations upon himself. Since that 2017 album, "Footprints on the Moon," Daniels has put five hourlong specials across YouTube, EPIX, MGM+ and Netflix — and that's not even counting another hour he has in the can for Netflix already. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Kyle Ayers is a comedian from Missouri currently based in Los Angeles who hosts the popular podcast and live show, Never Seen It, where comedians rewrite famous movies and TV shows they've never seen. You may have seen Ayers perform his stand-up on Conan or on the OnlyFans comedy showcase, LMAOF. Ayers also created and hosted the live comedy show, Boast Rattle, which as it name suggests is the opposite of Roast Battle, and which he adapted for the aborted streamer Quibi as Nice One! Ayers met up with me during the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe, where Ayers has debuted a new hour, Hard To Say, in which he describes his ordeals with chronic pain since 2017, when he discovered he was suffering from Trigeminal Neuralgia, a condition also sometimes referred to as Suicide Disease. Because of the subject matter, I also want you to know that if you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available by calling or texting 988.

Kyle Ayers may seem like he's more than OK joking about it on the outside, but how is he holding up on the inside? I asked him. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

The state of the comedy industry, like most everything else in 2024, feels very much in flux. Danny Frenkel and Alex Dajani have seen firsthand how technology and social media have changed the relationships between performers and fans in the 21st century, and have set about finding a better way for them to connect today. Danny worked at Facebook since 2010 in various aspects of marketing and data strategies, while Alex was a software engineer at Apple and Meta — until they partnered up to launch PunchUp Live in 2023. Their platform, which had about 200,000 monthly active users when I spoke to them earlier this year, aims to serve up data for comedians to better grow their fan bases, while providing those fans with ad-free viewing experiences, bonus content and a better ability to know when their favorite comedians are performing near them. Steve Byrne was the first comedian to visibly promote PunchUp in 2023, but the ranks have grown to include Sam Morril, Mark Normand, Michelle Wolf, Liz Miele, Joe List and more. Danny and Alex sat down with me over Zoom to explain how they got into the comedy business and what they hope to prove with PunchUp Live. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!