Kaufman's career was the country's first major introduction with what’s sometimes called anti-comedy: An audience-baiting bit of performance art that shuns the simplicity of the set-up/punchline dynamic. These 50 stand-ups best embody what we have come to expect of our modern-day comedians: Someone who can wake us up to the weird, wonderful possibilities of the world around us, impel us to think differently about our own lives – and most of all, make us howl like blithering idiots.Įven if Andy Kaufman hadn't wrestled women for the “Inter-Gender Wrestling” championship hadn't entrusted his three, grown adopted black sons to David Letterman on-air hadn't created abusive, overtly hacky alter-ego Tony Cilfton and hadn't took his entire audience at Carnegie Hall out for milk and cookies, he would still be a legend. No disrespect to the foundational figures who shaped the earliest incarnations, but this list tiptoes past some of the early craftsmen and focuses on the unique voices who have helped to push stand-up forward in more recent days. In coming up with our version of a comic canon, we weighed artistic merit, technical proficiency and sense of timing, quality of their written material, their delivery and degree of influence - and often, their sense of what makes something, anything, funny.

So you’d think assembling a list of the 50 greatest stand-ups of all time would be easy right? Riiiight. They eventually exit stage left and leave a lot of laughing folks in their wake. A man or woman walk into a bar (or a club, or a theater, or an arena …). And even as the medium has morphed from one-liner artists to political satirists, from social-taboo tweakers to didja-ever-notice observational humorists, from the club-comic bubble of the 1980s to the the alt-comedy boom of the 1990s, it usually boils down to a fairly simple set-up. Some of the best practitioners of the form are still alive … or at the very least, haven’t been in the ground all that long.

Stand-up comedy grew out of minstrelsy and then vaudeville, which only makes it about a century old, tops. But the idea of getting onstage in front of strangers, just one person and a spotlight, and talking until they crack up – that’s new.

Cavemen whacked one another in the nuts for cheap yuks, and Medieval fools jabbered in a flop sweat to keep from being beheaded.

Unknown comics