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If I went back in time and told my college self that, by middle age, we would consume comedy primarily in the form of podcasts, there would be a lot of questions, even after I explained what a podcast was. “So, basically, talk radio? Have we become politically conservative?” No, it’s more that podcasts are easier to make than movies or TV, but you can still advertise on them, so structural forces encourage every comedian to have one. “But the movie and TV industries are O.K.?” Maybe—it seems like they could go either way. “There’s still a vibrant sketch-comedy ecosystem centered on live performance, though, right?” Um . . . the important thing is that it’s never been easier to watch old clips of comedians on late-night talk shows, which, to be fair, are also kind of endangered.
At least college me could take comfort in seeing that we still wear big pants.
Is there a comedy cycle, the same way there are cycles in fashion? I became abnormally interested in what’s funny during the nineteen-nineties, the golden age of sketch comedy. In addition to “Saturday Night Live”—which may yet prove the most durable institution of my lifetime—there were “The Kids in the Hall,” “In Living Color,” “The State,” “Mr. Show with Bob and David,” and “Upright Citizens Brigade,” all of which shaped my generation’s idea of what comedy was. Many of the most successful comedy films of that decade—“Wayne’s World,” “Happy Gilmore,” “The Big Lebowski”—reflected the influence of sketch comedy on the national sense of humor, gleefully transgressing the bounds of natural realism in pursuit of high concepts and conspicuously clever writing.
During that period, the sketch approach to comedy struck me as less specific to the form and more just how a person was funny, the way fish are said to have no concept of water. Then “Anchorman” came out, in 2004, with a cast of stars who seemed to make up the dialogue as they went along, in the process training a generation of young men to say “That escalated quickly” whenever anything happened. Although “Anchorman” was only somewhat successful in theatres, grossing about ninety million dollars, it went on to an insanely profitable life on DVD. (That’s like a compact disc, both in the sense of higher quality and in the sense that you won’t own any after the Obama Administration—maybe we should sit down.) In the years that followed, American comedy’s center of gravity, both in hip performance venues and onscreen, shifted to improvisation.
The improv era rejected sketch comedy’s emphasis on funny situations, cutting out the heart of the scripted sketch by asking members of the audience to yell out a premise. Home-loan interview! Pinkberry! Nation-building! The high-wire act that followed—in which performers had to make these bland conceits into something funny without, ostensibly, preparing any jokes in advance—introduced a tension that made sketch shows feel sedate and uneven by comparison. As the two-thousands progressed, film and television comedy became dominated by Judd Apatow’s approach: allowing actors to improvise in loosely determined scenes, then cutting together the funniest exchanges. This approach yielded landmarks such as “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Superbad,” in addition to minor gems like “Role Models” and “Step Brothers.” In the process, American comedy went from being a writer’s medium, conceptual and self-aware, to a more tonal form that rewarded actors’ screen presence and sense of timing. Out went Mike Myers and in came Paul Rudd.
Then out went comedy almost entirely, at least from the box office. The declining number of films released and the withering of the mid-budget picture have progressively relegated filmed comedy to comic relief; many movies have gone back to scripted jokes, but mainly to break up fight scenes and exposition in action blockbusters. (The grim space warrior Drax, after his “Guardians of the Galaxy” teammate explains that metaphors go over his head: “Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast; I would catch it.”) The “Scary Movie” franchise gave us a Wayans-brothers reunion this year, but, otherwise, the feature-length comedy in which no one flies or explodes has largely vanished. It survives mainly among auteurs working for independent studios—take A24’s “Friendship,” released last year, and “The Invite,” released this year—and streaming platforms, as with last year’s “Jay Kelly” and “Madea’s Destination Wedding,” on Netflix. The shallow cultural footprint of these titles, at least two of which succeeded critically and/or financially, testifies to comedy’s waning as a cinematic form.
Meanwhile, the comedy podcast has waxed like crazy. Comedians now routinely give their audiences hours of new material every week, in exchange for subscription and advertising revenue that, while amounting to much less than what box offices and network sales departments once commanded, also goes more substantially and directly to the artists. The upshot is that you probably hear your favorite comic in conversation more often than you see them delivering prepared material or playing a character. And this change—subtle but enormous, accreting, over decades, through various currents and ecologies of selection, like a change in the composition of pearls—has altered our collective sense of what comedy is.
As anyone who has ever tried standup comedy will tell you, being funny in conversation and being funny when you are the only person talking are two different skills. My own experience interviewing Jerry Seinfeld felt less like a romp and more like a dental appointment, and you can still scare off TV executives by invoking the name of “The Chevy Chase Show.” The qualities that make someone fun at dinner do not qualify them to write a sitcom, and vice versa. This idea—that different forms of comedy reward and therefore encourage different ways of being funny—is my main argument here.
Let us say, just to agree on something, that there are five main ways to be funny: wit, quickness, charm, physicality, and tone. This list is arbitrary and incomplete—what about ventriloquism and criticizing the President?—but it’s a good starting point, offering us a schema for understanding how the comedy cycle has encouraged different ways of being funny over time.
Wit is the verbal construction of humor, and it tends to produce jokes that can be written out and still retain some of their quality. Consider the late Mitch Hedberg: “One time, I saw this wino eating grapes. I said, ‘Dude, you have to wait!’ ” It is often easier to explain why a witty joke is funny, because the content of wit matters more than how or when it is delivered. Compare that with quickness, or the ability to make the right remark at the right time, which is often funny not for its content so much as for its circumstances. Decades ago, my friend Aaron overheard a classmate introduce herself as “vice-chair, college Republicans,” and interposed his own hand to declare himself “chair, college Republicans!” This joke was memorable not for its sophistication so much as for his readiness to furnish it.
This readiness reflected the particular cast of Aaron’s mind, which brings us to category No. 3: charm, when a person is very much themselves. Sitcoms trade on this dimension of comedy: “Seinfeld” ’s George Costanza tells his girlfriend that God will never let him be successful or happy, and when his girlfriend objects that he doesn’t believe in God, he says, “I do for the bad things.” That’s so George! It is worth noting that comedic charm does not have to be charming in the conventional sense of the word; Don Rickles became one of the most beloved standup comics of all time by relentlessly complaining and insulting people, finding ways to be disappointed in everyone from David Letterman to audience members at his own shows.
Physicality is kind of its own thing and has not been a major force in American comedy since nineteen-seventies Steve Martin, or possibly Chris Farley. In the twenty-first century, the English have been better at it, as evidenced by the two-thousands film comedies of Edgar Wright (“Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”), which were strikingly visual and kinetic compared with the stand-around-bantering comedies that American directors made during the same period. (Here, recognition is also owed to Rowan Atkinson’s character Mr. Bean, an undeniable commercial and artistic achievement that, personally, makes me want to open the exit door mid-flight.) Maybe the comedy cycle will get back to physicality soon—perhaps through A.I. slop, which is aimed at a global audience and therefore rewards content that transcends language. I have also heard dark tidings of a return to clowning.
The last category is tone, a kind of light and whimsical atmosphere that operates independently of any single joke. In his 1895 essay “How to Tell a Story,” Mark Twain identified tone as the main difference between comedy and humor: the comic story comes to a point, whereas humor “bubbles gently along.” Perhaps the distinguishing feature of modern standup comedy has been the shift away from discrete jokes with identifiable setups and punch lines to a generally humorous tone; Bill Cosby’s 1982 routine about feeding his children chocolate cake for breakfast was a watershed, even though it is difficult to identify any one gag that is especially witty. It just kind of bubbles along.
The aspects of comedy most important to podcasting are tone and charm. Physicality presents technical challenges to audio recording, and wit—primarily achievable by coming up with lots of ideas in advance—quickly becomes alienating in a casual setting. The injection of prepared material into conversation, a classic social misstep of the young and clever, is also death on a podcast, a form that thrives on the parasocial illusion that you, the listener, are part of a conversation in which you happen not to speak.
With a chat podcast, in which familiar hosts talk for potentially hours each week, the source of humor tends to be the hosts’ ability to be casually yet consistently themselves—i.e., comedic charm—while maintaining a humorous tone. Although these hosts should probably not be totally witless, they should also not be so witty that the conversations become one-sided: compare the not particularly clever but very charming Theo Von, whose podcast has become so successful that he interviewed the President, with the genius Norm Macdonald, whose insistence on saying funny things to his guests sometimes drove his podcast into prank-show territory. If audiences wanted to hear a series of very funny jokes, standup albums would get more streams than podcasts. The numbers suggest that, at least for now, listeners prefer conversation.
As a fundamentally improvisatory form, podcasts also reward quickness. The hosts who can keep it moving, without lapsing into dead air or veering into an inappropriate tone (“What’s in the news . . . Israel?”) for long enough to develop a durable relationship with a growing audience are the ones who succeed. And those who do are successful indeed. At a moment when historically reliable sources of employment for mid-career comedians—writing for sitcoms and late night, supporting roles in film comedies, commercials—all seem to be in crisis, the podcast business is comparatively lucrative. In terms of return for your talents, being a good hang is currently more profitable than writing jokes.
My favorite funny podcast is “How Long Gone.” Launched by Chris Black and Jason Stewart in March, 2020, it bills itself as a “bi-coastal elite podcast,” presumably because its hosts have obnoxious jobs (creative consultant and d.j., respectively) and talk about Delta Air Lines Medallion status more than a cognitively normal person would. This theme turns out to be pretty loose, however; what “How Long Gone” is actually about is how Black and Stewart are friends.
In improv terms, they are a straight-line/wavy-line duo: Black is Manhattan-busy, sober, and easily annoyed, whereas Stewart is puckish and frequently stoned. Both men get off various zingers during the course of an episode, but the funniest moments come when they are especially themselves—e.g., Black’s irrational hatred of matcha, a premise that is inert on the page but comes to life in the context of the two friends’ amusement at each other’s idiosyncrasies.
What’s funny about “How Long Gone” is not what the hosts say (wit) or how they say it (quickness, physicality) but rather their freewheeling tone—the curmudgeonry, undergirded by deep affection, that characterizes male friendships in general and, it would seem, Black and Stewart’s friendship especially. They just kind of bubble along. This bubbling is a skill at which they particularly excel, and it is different from the skills demanded by standup or sketch performance—which, as far as I know, neither Black nor Stewart has ever done.
Another of my favorite podcasters, Caleb Hearon, does identify as a standup comedian and actor, and has found success in both forms. I enjoy his standup, but I would also say that, while he is good onstage, he’s great on a podcast. In “Model Comedian,” his HBO special from last year, he describes visiting Germany with an older friend who, in a group chat, suggests they all go to a concentration camp. “And I was, like, ‘Totally, I think something else,’ ” he says. “Which is that it’s Christmas, and I don’t want to go to Holocaust.” This bit is funny but also fundamentally conversational; it gets better when you picture him saying it in the moment, and from there it’s a short trip to imagining him talking with a guest. Hearon has the skill to be funny across multiple formats and an audience that is likely to follow him, but his strength and his income both lie in podcasting. He might decide, for artistic reasons, to develop his club act or audition more often, but financially he should probably spend as much time in the studio as possible. Given the incentives, why wouldn’t he?
A follow-up question: If you were a teen-ager in 2026 who aspired to a career in comedy, and you rarely saw feature-length comedies in movie theatres, routinely consumed news stories about the contraction of Hollywood production, and read Stavros Halkias’s recent interview with GQ, in which he says that “the entire industry has become a bringer”—meaning that, like standup-comedy showcases that require performers to bring a certain number of audience members, producers now look for comedians who bring a social-media following with them—what kind of career would you envision? Presumably, kids are still writing sketches in their basements and delivering jokes about cafeteria food into hairbrushes. But the smartest among them—or just the most ambitious—might reasonably conclude that the way to be funny for a living is to get very good at talking to their friends and interviewing people.
Right now, funny young people who would have enrolled in Improv 101 in 2006 are learning how to edit audio. The improvisation pipeline has narrowed—Upright Citizens Brigade has closed multiple spaces since 2019, and Chicago’s Second City was sold to private equity in 2021—and audiences whose earlier counterparts watched sketch shows, sitcoms, and late night are now consuming hours of podcasts, direct from the source or via clips on TikTok and other short-form-video platforms. Surely this change has affected what Americans in 2026 think is funny, the way certain of my father’s friends seemed to have based their entire sense of humor on Rodney Dangerfield.
The future of comedy is unwritten, meaning it hasn’t happened yet. But maybe the future of comedy is also unwritten in the sense that it is unscripted, more about being affable and enthusiastic than it is about being witty, something tonal and free-flowing instead of joke-oriented and structured. Maybe the generation growing up with podcasts will want comedians to make them laugh in ways closer to how laughter happens in real life. To them, the joke may be an experience rather than a line, and “Saturday Night Live” might seem as old-fashioned as “Take my wife—please!” ♦