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. Several characters in the Modern Age Batman comic books are expressly gay, lesbian, or bisexual. 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. Transvestite Bra Sex Change Sunburn Gay Comic Phone Postcard. A man or woman walk into a bar (or a club, or a theater, or an arena …). Boy Trouble: Gay Boy Comics with a New Attitude (5) and a great selection of related books. 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. This 2013 release from Northwest Press, which specializes in LGBTQ comics, is a compilation of strips about the space between and beyond heterosexual and homosexual. From childhood nostalgia to female orgasm, nothing is off the table.
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. I am a webcomic artist on Instagram known as TheReddot who creates hilariously unapologetic comics about 'finessing the inappropriate'. Cavemen whacked one another in the nuts for cheap yuks, and Medieval fools jabbered in a flop sweat to keep from being beheaded.