After a rocky year of false starts and pandemic-induced innovation, standup comedy has found its rhythm again in 2022. With clubs and comedy festivals back in action, we’ve been blessed with a slate of fresh comedy specials as comedians shake off the rust and channel two years of isolation and uncertainty into new material.

And despite cranky old millionaires hogging the headlines with their cancel culture moral panic, there’s actually been some really great comedy releases already this year. From the late Norm Macdonald’s last special, to blistering sets by fresher faces like Ali Siddiq and Jaspreet Singh, 2022 had a lot to offer. There’s even two more contenders in the pipeline, with Netflix due to drop specials by Chelsea Handler and Vir Das next week. Seriously, who drops a special in the last week of December?

Netflix’s covert war on culture journalists’ leisure time aside, here are our favourite comedy specials of the year (in no specific order).

Taylor Tomlinson – Look At You

It’s easy to underestimate Taylor Tomlinson. The 28-year-old is a traditionalist in a scene increasingly fascinated with postmodernist ideas about play, performativity and subversion (see: Hannah Gadsby, Bo Burnham, James Acaster). On top of that, she came up doing Church comedy, and her blonde hair and slightly manic on-stage persona means there’s a strong Taylor Swift energy about her, a comparison she loves. 

But on Look At You, Tomlinson shows that she can hit as hard and heavy as any brooding anti-comic. The comic’s second Netflix special is just as strong on the fundamentals as 2020’s Quarter-Life Crisis, but mines darker emotional territory such as being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, losing her mother as an eight-year-old, and her journey with therapy and mental health medication. There’s expertly delivered dead-mom jokes, eminently relatable bits about figuring out her diagnosis by Googling her meds and insightful self-effacing jokes about how she couldn’t tell if the changes in her sex life were because of meds affecting her sex drive or just a higher self-esteem. This is a great, well-polished set by a young standup who’s still growing and evolving as she goes. 

Ali Siddiq – The Domino Effect 

Ali Siddiq’s second hour-long special The Domino Effect—which he self-released on YouTube—is a story-telling masterclass by a comedian who’s gone through a few lifetimes of WTF. The special starts with Siddiq sitting onstage, one arm resting on a conveniently placed stool, as he pinpoints the moments when his life went down the wrong path. In Siddiq’s case, that was apparently when he was just 10 years old. 

The Houston native paints a vivid portrait of growing up in the Houston projects, and the decisions, interactions and situations that led him to become a drug dealer—or “street pharmaceutical salesman”—who was busted by the FBI at the age of 19, spending six years in prison. Siddiq pulls you in and holds your attention like a seasoned raconteur as he slowly unpacks stories that veer up and down the chronological timeline. It’s as authentic as it comes, and will have you hitting repeat the second it ends. 

Norm Macdonald – Nothing Special 

In the summer of 2020 Norm Macdonald—aware of the cancer that would kill him last year, about to go into a possibly risky medical procedure—sat down to record his last ever comedy special. Stuck at home due to the pandemic, he performed it to an audience of zero. As the pre-show caption says, he “didn’t want to leave anything on the table in case things went south.” 

Watching it now on Netflix, the special feels like a final farewell, a valedictory message from a comedian who knows he’s about to graduate to a bigger, cosmic stage. Especially since it comes packed with its own on-camera wake—six of his friends and peers in standup sitting down to dissect the special, and Norm’s career and life. It’s impossible to really capture the set in a short blurb, so I’ll just say that this is Norm at his Normest—folksy, audacious, wildly tangential, and always willing to stake everything on a punchline.

Sumaira Shaikh – Dongri Danger

On Dongri Danger, Sumaira Shaikh sets herself an incredibly tough task: to mine comedy out of the universal tragedy of a death in the family. The special centres around the sudden death and funeral of her brother and the awkward, tragicomic absurdity of dealing with an unexpected tragedy—from the way family hierarchy is established by who’s assigned to fetch water for the other mourners, to dealing with well-meaning friends who don’t know what to say or when to say it.

This comic exploration of loss and mourning—coming after of two years of a deadly pandemic—is book-ended by smart, relatable jokes about growing up in Dongri, a locality of Mumbai mostly known to people for its association with gang criminality, including anecdotes about his father’s encounter with notorious gangster Dawood Ibrahim. And Shaikh tackles material about both tragedy and pop culture stereotyping with the deft touch of a natural born comedian.

Ali Wong – Don Wong

In her previous Netflix specials Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife, Ali Wong successfully mined a rich vein—the tenuous relationship between sex, self-hood and financial independence—that made her eminently relatable to an audience sick of endless hustle culture. But now Wong is a success. She’s not just a big comedy star, she’s a movie star too now. Instead of the icon of “lying down”, Wong is now an actual girlboss.

On Don Wong, she leans into her new ‘unrelatability’, pegging much of the special around her fantasies of cheating on her husband, whether it’s with with Michael B. Jordan or a film food consultant. There’s also an anecdote about how she was so busy hustling on the sets of Always Be My Maybe that she forgot to take a dump during the whole production, leading to some hilariously gross colon issues. Wong is as dirty, naughty and angry as ever, and this special is her irresistibly funny mid-life crisis.

Bill Burr – Live At Red Rocks

In comedy’s ongoing internecine culture war, Bill Burr gets put in the corner with a bunch of other comedy revanchists—a bunch of middle-aged mostly white mostly male comedians who froth at the mouth when anyone mentions the words ‘cancel’ or ‘accountability’. And it’s not entirely unfair—Burr’s angry yell-rant style and his surface-level critiques of feminism are very much in old-man-yells-at-cloud territory.

But unlike a Dave Chappelle or a John Cleese, Burr’s contrarianism is undercut by his self-awareness. On Live At Red Rocks, he battles with the contradictions between the positions he holds and the realisation that he is a deeply imperfect person himself, trying to find a way to empathy that doesn’t involve self-censorship. It’s not a perfect special, far from it. But that thread of self-reflection elevates his “uninformed simpleton” routine and makes Live At Red Rocks a special worth engaging.

Ronny Chieng – Speakeasy

It’s rare that a comedy special earns the “gorgeous” tag, but Ronnie Chieng’s Speakeasy is a visual delicacy, with Chieng’s white tux and the candle-lit interiors of the Cantonese restaurant that serves as the venue, like something out of an 80s kung-fu action thriller. The material though is anything but pretty. Chieng comes out all guns blazing, hosing down podcasters with dodgy opinions about COVID-19 (*cough* Joe Rogan *cough*) in a hail of bullets punchlines.

There’s also a crowd-work bit meant to tease out racists (which kinda works) and a raging challenge to comedy fans, hecklers and comedy critics to ‘cancel’ him, which is pretty funny. Speakeasy may not land as hard as 2019’s Asian Comedian Destroys America but it’s a pretty good watch set in quite a lavish setting for a comedy special.

Hasan Minhaj – The King’s Jester

Former Patriot Act star Hasan Minhaj returns to standup every bit the PowerPoint sharing, arms-waving, slightly manic student activist that he was on his Netflix show. The King’s Jester is Minhaj’s first special in five years and he packs it full of material—about his family, about dealing with fame, and about combining activism with comedy. There’s a 40-minute centre-piece about all the weird and heartbreaking things that happen when you’re running a popular news comedy show, from behind-the-scenes drama to dealing with the pain and trauma of real-life tragedy.

There are also relatablemaxx bits about his personal life, fatherhood and his addiction to social media validation. Critics have (rightly) pointed out that, at points, Minhaj’s comedy is undercut by the smoothness of it all—the spit and polish of his comedy sales-pitch, the over-rehearsed nature of his performance—but that doesn’t take away from the strength of the material. Just fast forward through the chai tea and naan bread jokes.

Jaspreet Singh – Koi Load Nahi

This one flew a little under the radar, but in a year with relatively few Indian specials, Jaspreet Singh’s Koi Load Nahi stands out for Singh’s ability to craft good-natured, affable, intimate comedy. Singh embodies the classroom joker—that one guy in every friend group who’s always up for a lark, always ready with a good-natured punchline—making jokes about his enmity with the doorbell, the temptations of freelance life and the risks of studying in winter-time.

Koi Load Nahi‘s vignettes of middle-class life are elevated by Singh’s easy-going charm and his penchant for gleeful self-deprecation and his eye for North Indian absurdities. Missing home during the holidays? Stressed out because you failed all your 2022 resolutions? That’s okay, just put this special on, put your feet up and remember, “koi load nahi.“

Jerrod Carmichael – Rothaniel

Of all the avenues to come out as queer, who would choose to do it in a comedy special? Jerrod Carmichael, that’s who. On his HBO special Rothaniel—directed by potential comedy auteur Bo Burnham—Carmichael tells an audience he’s gay for the first time, and then sits down to dissect why he waited till he was 30 to come out and all the complications that wrought: friends feeling betrayed that he never told them, and feeling doubly betrayed that he’s dating a white man. He delves into his complicated relationship with his philandering father and the emotional and social toll of keeping secrets. It’s heady stuff, tackled with cleverness, humility and boy-next-door charm.

But it’s not just the material that’s out there. With Rothaniel, Carmichael leans into the casual intimacy of a comedy set, pushing the form into something that more closely resembles an AA meeting. The comedian sits on a low stool on a small stage at New York’s iconic Blue Note jazz club, the audience scant feet away, set up more for group therapy than big-ticket concert. His performance is confessional, absorbing, vulnerable and masterfully discomfiting. A special so good it’s worth an HBO Max subscription by itself.

Honorable Mentions

Sumit Sourav’s debut special Vansh Ka Naash is a spectacular debut by a comedian who revels in dark-edged takes on the inanities of everyday life. Sam Morril takes aim at cops, teachers, COPS (the TV show) and social media addictions on his debut Netflix special Same Time Tomorrow. And Andrew Schulz shows you can still make jokes about abortion, blackface, rapists and childhood sexual abuse and get away with it on the raw, edgy Infamous.