Crafting a coherent, impactful one-hour special is rightly perceived as the culmination of a standup comedian’s various skills—writing, performing, using audience reactions (and increasingly, AV jiggery-pokery) to your benefit. But a great standalone joke is like a mad scientist in a low-budget sci-fi movie; it re-wires your brain, cackling with glee while at it. Even if the overall symphony of the special doesn’t come out quite right, individual jokes within such a special can still slap. Here, then, are the top five jokes of 2022; jokes that I was most moved by this year, in no particular order.

Full disclosure: my personal bias regarding this list is that I love two specific kinds of jokes:

1. Jokes that break down complex socio-political scenarios into a succinct mouthful, and

2. Jokes that rely heavily on a sense of the absurd or the surreal—stuff that’s inherently easier to understand than to explain (y’know, like a Magritte painting).

‘Hostile Takeover’, Ali Wong (from Don Wong)

“See, because when you are a woman with money, power, and respect, your romantic options do not expand. They decline! Now, I am told it’s because men are threatened by women with money, power, and respect. What do you think is going to happen to you, huh? You think your dick is gonna get acquired in a hostile takeover?”

The reason I love this joke is because “hostile takeover” is the absolutely perfect punch line for this scenario. It captures the fear-and-domination dynamic that seems to guide so much of modern-day life; Twitter even has a phrase for this (“late-stage capitalism”). Young men both fear and emulate corporate aggression in their lives, which is why the line works so well. I felt Don Wong was a bit repetitive, especially if you’ve seen Wong’s previous specials, but this joke smashed it out of the park.

‘Werewolves and Panic Attacks’, Taylor Tomlinson (from Look at You)

“The only mental health advice my dad ever gave me is I was having panic attacks in high school and I didn’t know what they were and I was very stressed out. And I was, like, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do when I feel like this. I don’t know what to do.’ And he goes, ‘Alright. All I can tell you is that when you feel like this, get as far away from the people you care about as possible until you feel different.’ Which is advice you give a werewolf, like… ‘Just run into the woods ’til you’re not a monster anymore. Don’t let them see you change. They won’t accept you for what you truly are.’”

This wickedly clever riff from Taylor Tomlinson’s Look at You is a shoo-in, not just because it captures the bittersweet emotional palette of this moment (a not-particularly-modern Dad offering mental health advice), but also because it hints at the pleasures and allusive techniques common to the best of genre cinema, especially horror and science fiction. Vampires are aristocrats “sucking the lifeblood” of the peasantry, zombies are a metaphor for consumerist desensitisation and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is a fever dream about two things men fear: being raped by another man and witnessing childbirth—Tomlinson feels like the kind of comedian who gets all of this.

‘Sean Connery slaps Coco Chanel’, Bill Burr (from Live at Red Rocks)

I’m not a big Bill Burr fan in general and I think he devotes far too much time to the mythical ‘cancel culture’ fear-mongering than any self-respecting adult (who claims to follow the news, no less) ought to. But during his last show, the obligatory cancel culture build-up did result in one hilarious joke, about the wildly different ways we often celebrity legacies. Coco Chanel’s Nazi past (she worked as a Nazi agent in the 1940s but Winston Churchill’s interventions stopped her from being punished for it after the war) is not brought up nearly as much as Sean Connery’s comment (from an old interview) about “slapping them (women) about a little bit”. Burr argues that Connery’s offense is a relatively minor one—and that both Chanel and Connery were products of their time.

“So, she’s dead and gone. I think she’s up there in heaven. I think she made it. She’s up there with Sean Connery. Every once in a while, they have a disagreement, he gives her a little slap, you know? She doesn’t care. Once you shit on a Nazi’s chest, a little backhand’s not gonna freak you out. Jesus can’t say anything, he got a hooker, right? Everybody’s got a little something they did. Well, there you go, boom. Still buy your Coco Chanel. She’s still a hero. She was a victim, she was a victim of that time.”

This is classic Burr: irreverent and profane in the best possible way, and pushing a joke well past the point of no return.

‘The Polio Vaccine’, Patton Oswalt (from We All Scream)

Patton Oswalt is probably the best writer among contemporary standup comedians. And his writing prowess is demonstrated in this excellent joke comparing anti-vaxxers today unfavourably to white American conservatives in the 1950s. The ‘can’t beat up queers inside an iron lung’ line had me snorting aboard a (very quiet) metro car.

“In 1955, the polio vaccine came out. We were two years away from satellites. There were no satellites! And America could not have been more backward, racist, homophobic, sexist and these non-satellite-having racist dipshits lined the fuck up to get their fucking vaccine! ‘Gimme that shot, I can’t police those water fountains from a wheelchair! I can’t beat up queers inside an iron lung! Give me my science! What am I, a caveman?’”

‘Toyotathon’, Jerrod Carmichael (from Rothaniel)

Carmichael’s landmark special, for which he ended up winning a Primetime Emmy earlier this year, is named after his legal first name. Given the overarching topic of the special (Carmichael coming out as gay) and the many mini-routines about shame and societal conventions, this joke hit even harder. It tells the audience that often, what we unthinkingly consider to be a universalised or ‘default’ set of aesthetic standards… is just rich people’s shallow tastes dressed up with progressive bells and whistles.  

“My dad named me… He combined his dad’s first name and my mom’s dad’s first name and mushed them together. Not to make something elegant, like William Edward or something like that. It’s more like Toyotathon.”

Another reason I love this joke is that it pays close attention to the way words sound, which is an underrated skill for comedians. All words are glorified sounds and all sounds are ‘made up’; Carmichael recognises these truths and uses them to his advantage.