Lou Wall is an Australian comedian whose two most recent shows were both nominated for Most Outstanding Show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Wall has appeared on Australian TV panel shows, and also appeared in the ABC Australia and Netflix series, Fisk. I've seen and reviewed all three shows Wall has taken thus far to the Edinburgh Fringe, from their breakneck breakthrough performance about their best frenemy in Lou Wall vs. The Internet, to 2024's The Bisexual's Lament – an hour of deranged PowerPoints, gay (derogatory) musical comedy and mentally ill hot takes. One of their bits from that show went viral, prompting them to write this year's show, Breaking the Fifth Wall, which sold out its Fringe run and has brought Wall to New York City to perform for the first time in an Off-Broadway run at SoHo Playhouse. Wall eventually found a wall-free space where they could connect with me to talk about their life, career and how truth fits or doesn't fit when it comes to great comedy. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Chanel Ali is a stand-up comedian, writer, and actress based in New York City. You may have seen her on MTV's Girl Code, TruTV's Laff Mobb's Laff Tracks, Starz's Night Train with Wyatt Cenac, or two showcases she did for Comedy Central in partnership with Refinery29. She also released a full special for Unprotected Sets, available on MGM+. Deadline named her as one of their 15 Comedians to Watch in 2025, based on the success of her debut one-woman show, Relative Stranger, which she took to the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe and the 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. In her show, she recounts bouncing around the foster care system, and how a DNA test for a 23andMe commercial revealed a brother she never knew about and how she ultimately found her biological father. Ali spoke to me on Zoom just before her off-Broadway run at SoHo Playhouse, produced by Sarah Cooper. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

A San Fransisco native who's based in both New York City and Los Angeles, Dylan Adler is a musical comedian who performed and wrote for The Late Late Show with James Corden. Before that gig, Adler was named a Comic to Watch by the New York Comedy Festival and a Comedian You Should and Will Know by Vulture. He took his solo hour, Haus of Dy-lan, to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025, and sat down with me between shows in Scotland to talk about how he differentiates himself from his identical twin who also wants to be a comedian, working through trauma onstage by writing the album and show, Rape Victims are Horny Too with Kelly Bachman, and what he has learned from touring the world with Atsuko Okatsuka. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Britt Migs is a stand-up and sketch comedian based in New York City who was named a Creator to Watch at the 2024 New York Comedy Festival for characters such as her Italian publicist for the Pope. Migs manages Cracked magazine's social media and runs the Cracked Comedy Club showcases. In addition, she also has written for Reductress, co-hosts Sunday Sauce monthly at Union Hall with her Meat Cats collaborators, and has previous experience behind-the-camera as a producer on TV shows such as Dr. Oz and Deal or No Deal. In 2025, Migs brought her debut solo show, Dolphin Mode, to the Edinburgh Fringe, where she is reliving how she emerged out of her flop era of divorce to embrace a happier, hornier life. Migs sat down with me to talk about the emotional healing in her show, attending a prestigious performing arts camp in her middle-school summers, how to work in the clip economy without succumbing to the algorithm, and what her relationship with a trans man means to her as a comedian and as an American in 2025. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Grace Helbig is a legendary YouTuber, etched officially into the VidCon Hall of Fame earlier in 2025. The comedian and actress who began documenting her daily life in 2007 through solo videos, two-hander sketches with her college bestie and Brooklyn roomie Michelle, and then DailyGrace on MyDamnChannel, eventually went on to write two New York Times best-selling books, and hosted her own talk show on E!. Helbig provides the voice of Cindy Bear in the HBO Max series, Jellystone, and before that, made and co-starred in two films — Camp Takota and Dirty 30 — with her good friend, Mamrie Hart. Grace and Mamrie continue to produce regular episodes of their podcast together, This Might Get Weird. But for the first time, in 2025, Helbig finds herself onstage by herself, recounting her bout with breast cancer in a one-woman show, "Let Me Get This Off My Chest." I caught up with Helbig at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe festival, where she spoke with me about finding value outside of subscriber and view counts online, overcoming burnout and criticism from all sorts of media, and what her life is like now after almost two decades of content creation. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Ismael Loutfi is a comedian and TV writer currently working on the animated series Mating Season from the makers of Big Mouth. His previous credits include writing for After Midnight, Ramy Youssef's #1 Happy Family USA, and Netflix's Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. As a stand-up, he has a half-hour on Comedy Central to his credit, along with appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Bill Burr's The Ringers showcase. His new one-hander, Heavenly Baba, documents his life growing up in central Florida with a Muslim father so devout he fully decorated the outside of the family car with Islamic messaging. Loutfi sat down with me at the start of the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe to talk about what his early comedy days and nights were like in Orlando and then Atlanta, what he has learned from the older Muslim-American comedians who came before him, and how he wants to use his voice comedically as part of our society's current conversation. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Tamara Yajia's family immigrated to America from Argentina twice before she became a teenager, and the second time prevented her from becoming potentially Argentina's version of Britney Spears, for better or for worse. Yajia documents it all in her new memoir, CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA: My Life as a Failed Child Star, and she sat down with me to talk about how she dealt with the pangs of life not meeting the expectations her family had given her growing up, how she strayed from performing for more than a decade and what drew her back to show business, where she has worked in the writers rooms of Apple TV's Acapulco, Hulu's This Fool, and Netflix's upcoming show Strip Low. Her own script was picked up for development by an actual former child star in Selena Gomez, but I'll let Tam tell you all about the importance of having celebrity mentors and surviving mishaps and family embarrassments. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, Veronica Osorio moved to New York City after spending her teen years clowning and acting in South America. Once in America, she joined the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where she performed on house sketch teams with Kate McKinnon, Nicole Byer, and Natasha Rothwell, among others. In New York and Los Angeles, she has started and/or hosted all-Spanish and all-female shows, and co-hosted a Star Trek podcast, Treks and The City. Her screen credits include film roles working with the Coen Brothers in Hail, Caesar! and with Steven Soderbergh in The Laundromat. And she has two different stage babies: Medicine Woman, where she puts her certified healer work to test with live audiences at Fringe festivals from Hollywood to Edinburgh to Brighton to Adelaide; Cherry Baby: Lover Girl, a clown where she tries to find a spouse before the show is over. But as we caught up over Zoom, she's also about to deliver a real-life baby. She shared her journey with me, talking about the dangers she faced in Venezuela, the difficulties in her path trying to find acceptance with her American comedy teammates, and how what's happening now to her loved ones and other Venezuelan refugees in America, along with her impending motherhood, has impacted her work onstage. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!