Maggie Winters is a South Side Chicago comedian who came up in improv with iO and as a stand-up through Lincoln Lodge's FemCom program, and she first found a wider audience online with millions of views for her front-facing character videos on TikTok and Instagram. 2023 was a breakthrough year for Winters, as she appeared as a recurring character assisting the youth group in HBO's The Righteous Gemstones, as well as a "New Face" at Montreal's Just For Laughs. That same year, she debuted her one-person show, Marguerite, which she took to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024, and filmed in 2025 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles. The show combines onstage storytelling with video clips from her life growing up on the South Side of Chicago. Marguerite premiered on St. Patrick's Day 2026 on the UCB's YouTube channel, co-produced by Abso Lutely, and Winters sat down with me over Zoom to talk about her comedy start, adapting her show for people outside of Chicago, and what comes next. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Mark Vigeant blends clown, improv, physical theater, and multimedia to create interactive comedy shows such as The Best Man Show, which he took to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024 and 2025, and released as a special on Dropout in February 2026. Vigeant is based in Los Angeles, but started his career with the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City where he performed improv and sketch, played Trumpet Boy for The Special Without Brett Davis, hosted a series online for Seriously.TV, and earned himself a screen-test audition for Saturday Night Live. Vigeant caught up with me over Zoom to talk about how his brushes with near-stardom, as well as his 2021 documentary about the "Pizza Rat" phenomenon, influenced his views on fame and ambition; how he was inspired by seeing other Fringe shows by the likes of Moses Storm, Natalie Palamides and The Umbilical Brothers, and how releasing a Dropout special has influenced what he's doing next: a 2026 Fringe show about a YouTube survivalist called Out There. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Jamie Lee is an Emmy-winning writer and producer on Apple TV's Ted Lasso who began her comedy career in the press office of Comedy Central. Her first break in front of the camera came via panel shows, most notably MTV's Girl Code, as well as performances on both Conan and The Late Late Show with James Corden. As a writer, her credits have included HBO's Crashing, TV Land's Teachers, Peocock's Killing It, Hulu's Chad Powers, and of course, Ted Lasso. Her book Weddiculous, led to her starring in the Netflix series, The Wedding Coach. But her current passion project is a stage show, My Friend Katy, investigating how and why her childhood friend died suddenly and mysteriously while Lee was in college. Lee took the show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025, and she caught up with me over Zoom in March 2026 between shows at Union Hall in Brooklyn as she prepares to adapt her stage show into a special. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Matt Koff is a Brooklyn-based stand-up comic and Emmy-winning TV writer who has spent more than 13 years writing for The Daily Show. His own stand-up was featured on Adam Devine's House Party on Comedy Central, and earned him the title of New York's Funniest in 2023. In addition to his writing for The Daily Show, Koff also has written for The Onion, Trevor Noah's keynote at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and he co-wrote the former Twitter account, @TrumpComedyNerd. His new hour special, Cat Man, premieres March 10, 2026, on VEEPS, with jokes about divorce, middle age, and of course, cats. Koff sat down with me over Zoom to talk about his first big break in TV via the Game Show Network, an even earlier live theater project he worked on called Saturday Night Rewritten (which proved to be a great training ground for his writing for The Daily Show), and how he separates his often political comedy day job from the comedy he pursues in the clubs at night. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Steve Sweeney is a comedian and actor from Boston's Charlestown neighborhood who has performed on big stages and bigger screens for more than four decades. His newest project is Townie, a documentary-style stand-up film making its North American premiere at the New York Comedy Film Festival in February 2026. It's executive-produced by Peter Farrelly, one of the Farrelly Brothers who previously have employed Sweeney in memorable supporting roles in films such as Me, Myself and Irene and There's Something About Mary, where he played a cop confronting Ben Stiller's zipper scene. Sweeney, who has his own intimate comedy club in Quincy, shared stories with me reminiscing about his performance on the HBO Young Comedians Special hosted by John Candy, attending USC with Judd Apatow, what he learned working with and befriending legends such as George Carlin and Rodney Dangerfield, how Colin Quinn pushed him to become more vulnerable onstage for Townie. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

A dozen years removed from his debut stand-up special, Beta Male on Comedy Central, Kumail Nanjiani's fans can finally see him in a new hour, Night Thoughts, which premiered in December 2025 Hulu and Disney+. In between, he and his wife Emily V. Gordon received an Academy Award nomination for their screenplay for The Big Sick (and won Best First Screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards). On his own, Nanjiani has earned two Emmy nominations (first for guest acting in The Twilight Zone, the second for his lead performance in a limited series for Hulu's Welcome to Chippendales). He also shared in a Screen Actors Guild Award win with the cast of Hulu's Only Murders in the Building. Night Thoughts finds Nanjiani in contention for his first Golden Globe, for Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television. His performance catches fans up on how fame has and hasn't changed him, most strikingly by how the public reacted to his body transformation for Eternals, and then for their reaction to the Marvel movie itself. I caught up with Nanjiani over Zoom to see whether all of that therapy has translated into better mental and emotional health for him in receiving both validation and criticism from strangers online, and how he's slowly become more comfortable putting himself out there in bigger and bigger pop-culture franchises. In 2026, you're already guaranteed to see him in the second season of Amazon Prime Video's Fallout, as well as the upcoming season 21 of Taskmaster. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

It's the end of 2025, which means it's time once more for my annual December to remember the year in comedy with my friend and colleague in comedy criticism, Jason Zinoman from The New York Times. Which funny people met the moment to become Comedy's Most Valuable Performer for 2025? Late-night TV certainly faced a political crisis on top of its existing existential crisis this past year, with CBS jettisoning both of its late-night franchises, and ABC threatening to follow suit with Jimmy Kimmel. We also saw major push back within and outside of comedy regarding the inaugural Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia; the end of an era with Marc Maron closing the loop on his WTF podcast coinciding with the WTF-ness of video podcasting reigning supreme; the eccentric choices from the likes of Nathan Fielder and Tim Robinson; and a year in stand-up specials that smiled upon relative newcomers big (Hulu) and small (Dropout), with an uncertain future for HBO. As always, there's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Mike Bridenstine appeared on this podcast three years ago in Episode 417. Since then, he has written and published his second book about comedy, "Kansas City Comedy: The Unbelievable True Story of Stanford & Sons, Its Outlaw Owners and the Most Infamous Stand-Up Sets of All Time." Brido also has begun working behind the scenes as general manager of a cherished Los Angeles comedy venue, the Lyric Hyperion in LA's Silver Lake neighborhood, where he and his team also have launched their own production arm, Spesh!, filming and distributing comedy specials. Brido directed the first Spesh! special, Emily Browning: Temporary, Beautiful, which came out in September. On the weekend before Thanksgiving, I sat in on the Lyric's taping of a new hour from Ahmed Bharoocha, then met up with Brido the following day in Lyric's green room to talk about where his own path in comedy has taken him, and what he has learned about talking with other comedians and working with them more closely. Brido — who appeared this year on an episode of High Potential — he has come a long way from Iowa and iCarly. Which means there's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!