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Yes, yes he is.

I don't care who you are.

A lot of you people. My girlfriend. Me (because I'm a comedy genius). Stand up...I can't think of anybody off the top of my head who's always good. I like some of Seinfeld's stuff, I like Norm McDonald.

Hrrm, while you speak well of bacon and your musical tastes aren't all suck I will still have to kill you for these "comedians" you dare speak of.

michael richards flipping out on that guy and destroying his career in the process made me laugh.

caveat: i really enjoy the 2nd and 3rd seasons of drawn together. let this be your soothing balm.

Lewis Black might have great comic timing, but I've never seen it, as I've never seen him tell a joke. He just makes statements in an angry voice and people pee themselves laughing.

Drawn Together is about as funny as getting gonorrhea in your eye.

I like Ron White and Dmitri Martin. And Jim Gaffigan.

I don't think I am familiar with Mr. Martin. I will check him out when I get a chance.

i believe that was a plotline in season 2. (seriously, it's a really good show)

i agree with you about lewis black. he's angry about something, perhaps the fact he looks like he's wearing adult diapers.

you know who is a terrible fucking standup act? damon wayans.

Yeah, David Cross. And Bob Odenkirk. Neil Hamburger. The Kids in the Hall.

Patton Oswalt.

Tom and Ray Magliozzi on NPR's Car Talk. Standard Libertarian disclaimer #4 applies.

Jim Gaffigan is very funny to me. Have you noticed that he doesn't cuss? Gaffigan is for the children.

Mitch Hedberg was very funny. Too bad about the death and all that.

Patton Oswalt and all the "comedians of comedy" or whatever they are calling themselves this week are great. Also, pretty much every comedian that was on Dr. Katz had a bit of funny in them. That show was great.

The show Arrested Development made me laugh out loud.

Oh, and Dane Cook sucks

I too like Car Talk and Wait, Wait.... Now, frankly, while Ellie is right about the blue tint of Wait, Wait..., My impression is that these are the kind of people (Peter Sagal, at least) who would be libertarians if only they learned some economics. :)

And add me to the Arrested Development fan club.

And I read the PG Wodehouse Jeeves stories at an early age and enjoyed them beyond measure. Since then I found some of his other works and they were equally rewarding.

As you can see by my sig like Jean-Luc Godard, "Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho," (I'm a Marxist of the Groucho variety).

And just as with Wodehouse, the Marx Bros and the Stooges I am with DAR on Mel Brooks. Although I find I am alone (if the critics I have read are right) in liking Silent Movie. Frankly I laughed like a hyena at that flick.

Another of my favorites was Myron Cohen. He styled himself as a raconteur, rather than as a comic or comedian. He specialized in stories told in the New York City Jewish dialect.

This is not a good thread. Several comedians named here are of the "if you think this is funny you are pulling down the national IQ" variety.

Hey now!

I'll rise to the defense of folks who thing someone who I happen to think sucks is nonetheless funny.

And I don't think Moe, Larry and Curly (Curly, damnit!, not Shemp and don't even mention Curly Joe!) ever did much for the national I.Q.

I think Lenny Bruce can be laugh out loud funny; Nick Gillespie disagrees. Hey, it's a free country. In Soviet Russia, party laughs at you, Warren! (Just kiddin')

i like dumb comedy.

but i'm picky like that.

i always figured larry the cable guy was for people who thought jim carrey was "too ethnic."

Shit! About two years after I first heard saw the acronymn, I just now figured out that "KITH" is "Kids in the Hall"!

I think the first time I tried to look up "kith" via Google all I could find was some stuff about some Dutch heavy metal band, I think, and the aliens in a Poul Anderson book.

Finally, enlightenment.

I think by definition you can't have a liberal latte guy doing the "I'm stupid, low class, and proud of it!" standup bit if it's not a sendup of Bush.

Well, except for Dave Chappelle doing his "black people are stupid, thuggish, oversexed drug dealers who intimidate white people, I mean, uh, sure white viewer, it's meant as irony. No really" bit. He can be funny, but he can also be the black Mencia.

Huzzah!

The rap on Mencia is that his steals other comics' stuff. Don't know if it's true or not. Of course, the running gag about stealing other comedians' jokes was about half of Milton Berle's routine for 20 years. Berle is otherwise well known for (1) being "Mr. Television," wearing a dress long before Eddie Izzard made being a transvestite part of the act and (2) having the longest schlong (comedy law requires the use of Yiddish whenever possible) in show business long before Ron Jeremy.

Chappelle can be very funny, but I find him to be a bit of a one trick pony in the Eddie Murphy / Chris Rock tradition of race humor after Pryor.

There is actual comedy tucked away inside Lewis Black's scream routines and lord knows subverting outrage to comedic effect is as old as the hills (but probably not older than Benny Hill). He works well in the context of shows like the Daily Show, but I can't see him with his own talk show.

Speaking of which, I don't find Jon Stewart funny at all, though I think he has good writers. Don't think I've seen Patton Oswalt, speaking of Stewart, but as he (and Stewart and M*A*S*H TV show writer Karen Hall, and Linda Lavin and Glen Close) went to my alma mater, I'm sure he's a clever chap.

Has anyone already mentioned P.J. O'Rourke? He's funny in print (which sorta includes delivering a speech he's written in advance), not so funny as a talking head. I find that's often the case with funny writers. Many of them are not very witty spontaneously or in public.

Finally, while I don't find Larry the Cable Guy all that funny, either, I trust it is well understood that he's a character like, say, Pee Wee Herman.

Who?

(N.B. -- that is supposed to be a funny, rhetorical question. Please, no one feel the need to explain to me who Martin Lawrence is.)

As for "Who doesn't make you laugh?" Other than the few mentioned above and the many beneath mentioning, two words spring immediately to mind:

Pauly Shore

I agree with that. His written stuff tends to be very funny. And you're right, he can come across as wooden or forced when speaking of the cuff.

To illustrate, he shows up occasionally as the token conservative on Wait, Wait....Don't Tell Me. He does his best in the witty spontaneous banter sessions but he really can't compete with Roy Blount or Paula Poundstone*. He does do better in the section where the panelists tell one true story and two fake ones. But then of course he is reading from a script which he has carefully edited and probably rehearsed.

*I'm really not that familiar with Paula Poundstone's work except from Wait, wait.... At first I thought she was a bit of an airhead but I soon realized she's actually rather a clever woman.

Chappelle and Chris Rock were funniest when they broke out of the "White people do this, but black people do this" mold. The Blind KKK member was genius. The MTV's Ghetto Real World was racist crap, I don't care who wrote it.

I've never really gotten what's so great about Pryor, except that everybody's supposed to get that Pryor is so great 'cuz he did drugs and burned himself or something. Maybe I haven't heard early enough routines, or it's one of those things that "broke ground" if you'd never heard it before, but now that you've heard a thousand retreads, it doesn't seem as funny.

Mike Nelson usually makes me laugh.

Nick Gillespie makes me laugh. Dave Weigel is starting to consistently make me chortle with his snark, too.

well, the very last episode is one of the single best things i've ever seen. the patience episode was amazing. it was all about punishment. brutality. strength through joy.

the sort of themes i can appreciate in comedy.

some confessions:

dave barry never made me laugh. i don't get it.

daily show? zzzzzzzzzzzz.

and a double fuck you to coulbert. your whole routine is making fun of a guy who used to work for inside edition? maybe that's the latte liberal counterpart of larry the cable guy?

i kind of want to punch ron white, but i don't know why.

As stated at the beginning, I think Ron White is very funny and, for the record, his humor is only incidentally Southern, IMHO.

Sandy, you really should hear several of Pryor's early albums (That Nigger's Crazy, Is It Something I Said? and Bicentennial Nigger are all good.) and / or watch some of his early to middle career stand-up on YouTube. He definitely should not be judged either by the TV show or -- gag!-- by the movies he was in. His humor was deeply personal and keenly observational. I almost want to say that the fact that he happened to be a black comedian is almost incidental to his, and I do dare use the phrase here, comic genius. Okay, so much of his humor sprang from being a black man (just as, say, Woody Allen's came from being a skinny Jewish kid), but it transcended mere demographics.

Ah, tymac - you act like there aren't rednecks within 50 miles of NYC. You should know better than that. I suppose you do, now...

Eh, more "dumb, low-class, and amiable about it". The key to the persona that a lot of people don't get is that Larry is doing three things at once:

• Being so dumb and low-class that virtually everybody, even proudly self-identified rednecks, see him as dumb and low-class, not quite a social equal, but a clown
• Talking about people who are ridiculously dumber and more uncouth than he is
• At all times remaining likable and sympathetic so that he stays a clown and not a ugly caricature

That last is key - unlike (say) Jeff Foxworthy, who does a straightforward everyman shtick, even us folks of rural background aren't supposed to identify greatly with Larry. We're supposed to look down on him. However, we're not supposed to look on him with hostility or disdain - that would change the reaction from, "Oh, that Larry!" to "Hey, is this asshole someone's view of us?"

Well, I thought the reason he ended the show was that he suddenly realized that the irony he thought he was communicating wasn't actually conveying to many or most people. I thought that was a respectable choice in the face of, well, doin' it wrong. I haven't seen any comedy he's done since, mind.

Oh, my god, I feel your pain. Back when David and I were dating, we spent one Christmas Eve with his family and someone pulled out a CD of a Christian comedian. The whole thing went something like:

"I'll admit it, I'm scared to fly. People always say, why are you scared to fly? It's more dangerous in a car. But you can't change your mind halfway in a plane! 'Uhh, actually, I'd like to get off now!' (audience laughter) But the thing is, NONE of us should be afraid of death! For we will live eternally in CHRIST JESUS! (Audience cheering.) But seriously, what's the deal with airplane food?"

This is how black people dial a phone:
[jamming] BOOP-ba-da-BOOP-daBOOP BOOP daBOOP

This is how white people dial a phone:
[licks finger] boop BOOP boop BOOP boop BOOP BOOP

Soooooo....

Jesus walks into a hotel, hands the desk clerk three nails and asks...

"Can you put me up for the night?" [rimshot]

FWIW, I saw Ron White at a local comedy club a few years before I started recognizing him on TV. He was pretty good.

This is very sad. This is more sad than hundreds of crying puppies and kittens being loaded ominously onto a boxcar by grim-faced carnivorous reptilian creatures dressed in black leather military uniforms and long coats, on a cold gray wintry day, while mournfully atonal violoin music plays slowly in the background.

But Police Squad went on to become a highly successful and popular movie franchise as the Naked Gun series.

I think that shows that lots of Americans have great taste in comedy ... but a lot of those particular Americans in position of deciding whether a TV series gets canceled often have very poor information as to whether it can yet catch on among a wider audience.

Alas, Naked Gun was the Firefly of sitcoms -- but with better successor movies.

That is not sad at all, because the only reason you would load kittens and puppies onto a boxcar would be to take them to their new, awesome homes! I mean, it is not like anybody would be mean to a baby animal ever. That is physically impossible.

Tim and Eric.
Now, I haven't really seen much of Wonder Showzen since I don't have cable, but if you want some of the most hilarious, bizarre, frightening, absurdist comedy EVAR, you have to watch Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!