Clients: Roz Hernandez – Comedian; Gianmarco Soresi – Comedian
The comedy industry is undergoing a metamorphosis in 2024. Name-brand comedy venues are opening new locations, beloved local venues are being bought out by megacorporations, and streaming-service-helmed comedy festivals are usurping the old-fashioned ones. Post–WGA strike, TV-development execs are growing green-light-shy; other streamers are entering the stand-up fray; and YouTube specials are becoming just as, if not more, worthy of watching as Netflix specials. A comedian asking an audience member what they do for a living is transforming from age-old stand-up cliché to heated (and mockworthy) comedy debate, and platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which only a few years ago were looked down upon, are now churning out some of the most consistently talented performers on the internet.
With so much going on, the mattmosphere is sure to be Rife with hacks and phonies, but it’s also full of undiscovered treasures — or, more accurately, treasures who deserve to shine much brighter than they already do. Out there amid this industry chaos, there are touring vets who have honed their craft across the country, young oddball weirdos brimming with disruptive brilliance, and everyone in between, all waiting for their next big break. They’re posting clips on Instagram Reels, releasing self-produced specials, playing tabletop-roleplaying games to loyal fan bases, starring in one-person shows, or hosting podcasts — an audio medium that is for some reason also video now. There’s never been more comedy to parse, and it can be difficult to train your algorithm toward the aforementioned treasures.
So to hell with the algorithm,Jk Google, please don’t bury us. We need this. we say, and turn instead to Vulture’s 11th annual roundup of “Comedians You Should and Will Know.” This year’s list of comics includes such oddities as straight dudes with consciences, career women who left desk jobs to pursue their passion, TikTokers who inspire fancams, club classics, cheeky Australians, showy Canadians, and queer luminaries saying the wildest shit. The list paints a portrait of a world where improv is so back, a Don’t Tell 15 is the new Comedy Central Half Hour, everything old (CollegeHumor, the ancient art of clown, jokes with actual punch lines) is new again, and emerging comics crush like headliners behind their own paywalled gardens. One upside to the clip-based comedy economy? This year’s best comics’ jokes are memorable — immediate calling cards for who they are as artists — and most of all, tight.
We’ve kept this year’s list tight, too. After polling more than 100 industry insiders — including TV execs from streaming and linear TV, bookers for clubs across the country and late-night talk shows, artistic directors from comedy theaters, indie-comedy producers, podcast-network heads, top brass at animation studios, terrestrial-radio chiefs, comedy record-label execs, comedy-festival programmers, comedy historians, live-show photographers, and performers featured on last year’s list — we were left with a pool of more than 200 comedians. From there, we had to grapple with some questions: Which names came up over and over again? Who stood out from the crowd(work), are on the rise to stardom, and will be the masterminds of our future-favorite TV shows and stand-up specials? In the year of our Lord 2024, we thought it fitting to choose 24 of the absolute best. From clown college to Dropout, here are this year’s “Comedians You Should and Will Know.”
Roz Hernandez
Roz Hernandez is, with apologies to Demi Lovato, the most fabulous ghost hunter ever born. With her heavy black bangs and penchant for dressing like a paper doll from the 1960s, the comedian is loud, indignant, and ready to entrap both spirits and audience members. In her stand-up, she leads audience members down a cliff by coaxing them into saying the other name for a water spritzer (it’s “mister”), then getting offended that they misgendered her. Part of the fun of Hernandez’s act is how her joyfully exuberant style so directly contrasts her connection with the macabre. The classic Hernandez image is of her in a zebra-print coat with a blue-feather collar, recapping how a ghost ruined her hookup by turning the lights on when her makeup wasn’t done: “These shady-ass ghosts said, ‘Sir, I want you to see what you’ve signed up for.’”
Hernandez has a regular platform for discussing said shady-ass ghosts with guests like Rachel Dratch and Nicole Byer on her successful podcast, Ghosted!, leading to episode titles like “Vinny Thomas Would Break Bread With a Ghost” and “Jackie Beat Saw a Gay UFO.” Hernandez appears in the Netflix queer-comedy documentary Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, and she was the breakout star of the Kristen Stewart–produced ghost-hunting reality show Living for the Dead on Hulu, in which she was billed as the “researcher” in a crew of queer ghost hunters (but really just provided the best color commentary). In one scene, Hernandez declares, “I swear to God, if I’m possessed, I’m gonna be fucking pissed off.” In another, she gets very offended when a ghost calls her fat and “faggot.” She becomes less offended once she realizes that she doesn’t respect the ghost after he misidentifies the color of her dress as red. It’s obviously magenta.
Gianmarco Soresi
Ubiquity is a skill. Blanketing social platforms with material can only get a comedian so far; being as undeniably universal as Gianmarco Soresi requires an improbable combination of energy, productivity, and an ability to read the room (and work the algorithm). It’s not just one platform, either. Soresi was a Just for Laughs new face in 2022; performed on The Late Late Show; appeared in The Last OG, Hustlers, and Bonding; and has a popular podcast called The Downside With Gianmarco Soresi, but he’s most impressively inescapable online, where his posts reliably rack up tens of thousands of views and his TikTok has over 700,000 followers. He has Poster’s Disease in the best possible sense: He’s constantly developing new material, and he’s relentless about getting it out into the world. “My girlfriend, she wants us to get a mezuzah,” he says in one of the dozen TikToks posted in the last few weeks. But he feels anxiety about it, “so I got a watermelon mezuzah.”
That ceaseless energy is a career strategy, but it’s also a reflection of who Soresi is onstage. He is effusive and expressive, a chatterbox of ideas and reactions with dense stretches of jokes that draw the eye in the compressed, attention-strained landscape of vertical video. His material about current events plays well in that environment, as do his regular clips of crowdwork. But it’s not surprising that in his longer sets, he’s also the unusual comedian with material about MrBeast. “It’s kind of pathetic, filming strangers to build up your YouTube following,” Soresi says, before his head falls in a moment of self-awareness. The crowd roars because they get it. He lives in that place, he owns it, and he possesses the rare gift of translating it for the in-person experience of live comedy.
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