The Best Comedy Specials of 2025
- Leslie
- 23 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Client: Ian Edwards – Comedian
Many of the year’s best comedy specials share a reflective sense of mid-career reconsideration. The most striking of these is from Kumail Nanjiani, whose special Night Thoughts allows him to reassess his career and relationship with comedy after more than a decade away from regular stand-up. For other comedians, the retrospective meditation is about grappling with existential dread rather than Nanjiani’s focus on the trap of his external public persona. Mike Birbiglia’s The Good Life, Marc Maron’s Panicked, Cameron Esposito’s Four Pills, and Bill Burr’s Drop Dead Years are all hours in which the comedians openly wrestle with conceiving of their own mortality and think about how to keep making comedy when they’re so conscious of their own fear and frailty.
Atsuko Okatsuka’s Father and Earthquake’s Joke Telling Business are also reflections on their comedic identities, but they operate without the same wistful existentialism; both of them are artists insistently articulating the accomplishment and talent that goes into their craft. Meanwhile, Steph Tolev’s Filth Queen and Jordan Jensen’s Take Me With You are a matched pair of specials on human debasement, namely sex and poop, with one a joyful celebration and the other a grim self-excoriation. Amid them all, Ian Edwards’s confidently unflappable work stands out as the least self-conscious about the meaning of life, but Edwards’s is every bit as thoughtful and well-crafted. And even Edwards’s special has a section about death near the end — it’s a metaphysically fraught time in comedy. Here are the best specials of 2025.
Ian Edwards, Untitled (YouTube)
Ian Edwards reinvents no comedy wheels in Untitled. This is a YouTube special shot at the Comedy Store, where a guy stands next to a stool and tells jokes about relationships, hotel check-in times, and gender-reveal parties. It’s a little beguiling in that way, because there’s no obvious outward signal that Edwards is about to make all of that familiar-seeming material feel weird and surprising. He’s a sharp writer who finds ways out of standard setups that stick in the mind. Turning down an offer to sleep with two women is not just deciding not to cheat on his wife, it’s refusing “an amazing breakup severance package.” A section about air travel, one of the most overrepresented topics in stand-up comedy, somehow discovers a novel take on airline up-charging: Travelers without luggage should be charged more because they’re definitely not terrorists, Edwards says. “Who’s blowing up their own clothes?” But his real gift is his steady and measured delivery, which never tilts into overt deadpan. There’s no pandering, and the whole hour is even more charming for how businesslike it all feels. Edwards is a professional. He takes this seriously. He will make you snort, even in a hoary joke about green-bubble Android phone racism.