The Essential Alt Comedy Albums: 26 Records Every Comedy Fan Should Hear
Before specials, there were records. A ranked guide to the comedy albums that shaped the alternative tradition, from 1950s nightclub LPs to the indie-label era.
The comedy album is where stand-up learned to be personal. In the late 1950s a handful of nightclub comics, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, discovered that the long-playing record could carry a whole act into people's living rooms, uncut and unsupervised by television censors. Everything the alternative tradition values (voice over gags, risk over polish, the sense of overhearing something you weren't meant to) is audible on those records first.
This is a ranked list of 26 albums that matter to that tradition, followed by the backstory of the 1950s LP boom, the labels that kept comedy records alive, and how to actually listen to them now. We stuck to records we could verify (title, label, year) and left out anything that exists mainly as a video special. For the screen canon, see our 50 greatest alt comedy specials; for the reading list, see essential alt comedy books.
How we chose
Three tests. First, does the record work as a record, without pictures? Some great comics are visual and lose half their power on audio; others, like Steven Wright or Albert Brooks, arguably sound better than they look. Second, did it change what other comedians thought was possible? Third, is it still a good listen today, not just a historical artifact?
The ranking is a critic's ranking, not a sales chart. Huge sellers that broke no new ground are missing; a few cult records that sold modestly are high up. Where a comic has several great albums we picked one and mention the others.
The 26 essential albums, ranked
Richard Pryor, Wanted: Live in Concert
Pryor at the height of his powers, recorded on tour in the late 1970s and released as a double album. The material is confessional, physical and fearless; he plays himself, his family, animals and his own failing body, and the audience's laughter keeps changing pitch as he moves from silliness into pain. If you only own one stand-up record, it is this one or his mid-1970s Grammy winners for Partee/Stax and Reprise. The concert film Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979) is the visual companion, but the record holds up entirely on its own.
Lenny Bruce, The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce
Bruce's Fantasy LPs are where the idea of the comedian as a free-talking social critic first reached a mass audience. The studio-and-club pieces here are jazzier and more scripted than the rambling courtroom monologues of his last years, which makes them a better entry point. Listen for the rhythm: he phrases like a horn player, and comics from George Carlin to Stewart Lee have cited that cadence. Our Lenny Bruce profile covers the obscenity trials that followed.
Steve Martin, Let's Get Small
The purest anti-comedy record ever to go mainstream. Martin's act was a parody of a bad nightclub comedian, all fake confidence and deliberately empty catchphrases, and on record you can hear audiences working out that the joke is on the form itself. It won the Grammy for Best Comedy Recording; the follow-up, A Wild and Crazy Guy (1978), won again and carried the novelty single "King Tut" onto the pop charts. For the lineage, see our guide to anti-comedy.
Albert Brooks, Comedy Minus One
The alt-comedy record before alt comedy existed. Brooks builds conceptual bits about the very idea of a comedy album, including a routine you are supposed to perform along with him, karaoke style. His second album, A Star Is Bought (Asylum, 1975), goes further, presenting itself as a shameless bid for radio airplay in every genre. Nobody since has used the LP format itself as the joke quite so well.
Mike Nichols and Elaine May, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May
Recorded from their Broadway show, these are improvised-and-refined two-person scenes: a mother guilt-tripping her son, a telephone operator bureaucracy, a pair of teenagers on a date. They came out of the Compass Players in Chicago, the improv troupe that preceded Second City, and this album is the best audio document of where American improv comedy came from. It won the Grammy for Best Comedy Performance. Their earlier Improvisations to Music (Mercury, 1958) is also worth finding.
Bob Newhart, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart
A Chicago accountant-turned-comic doing one side of imaginary phone calls, most famously a press agent coaching Abraham Lincoln. The calm, stammering delivery made it the opposite of the brash nightclub style, and it became a phenomenon: a No. 1 album that won Album of the Year at the 1961 Grammys, with Newhart also named Best New Artist. Every deadpan comic since owes it something.
Tig Notaro, Live
Recorded at Largo in Los Angeles in August 2012, days after Notaro learned she had breast cancer, following her mother's sudden death and a serious illness of her own. She opens by telling the audience, and the half-hour that follows is the sound of a room deciding how to laugh with her. It was first sold as a download through Louis C.K.'s website, then released on CD and vinyl, and it was nominated for a Grammy. It is the rare record where the lack of video is part of the point. See our Tig Notaro profile.
Bill Hicks, Arizona Bay
Hicks died in 1994, and this posthumous release, with live material laid over music Hicks recorded with his friend and producer Kevin Booth, is the closest thing to the record he wanted to make. It is angry, spiritual, paranoid and very funny. Rant in E-Minor, released the same year, is rawer; Relentless (1992) is the most conventional and an easier start.
George Carlin, Class Clown
The album where Carlin finished turning from a clean-cut TV comic into the counterculture's resident philosopher, and the debut of his "seven words you can never say on television" routine. A reworked version of that bit, broadcast by a Pacifica radio station, led to the Supreme Court case FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978). FM & AM (1972), with the old and new Carlin on opposite sides, makes a good companion.
Monty Python, Matching Tie and Handkerchief
Python's records were never just soundtracks of the TV show, and this is the most inventive. Side two was pressed with two parallel grooves, so which set of sketches you heard depended on where the needle dropped. It is a sight gag you can only do with vinyl, and a reminder that the British sketch tradition treated every medium as a toy. See our history of British alternative comedy for what came after.
The Firesign Theatre, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers
A dense, surreal audio collage about a former child star watching himself on late-night TV. The four-man troupe made records the way psychedelic bands made concept albums, layered and meant for repeated listening. It is closer to radio drama than stand-up, and it anticipated the character podcasts of the 2010s by four decades.
Mort Sahl, At Sunset
Recorded in 1955 and often called the first modern stand-up album. Sahl walked out in a sweater with a newspaper and talked about politics like a sardonic graduate student. No tuxedo, no mother-in-law jokes, no band. The specific references have dated, but the posture, a comic who reads the news and argues with it, is now so standard that it is easy to forget someone had to invent it.
David Cross, Shut Up You Fucking Baby!
A double album, Grammy-nominated, released by the Seattle label best known for grunge. It is long, political and furious about post-9/11 America, and its success made indie-rock labels a home for alternative stand-up for the next decade. It's Not Funny (Sub Pop, 2004) is tighter. Our David Cross page covers his career from Mr. Show on.
Patton Oswalt, Werewolves and Lollipops
Oswalt's sharpest early hour: nerd erudition, a disgust at fast food and a gift for building one absurd image into five minutes of escalating description. His debut, Feelin' Kinda Patton (United Musicians, 2004), is good too; his later Talking for Clapping won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album. See Patton Oswalt.
Steven Wright, I Have a Pony
One-liners delivered in a low, sleepy monotone, each one a tiny surrealist puzzle. On record, without his motionless stage presence, the economy of the writing is even more obvious. It is the album aspiring joke writers wear out.
Lily Tomlin, This Is a Recording
Built around Ernestine, the snorting, power-mad telephone operator Tomlin made famous on Laugh-In. It won the Grammy for Best Comedy Recording and is a masterclass in character comedy carried by voice alone, a line that runs straight to Maria Bamford.
Neil Hamburger, America's Funnyman
Gregg Turkington's character is a miserable, throat-clearing hack whose shows go wrong in ways that seem to be really happening. The records sound like disastrous live recordings, and the uncertainty about where staged failure ends and real failure begins is the joke. It is the most important anti-comedy record of the 1990s and the start of a long relationship between comedy and the Chicago indie label Drag City.
Flight of the Conchords, The Distant Future
A six-track EP by the New Zealand duo that won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album. The songs are genre parodies played completely straight, which is why they last. Their self-titled full-length followed on Sub Pop in 2008. See Flight of the Conchords.
Andy Kaufman, Andy and His Grandmother
Assembled decades after Kaufman's death from the microcassettes he carried around in the late 1970s: pranks, staged arguments and private bits recorded on the street and in hotel rooms. It is not an act so much as a glimpse of how he thought, which is exactly what makes it valuable. See our Andy Kaufman profile.
Emo Philips, E=MO²
Recorded live in New York, with Philips's warbling, childlike voice delivering jokes that swerve in the final few words. It is a perfect example of persona and construction working together: the voice lulls you, the structure ambushes you.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Derek and Clive (Live)
Two of Britain's best-loved comic performers improvising the filthiest conversations they could think of, originally in private recording sessions that circulated as bootlegs before Island released them. It is shocking even now, and its influence on British comedy's taste for the grotesque is huge.
Tom Lehrer, Songs by Tom Lehrer
A Harvard mathematics student recording satirical piano songs and selling them himself, first locally and then by mail order across the country. It is the earliest record on this list and a model of the do-it-yourself release decades before the internet. His live album That Was the Year That Was (Reprise, 1965) collects his best topical songs.
Eugene Mirman, En Garde, Society!
Mirman was the second comedian Sub Pop signed after David Cross, and this record captures the Brooklyn alt scene of the mid-2000s: gentle, absurd, full of letters of complaint and fake ads. It also marks the moment the indie-rock comedy album became a small movement rather than a one-off. See Eugene Mirman.
John Mulaney, The Top Part
Mulaney's debut, taped in San Francisco while he was still writing for Saturday Night Live. The long, perfectly structured stories that later made him a star are already here, delivered with the polish of a much older comic. See John Mulaney.
Hannibal Buress, My Name Is Hannibal
Buress's debut on the independent label Stand Up! Records. His flat, amused delivery and willingness to stretch a tiny observation to absurd length made him one of the defining comics of the 2010s. Animal Furnace (2012) followed. See Hannibal Buress.
Hari Kondabolu, Waiting for 2042
Recorded in Oakland and released by the Olympia indie label better known for riot grrrl records. Kondabolu writes political comedy about race and identity that is also tightly built joke-for-joke, and the title refers to the year census projections said white Americans would become a minority. It shows the indie-label tradition still producing important records in the streaming era.
The 1950s comedy LP boom
People searching for "1950s comedy records" are usually trying to remember one of a cluster of albums that briefly made spoken comedy one of the hottest things in American record shops. A few changes came together. The long-playing record, introduced in 1948, could hold twenty minutes a side, enough for a full club set. Home hi-fi equipment was booming. And a new kind of comedian was working in small, literate nightclubs such as the hungry i in San Francisco and Mister Kelly's in Chicago, doing material that television would not touch.
The records that defined that moment:
- Mort Sahl, At Sunset (Fantasy), the topical, newspaper-in-hand style.
- Shelley Berman, Inside Shelley Berman (Verve, 1959), a sit-down comic doing anxious one-sided phone calls. It went gold and won the first Grammy given for spoken comedy.
- Bob Newhart, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart (Warner Bros., 1960), the biggest of them all.
- Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (1960), the 2000 Year Old Man routine, born as a party piece and pressed to vinyl.
- Nichols and May, whose Mercury albums brought improvised scene work to a national audience.
- Lenny Bruce on Fantasy and Tom Lehrer on his own label, both cult figures whose records travelled through college dorms.
- Jonathan Winters, whose character-driven improvisations on Verve influenced Robin Williams among many others.
- Vaughn Meader, The First Family (Cadence, 1962), a gentle parody of the Kennedys that sold in enormous numbers and won Album of the Year, then was pulled from sale after President Kennedy's assassination.
Running in parallel was a separate market that mainstream histories long ignored: "party records" by Black comics such as Redd Foxx (on the Los Angeles label Dooto) and Moms Mabley (on Chess), often sold under the counter because of their content. Dick Gregory's In Living Black and White (Colpix, 1961) brought his cool, political style to a crossover audience. Those records are as much a part of stand-up's prehistory as Sahl and Newhart.
The labels that kept comedy records alive
The comedy album never disappeared, but its home kept moving. In the 1960s and 1970s the major labels, especially Warner Bros., treated comedy as a reliable seller. By the 1990s most majors had lost interest, and the form survived on smaller labels.
- Fantasy
- The Bay Area jazz label that recorded Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce in the 1950s.
- Warner Bros.
- Home to Newhart, Pryor's late-1970s records, Steve Martin and Steven Wright: the major-label peak of the form.
- Drag City
- Chicago indie label that has released Neil Hamburger since the 1990s, plus the Andy Kaufman tapes and other oddities.
- Sub Pop
- The Seattle label that signed David Cross in the early 2000s and then Patton Oswalt, Eugene Mirman and Flight of the Conchords, making indie-rock credibility part of alt comedy's identity.
- Stand Up! Records
- An independent label devoted entirely to stand-up, with a large catalogue of early and mid-career comics, Hannibal Buress among them.
- Comedy Central Records
- The cable network's label, which released many audio versions of its specials in the 2000s and 2010s.
- Kill Rock Stars
- The Olympia indie label that put out Hari Kondabolu's albums.
- 800 Pound Gorilla
- An independent comedy label and distributor active since the 2000s that releases a large share of contemporary stand-up audio.
How to listen to comedy albums now
Most of the records above are on the big streaming services, though classic catalogue titles come and go as licensing changes. Stand Up! Records, Drag City and many comedians sell directly through Bandcamp, which usually pays the artist more than streaming. And used vinyl from the 1950s and 1960s is often cheap, because the comedy bin is not where collectors look.
Listen to a comedy album the way you would a music album: start to finish, with nothing else on. The sequencing, the callbacks and the audience's shifting mood are part of the work, and they disappear if you shuffle tracks.
Making your own
The economics have changed completely since the LP boom. A comic can record a set, master it and release it worldwide in a few weeks, and many working comedians do exactly that before they ever get a filmed special. If that is you, our guide to recording a comedy album covers mics, rooms, editing and distribution, and self-releasing a special covers the video side.
Frequently asked questions
What were the popular comedy records of the 1950s and early 1960s?
The big sellers included Mort Sahl's At Sunset, Shelley Berman's Inside Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart's The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, Nichols and May's albums for Mercury, the Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks 2000 Year Old Man records and Vaughn Meader's The First Family. Lenny Bruce's Fantasy LPs and Tom Lehrer's song records sold less but were hugely influential.
What was the first stand-up comedy album?
There is no single agreed answer, because spoken comedy was recorded on 78s long before the LP. Mort Sahl's At Sunset, recorded in 1955 and released by Fantasy in 1958, is often cited as the first modern stand-up album: one comic, a live audience, topical material, no music.
Did a comedy album ever win the Grammy for Album of the Year?
Yes, twice in the early 1960s. Bob Newhart's The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart won Album of the Year at the 1961 Grammys, and Vaughn Meader's Kennedy parody The First Family won the following cycle.
Where can I listen to classic comedy albums today?
Many are on the major streaming services, and labels such as Stand Up! Records and Drag City sell catalogue titles on Bandcamp and vinyl. Out-of-print LPs turn up cheaply in used record shops, usually in the spoken-word or comedy bin.
Are comedy albums still released?
Yes. Most hour-long specials now get an audio release, and independent labels continue to put out stand-up records on streaming, CD and vinyl. The Grammys still give an award for Best Comedy Album.