Essential Alt Comedy Books: The Reading List for People Who Take Jokes Seriously
The ten books we would hand anyone who wants to understand alternative comedy, ranked, plus the memoirs, craft manuals and histories that fill in the rest.
The best comedy books do something a special can't: they show you the work. A great hour hides its scaffolding, but Steve Martin explaining how he rebuilt his act around the absence of punchlines, or Stewart Lee annotating his own transcripts line by line, lets you see how the machine runs. This reading list is built around that idea. Memoirs that explain choices, craft books that working comics actually use, and the histories that put alternative comedy in context.
We start with a ranked top ten, then group the rest by what you want from them. Every title, author and year below has been checked; where we were not sure of a detail we left it out. For the audio side of the canon, see our companion list of essential comedy albums.
The ten essential books, ranked
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
The best book ever written by a stand-up about stand-up. Martin traces his path from magic-shop kid to arena headliner and explains, with unusual clarity, the decision at the heart of his act: to remove the punchline and let tension build until the audience chose where to laugh. It is short, unsentimental and full of practical detail about years of bad gigs. It is also the origin story of anti-comedy going mainstream.
The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff
A sweeping, anecdote-packed history from vaudeville and mob-run nightclubs through television, the comedy boom and the alternative rooms of the 1990s. Nesteroff built it on years of interviews and archive work, and it is the single book that gives you the whole American story in order. His follow-up, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem (Simon & Schuster, 2021), covers the long and overlooked history of Native American comedy.
Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s by Gerald Nachman
Profiles of the generation that invented modern stand-up: Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Nichols and May, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Tom Lehrer and more. If alternative comedy has a prehistory, it is this book. Read it alongside the records on our albums list.
Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers by Mike Sacks
Long interviews with comedy writers across television, film, print and stand-up, focused on process: how they generate ideas, how rooms work, how they survived failure. Sacks asks good, specific questions and lets answers run. His earlier And Here's the Kicker (Writer's Digest Books, 2009) is in the same vein. Our guide to the best comedian interviews lists more sources like these.
Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation by Charna Halpern, Del Close and Kim "Howard" Johnson
The founding text of long-form improv, explaining the Harold and Del Close's principles of agreement, pattern and treating your scene partner as a genius. It is slim and a bit dated in places, but the ideas run through everything from UCB to the character podcasts of the 2010s.
Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama by Bob Odenkirk
Odenkirk's memoir covers Second City, writing for Saturday Night Live, The Ben Stiller Show, and above all the making of Mr. Show with David Cross, before his late turn as a dramatic actor. It is candid about failure, money and ego, and it is the most useful first-person account of the 1990s American alt scene. See our Mr. Show guide.
How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian by Stewart Lee
Transcripts of three of Lee's shows, surrounded by long, funny, self-lacerating footnotes explaining every pause, repetition and deliberate failure. Nothing else so thoroughly explains how an alternative comedian thinks about structure and audience. See Stewart Lee.
Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy by Judd Apatow
Interviews spanning Apatow's career, including ones he recorded as a teenager with comics he admired, through to recent conversations with peers. The early interviews are fascinating as a record of how working comedians talked about craft in the 1980s. His later It's Garry Shandling's Book (Random House, 2019), built from Shandling's journals and notes, is a remarkable portrait of a comic's private process.
We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy by Yael Kohen
An oral history of women in American comedy from the 1950s to the 2010s, told largely in the performers' own words. It corrects the male-centred version of the story that most histories still tell.
I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder
The story of the 1970s Los Angeles stand-up scene centred on the Comedy Store, including the 1979 strike by comedians who wanted to be paid. It is a reminder that alt comedy's fights over money and control are older than the term.
Comedian memoirs worth reading
Most comedy memoirs are tour merchandise. These are the exceptions: books where the writer is as good on the page as on stage, and where you learn something about how comedy gets made.
- I'm Just a Person by Tig Notaro (Ecco, 2016). The year of her mother's death and her cancer diagnosis, told with the same flat calm as her famous Largo set. Pair with our Tig Notaro profile.
- Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere by Maria Bamford (Gallery Books, 2023). Bamford on psychiatric hospitals, 12-step groups and the comedy business, structured around every group she has joined. See Maria Bamford.
- Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences by Richard Pryor with Todd Gold (Pantheon, 1995). Pryor in his own voice. For a deeper, researched account of his early years, read Scott Saul's Becoming Richard Pryor (Harper, 2014).
- How to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce (Playboy Press, 1965). Bruce's own account, first serialised in Playboy. Uneven but essential. See our Lenny Bruce page.
- Bossypants by Tina Fey (Little, Brown, 2011). Funny about Chicago improv, SNL and running a writers' room.
- Yes Please by Amy Poehler (Dey Street, 2014). Includes her years in Chicago and New York with the Upright Citizens Brigade.
- The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman (Harper, 2010). Childhood, a short and unhappy SNL stint, and the New York clubs. See Sarah Silverman.
- Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt (Scribner, 2011). Essays on nerd obsession and the grim early years of stand-up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
- Sleepwalk with Me and Other Painfully True Stories by Mike Birbiglia (Simon & Schuster, 2010). The essay version of the material that became his one-man show and film.
- Perfect Sound Whatever by James Acaster (Headline, 2019). A book about the music of 2016, used as a way to talk about a breakdown and recovery. See James Acaster.
- Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard (Blue Rider Press, 2017). Good on how Izzard built a stream-of-consciousness act on the London circuit.
- Vacationland by John Hodgman (Viking, 2017). Essays about middle age and the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts from the host of Judge John Hodgman.
- Dear Girls by Ali Wong (Random House, 2019). Letters to her daughters, funnier and franker than most memoirs.
- Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (Little, Brown, 2000). Not a stand-up, but his radio essays shaped the confessional comic voice of the 1990s.
Craft books for improv and stand-up
No book will make you funny. These will help you understand why something worked, which is most of what rewriting is. If you are just starting out, pair them with our guides to comedy writing techniques and starting out in alt comedy.
Improv and sketch
- Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone (1979). The British teacher's book on status, spontaneity and storytelling. Not a comedy manual as such, but nearly every improv teacher has read it.
- The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual by Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh (Comedy Council of Nicea, 2013). The UCB method, centred on finding "the game" of a scene. See UCB Theatre history.
- Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out by Mick Napier (Heinemann, 2004). The Annoyance Theatre founder's deliberately rule-breaking alternative to game-based teaching.
- Something Wonderful Right Away by Jeffrey Sweet (1978). An oral history of the Compass Players and Second City, with Nichols, May, Alan Arkin and others describing how the form was invented.
- The Funniest One in the Room: The Lives and Legends of Del Close by Kim "Howard" Johnson (Chicago Review Press, 2008). A biography of the teacher behind long-form improv.
Stand-up
- The Comedy Bible by Judy Carter (Fireside, 2001). A workbook approach to finding material and building a first five minutes.
- Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy by Greg Dean (Heinemann, 2000). A technical breakdown of how a setup creates an assumption and a punchline overturns it.
- And Here's the Kicker by Mike Sacks (Writer's Digest Books, 2009). Interviews with comedy writers about process.
- Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy by Oliver Double (2005). A comedian-turned-academic's study of how stand-up works on stage.
Histories and critical studies
- Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America by Richard Zoglin (Bloomsbury, 2008). Pryor, Carlin, Martin, Kaufman, Robert Klein and the club boom.
- Going Too Far by Tony Hendra (Doubleday, 1987). A history of "boomer" satire from Lenny Bruce through National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, by someone who was in the middle of it.
- Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller (Little, Brown, 2002). The oral history of the show many alt comics define themselves against.
- The Last Laugh by Phil Berger (1975). A journalist's portrait of the stand-up world in the mid-1970s, written while it was happening.
- Alternative Comedy: 1979 and the Reinvention of British Stand-Up by Oliver Double (2020). A detailed history of the Comedy Store and Comic Strip generation. See our history of British alt comedy.
- Andy Kaufman Revealed! by Bob Zmuda with Matthew Scott Hansen (Little, Brown, 1999). The insider account from Kaufman's writing partner and accomplice. Read it knowing that Zmuda is part of the prank too. See Andy Kaufman.
Fiction and graphic books with an alt sensibility
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (Louisiana State University Press, 1980). The great American comic novel, with a hero as committed to his own grandiosity as any character comic.
- Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury, 2014). The New Yorker cartoonist's graphic memoir about her ageing parents, painfully funny in the way the best confessional stand-up is.
- New Teeth by Simon Rich (2021). Short stories from a former SNL writer that commit to an absurd premise and follow it to an emotional conclusion, which is sketch logic in prose form.
Where to start
One last tip: listen to the audiobooks of the memoirs where you can. Martin, Odenkirk and Notaro read their own, and comedians reading their own sentences restores the timing that print takes away.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best book about stand-up comedy?
For a performer's view, Steve Martin's Born Standing Up is the best account of building an act from nothing. For the history, Kliph Nesteroff's The Comedians covers American comedy from vaudeville to the present in one readable volume.
What books do comedians recommend for learning comedy?
Improvisers start with Truth in Comedy and Keith Johnstone's Impro. Stand-ups often point to Judy Carter's The Comedy Bible or Greg Dean's Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy for structure, and to Mike Sacks's interview books for how professionals actually work.
Is there a book about British alternative comedy?
Stewart Lee's How I Escaped My Certain Fate is the best insider account, with annotated transcripts of his shows. Oliver Double's academic history Alternative Comedy (2020) covers the 1979 Comedy Store and Comic Strip generation in detail.
What are the best comedian memoirs?
Our shortlist: Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, Bob Odenkirk's Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, Tig Notaro's I'm Just a Person, Maria Bamford's Sure, I'll Join Your Cult and Richard Pryor's Pryor Convictions.