Best Comedian Interviews: Podcasts, Radio, Books & Docs

The best comedian interviews are not on talk shows. A five-minute couch segment is a performance; the good stuff comes when someone gives a comedian an hour, a quiet room and a question they haven't heard before. The richest sources are long-form podcasts like WTF with Marc Maron, public-radio programs like Fresh Air and Bullseye, a handful of books of interviews, and a few documentaries that let comics talk shop. This guide collects the real ones worth your time.

A note on what this page is: AltComedy does not conduct or publish its own interviews. Everything below was made by someone else, and we link you toward it. For the shows themselves, ranked, see the best comedy podcasts of all time.

What makes a great comedy interview

Comedians are hard to interview. They are trained to deflect with a joke, and most have told their origin story hundreds of times. The interviews that last tend to share three things:

Time. An hour or more lets the prepared anecdotes run out. Something more honest usually arrives around the forty-minute mark.
An interviewer with a point of view. Either a fellow comic who knows the work from the inside, or a journalist who has done the reading.
Interest in process. How a bit was written, why a special is structured the way it is, what happened on a bad night. Craft talk ages better than promotion.

Podcasts: the long-form era

WTF with Marc Maron (2009–2025)

The defining comedy interview show, and the place to start. Maron interviewed nearly every significant comedian of his era in his Los Angeles garage, usually for over an hour. His technique is the opposite of journalistic neutrality: he brings his own insecurities, old feuds and recovery into the room, and guests respond in kind. The result is a vast oral history of stand-up, with conversations about addiction, mental health and the economics of the road that simply didn't exist in public before. The show ended in October 2025 but the archive remains. See our Marc Maron profile.

The Adam Buxton Podcast

Buxton, a British comedian and one half of Adam and Joe, conducts warm, wandering "ramble chats" with comedians, writers and musicians. Where Maron digs, Buxton plays. Guests often say things here they would not say under pressure.

The Comedian's Comedian

Stuart Goldsmith, himself a stand-up, interviews working comedians specifically about craft: how they write, how they structure an hour, how they handle a hostile room. It is the closest thing to a masterclass archive for stand-up, with a strong British and Edinburgh Fringe emphasis.

Good One (Vulture)

Critic Jesse David Fox asks a comedian to play one joke or bit, then takes it apart with them: where it came from, how it changed, why each word is there. Short, focused and very useful if you write comedy yourself.

Also worth your time

Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast: live interviews with a decade-plus archive of British comedians.
Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend: funnier than it is revealing, but Conan is an expert at getting comics to riff.
You Made It Weird: Pete Holmes's long, spiritual and occasionally very personal conversations.
Working It Out: Mike Birbiglia works on unfinished material with a guest, showing how bits develop.
Off Menu: not an interview show in form, but Ed Gamble and James Acaster get a surprising amount of biography out of guests via their food choices.

Radio: the public-broadcasting tradition

Fresh Air (NPR)

Produced at WHYY in Philadelphia and long hosted by Terry Gross, Fresh Air has interviewed most major comedians of the past four decades. Gross prepares exhaustively and asks direct personal questions in a calm voice, and comedians who would joke their way past other hosts often answer her seriously. Its archive, searchable online, is one of the best resources for comedy history.

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Thorn started his show as a college radio program, then called The Sound of Young America, and it grew into a nationally distributed public-radio show produced by his network, Maximum Fun. He interviews comedians with obvious love for the form and a fan's knowledge of their work, and the show regularly features up-and-coming alternative comics alongside established names.

More radio

Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4): guests choose eight records to take to a desert island and talk through their lives. Many British comedians' best-known interviews happened here.
Here's the Thing (WNYC): Alec Baldwin's interview show, with notable conversations with comedy figures.
The Treatment (KCRW): Elvis Mitchell's conversations with filmmakers and performers, including many comedy writer-directors.

Interview styles worth knowing

Comedy has also turned the interview itself into material. A few distinct approaches:

The confessional: Maron's mode. The interviewer exposes himself first, inviting the guest to do the same. Intimate, sometimes uncomfortable, often therapeutic for both sides.
The researched conversation: Terry Gross's mode. Deep preparation, precise questions, a neutral tone that makes candour feel safe.
The craft breakdown: Good One and The Comedian's Comedian. The subject is the work, not the person, which often reveals more about the person anyway.
The ambush: Ziwe Fumudoh's mode. On her 2020 Instagram Live series and then her Showtime show Ziwe, she asked guests deadpan, loaded questions about race designed to expose how badly people talk about it. The interview becomes a satirical trap. See our Ziwe profile.
The anti-interview: Zach Galifianakis's Between Two Ferns and The Eric Andre Show parody the talk-show format with hostility, awkward silences and collapsing sets. Not a source of information, but a crucial alt comedy form. See Zach Galifianakis and anti-comedy.

Books of interviews

Poking a Dead Frog by Mike Sacks (Penguin, 2014). Long craft-focused interviews with comedy writers across TV, film, print and stand-up.
And Here's the Kicker by Mike Sacks (Writer's Digest Books, 2009). His earlier collection, in the same vein.
Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow (Random House, 2015). Includes interviews Apatow recorded as a teenager with comedians he admired, alongside later conversations.
Something Wonderful Right Away by Jeffrey Sweet (1978). An oral history of the Compass Players and Second City in the words of the people who invented American improv.
We Killed by Yael Kohen (Sarah Crichton Books, 2012). An oral history of women in American comedy.
Live from New York by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller (Little, Brown, 2002). The oral history of Saturday Night Live.
How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee (Faber and Faber, 2010). Not interviews, but Lee's footnotes on his own transcripts amount to the most detailed self-interview a comedian has published.

Our full reading list is at essential alt comedy books.

Television and video

Talking Funny (HBO, 2011). Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Louis C.K. around a table talking about how they work. A rare look at headliners talking shop with peers.
The Green Room with Paul Provenza (Showtime, 2010–2011). Comedians in loose, uncensored conversation with each other, hosted by a fellow comic.
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (Crackle, then Netflix). Jerry Seinfeld's short, polished conversations. Light, but with real moments of craft talk.
Dinner for Five (IFC, 2001–2005). Jon Favreau hosts actors and comedians over dinner; looser and more revealing than most talk TV.
Hot Ones. Sean Evans's spicy-wing interview show, whose physical ordeal gets surprisingly candid answers from comedians.
Classic talk-show archives. The Dick Cavett Show gave comedians long, unhurried segments in the late 1960s and 1970s, and many are available on DVD and online.

Documentaries

Comedian (2002). Jerry Seinfeld builds a new act from scratch after retiring his old material, alongside a young comic, Orny Adams, trying to break through. The best film about how stand-up material is developed.
The Aristocrats (2005). Dozens of comedians tell and analyse the same notoriously filthy joke, a study in how delivery and improvisation make the joke.
Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth (1998). Robert B. Weide's Oscar-nominated documentary. See Lenny Bruce.
The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling (HBO, 2018). Judd Apatow's portrait built from Shandling's own journals.
Dying Laughing (2016). Comedians on the psychological cost of stand-up.
Hysterical (FX, 2021). Women comedians on their careers and the industry.
Tig (Netflix, 2015). Tig Notaro's life after the 2012 Largo set. See Tig Notaro.

How to use interviews if you're a comedian

Working comics mine these archives for practical advice. Listen for the specifics: how a comedian decided what to cut from an hour, what they do the morning of a taping, how they handle the first ten minutes of a set. Ignore the war stories unless they contain a lesson. And pay attention to how often successful comedians describe years of failure; it is the most consistent theme in every archive on this page. For more practical help, see our guides to comedy writing techniques and workshopping material.

Frequently asked questions

What is Marc Maron's interview style?

Maron interviews like a fellow patient rather than a journalist. He brings his own anxieties and grudges into the conversation, follows emotional tension rather than a list of questions, and lets talks run long, which is why comedians often opened up to him about addiction, depression and family.

What kind of interviews does Ziwe do?

Ziwe Fumudoh's interviews are satirical ambushes. Starting on Instagram Live in 2020 and then on her Showtime series, she asked guests deliberately uncomfortable, deadpan questions about race and privilege, and the comedy came from watching them try to answer.

Where can I find long interviews with comedians?

The richest sources are podcasts such as WTF with Marc Maron, The Adam Buxton Podcast and The Comedian's Comedian; public radio shows such as Fresh Air and Bullseye; and books of interviews like Mike Sacks's Poking a Dead Frog and Judd Apatow's Sick in the Head.

Does AltComedy publish its own comedian interviews?

No. This page is a guide to the best interviews published elsewhere. AltComedy publishes profiles, criticism and guides based on public sources.