The 6 Best Performances We Saw at the 2025 New York Comedy Festival

The old line that if you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny didn’t apply to two panels held during the festival. On Nov. 15, the cast of NBC/Peacock’s very funny mockumentary, St. Denis Medical — which takes place in a financially strapped Oregon hospital — and its co-creator and showrunner and Eric Ledgin gathered at the Hard Rock Hotel to discuss the hit sitcom.

After screening an episode from the series’ second season, which is currently airing, Ledgin and cast members David Alan Grier, Allison Tolman, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Kahyun Kim, Mekki Leeper and Kaliko Kauahi took part in a Q&A moderated by Mara Webster.

Kauahi, who plays the deadpan Nurse Val — in season one, she dragged a giant wooden crucifix into the room of a patient who wouldn’t undergo an appendectomy without it —revealed her favorite line of dialogue: “I’m sorry your finger smells like that, but you have to move to the back of the line.”

Aussie Josh Lawson, who plays the cluelessly egocentric Dr. Bruce — in pretty flawless American English — and Ledgin talked about the curious items in the surgeon’s on-set office, which include a golden football, second-place talent show trophies and an electric guitar. “He’s that guy, good God,” Lawson said. Ledgin also recounted how Lawson’s office display came to include a samurai sword after a prop guy asked him about one of the awards in the office. “I said, ‘His sword?’ And he said, ‘No, his award.'” Ledgin’s reply: “We’ve got to get him a sword.”

“Comedy Is Not Pretty,” goes a song (and album) by Steve Martin, and Ledgin gave testament to that declaration when he said that working on the second season of St. Denis Medical gave him “a lot deeper acceptance for how not fun my life is while we’re making the show.”

But as Joyce, McLendon-Covey’s hospital administrator, might say in an attempt to ease the pain: “We’re working late, and there’s pizza!”

There were no snacks for Strangers With Candy creators Sedaris, Dinello and Colbert, who sat for a panel discussion that was billed as a celebration of the 25^th anniversary of the cancellation of the out-there Comedy Central show that ran from 1999 to 2000. On Nov. 7 at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, the trio — who Colbert said often “would write all night and go to the set” — revealed that they were never actually told their show was canceled. “They just stopped filling our snack drawer,” Dinello said.

The series was a spoof of after-school specials — ham-fisted morality plays that ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast from the ‘70s through the ‘90s — and featured Sedaris as Jerri Blank, a former prostitute and junkie high-school dropout who resumed her education as a 46-year-old freshman. Colbert played married history teacher Chuck Noblet, who was carrying on a secret affair with Dinello’s art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck. “We were improvising while we were writing a lot,” Colbert said of the trio’s creative process, adding: “If we laughed, we couldn’t cut it from the show.”

Although Strangers was satire — one of its funniest episodes is a spoof of the 1962 film The Miracle Worker, in which the illiterate Jerri, in the Helen Keller role, learns to read — the show, which is available on Paramount+, was more than groundbreaking. Its surreal vibe defies imitation. As one audience member observed, Jeri Blank was one of the first gender-queer characters on television.

The series also featured some memorably absurd dance sequences, and at the end of the discussion, the audience was treated to a montage of fascinating footwork by the characters that should be available to stream as well.

Benefits for disease-fighting organizations are usually dry affairs with equally dry meals. Not the Nov. 12 Cool Comedy + Hot Cuisine fundraiser for the Scleroderma Research Foundation’s tribute to the late Bob Saget, who became an ardent advocate for the cause after his sister was diagnosed with and later succumbed to the disease.

Jeff Ross, Jim Gaffigan, Nikki Glaser, Hannibal Buress and Kelsey Cook — friends of Saget, who died in 2022 — turned out to perform sets for the crowd, who dined on Jerusalem artichoke tiradito and Mary’s seeded chicken cutlet prepared by a team of chefs headed by celebrity chef Susan Feniger, who has been involved with the event since its 1987 inception. Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz received the Bob Saget Legacy Award for his dedication to the event.

Ross, who hosted the proceedings, which raised $1.2 million for the foundation, brought the laughs from the moment the crowd began taking its seats at the Edison Ballroom in midtown Manhattan. “We have blond Jews. It’s a big night!” he said. Spotting actor Breckin Meyer at one table, he said the Clueless actor “was on To Catch a Predator, season three.” (He wasn’t.)  Ross praised Saget’s “big heart and tiny d—,” and called the Full House star “America’s dad — like Bill Cosby, except he put women to sleep the old-fashioned way: with his comedy.” Saget, who was as good at working blue as he was on family-friendly sitcoms, would have loved it.

Gaffigan, who took the stage in a thin, quilted vest, said he was wearing “a light jacket to hide my man boobs.”

Noting the upcoming holiday season, he lamented his role as “an unpaid volunteer” for family excursions, where his son once told him he had “accidentally ordered Uber Eats” on his dad’s credit card. Gaffigan described his own experience on these trips as “How would you like to ignore me in a hotel room?”

Glaser, who, shortly after Saget’s death, shared a song she co-wrote, “Song For Bob,” on her Instagram, dipped into the set she had performed a few days earlier on Saturday Night Live, albeit with details that she could not have used on that FCC-monitored program. One of the highlights of her set was tweaking Jennifer Aniston’s role as a brand ambassador for Aveeno skin products. Glaser expressed extreme doubt that The Morning Show star was going “to Duane Reade, pushing the button and waiting for the guy to come,” a reference to the locked, plexiglass shielded shelves that the chain uses to deter shoplifting at some stores. She then described Aniston’s youthful complexion as “a baby’s head on a woman’s body — a reverse Ariana” — as in Grande. Oof!

Jay is the ideal comic for a generation of Instagramers and TikTokers who yearn to fly their freak flags in a viral video. And they came in droves to three sold-out shows — two at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre and one at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre. Audience participation is essential to Jay’s performance, so avoid aisle seats if that’s not your idea of a fun night out.

The eminently likable comic — “you have to be odd to be No. 1” — performs superb crowd work with a slow-jam proficient band and an Auto-Tuned microphone that makes almost everyone he approaches sound as soulful as T-Pain or Travis Scott. (Not surprisingly, his questions often have to do with relationships and booty calls.) The one exception at his Nov. 13 Beacon performance (which his mother attended!): a woman who seemed caught off-guard by his question was, Jay said, “buffering.”

The shows were part of the comic’s — one of Billboard’s “Top 15 Musical Comics Right Now” — Goofy Guy Tour, and though there are some set pieces, including a poem about nutting, the humor is supercharged because there’s no predicting what audience members will say — and how Jay will respond.

Edelman is as exuberant as C.K. is dark, and his non-stop Nov. 15 show at Carnegie Hall produced one gut-clenching laugh after another. Much of the humor dealt with his parents. His father, Elazer Edelman, is a highly respected biomedical engineer, cardiologist, MIT professor and ER doctor, who, his son told the crowd, came close to winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Given his dad’s bona fides, Edelman said he watched the HBO ER drama The Pitt “as if it was Anchorman 2.” Hearing one of show’s characters order “30 ccs of sodium” for a patient, he recounted his father laughing and saying, “What’s he gonna do, flavor a soup?” And when Alex’s mother, commenting on her son’s job as a hospital clown for kid patients in Jerusalem, said, “Laughter is the best medicine,” his father replied: “Are you f—ing kidding me?”

Edelman, who’s also a standout on the very funny Peacock series The Paper, explained that despite his father’s renown in the medical profession, his mother, Cheryl, who’s an attorney, is not impressed. During the pandemic, he explained that his father offered to show him one of the artificial hearts he was working on and went out to his car, “where he had a trunk full of hearts, like the saddest of country songs.”

When he handed the heart to his son, his mother scoffed, “He’s been working on that for 30 years. I grew your head inside me in nine months.”

And during a visit to a museum, Edelman explained that his mother was upset that his father had parked too far away from the building. When she called her husband an “idiot,” Alex said he jumped to his defense, saying. “He almost won the Nobel Prize!” Mom’s reply: “Not for parking!”

If, to quote the late, great Leonard Cohen, “you want it darker,” then C.K. is your man. There is no one better at making light of gloom. During his sold-out Nov. 16 show at the Beacon Theatre, C.K.’s first joke was, “I took an AIDS test today. I haven’t had sex in years. I just wanted some good news.” Then, after a beat: “Turns out I have AIDS.”

The time C.K. spent in cultural exile after a 2017 New York Times story about sexual misconduct has not blunted his unapologetic observational comedy, and his Beacon performance, which was taped for a special, was hilariously scalpel-sharp, albeit not for the fainthearted or easily offended.

While he riffed on standalone topics like the culture that created the blood-absorbent pads found at the bottom of meat and poultry packaging — “Only people would make a… chicken tampon” — and what Barely Legal magazine says about its readers — “You’re not a pedophile, but you’re so f—ing close” — the meat of C.K.’s set dealt with mortality.

“Life is too long,” C.K. said at one point in his set. “You can have a good life, but then you’re still alive at that point.” Alive, with, he added, “a useless skill set.”

But, as seen through the 58-year-old comic’s eyes, death and the run-up to it can be as hilarious as it is grim.

The centerpiece of his set was about reluctantly visiting his father — who “did one good thing for me,” C.K. said. “He never f—ed me” — in a nursing home where the woman at the reception desk offered no help locating him, instead suggesting he open doors until he hit the jackpot. Upon entering the facility, he described encountering a place that was barren of attendants and cluttered with clusters of elderly people slumped over in wheelchairs that were “jackknifed” in odd configurations, “like bumper cars where they turned the power off.”

According to AARP, there are 59 million Americans caring for adults, and some of those people were clearly in the audience. They were the ones laughing hardest because they recognized the truth in C.K.’s humor — humor that gave them permission to howl away the guilt they harbor because their parents live in nursing homes just like the one he described. (He did find his dad, but watch the special for the payoff.)

Musing about the afterlife, C.K. told the crowd, “The only way I’m not going to hell is if it’s not there.” Then describing some of the tortures that allegedly await those sentenced down under — which, in C.K.s description, included a lot of non-consensual anal sex, he said, “You don’t want to go to hell, but maybe it’s fun to work there.”