Eleven days. More than 300 shows. The 20th annual New York Comedy festival offered a Golden Corral-style buffet of laughs. It was impossible to see them all, but here are the top seven shows – in no particular order – of them Bulletin board was witnessed.
1. Zarna Garg
Garg, who closed the festival with a sold-out show at Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan on Nov. 17, took an unlikely path to stand-up comedy. Raised in Mumbai, she escaped an arranged marriage by running away from home, immigrating to the United States and attending law school before becoming a fixture in the comedy business: stand-up, screenwriting, podcasting and memoir. She debuted at Caroline's on Broadway in 2020 and, according to her manager, the City Hall performance was one of her biggest headline shows to date.
Many of Garg's comedies are steeped in Indian culture and stereotypes — “You're Indian, your pronoun is Doctor!” she said during her performance — but judging by the lineup of the crowd on Nov. 17, she clearly passed. Garg had a big laugh saying that her bindi was the same sticker that Macy's uses to mark clothes and hinted that she occasionally uses hers to bargain. “You know I do!” she said. And she drew a huge roar from the crowd after she told a story about keeping her comedy from her parents. When her mother found out, instead of disowning her daughter, she told her that if it would help her career, “I hope you tell your audience that your father likes to do it with a dog.”
2. Jeff Arcuri
The Chicago-based, Michigan-born comic opened the festival on Nov. 7 when he brought his Full Beans tour to the Beacon Theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side and proved how he's made it last year: with crowd work, which has gone viral on social media. Arcuri he's so lightning-quick and razor-sharp that attempting to take notes from his sticks with members of the audience—done with a big, sly grin—is a fool's errand. So take a look at this video and note that, unlike other comics who single out members of their audience, Arcuri largely practices comedy without cruelty.
3. Jordan Jensen
The Ithaca-born, former New York City contractor — she called her company Lady Parts Carpentry because her name was often mistaken for a man — Jensen is a tattooed comedy cyclone who became the first woman to win the 2021 NYC festival's funniest contest. Her act is seeded with the wins and losses of womanhood and dating, growing up with a lesbian mother and an estranged weed-loving father, and her battles with OCD and intrusive thoughts. As one of Jeff Arcuri's presenters at the Beacon Theatre, Jensen had the crowd roaring with laughter and wildly vocal about the reality of menstruation.
4. New York's funniest
The winner of the festival's annual joke — which launched Jensen's career and Michael Cheamong other comics — was a New York-based stand-up Jamie Wolfewho delivered a polished set that closed with a killer, seemingly new clue to why he's sure God is a woman. “Take pictures of dicks and balls,” he said. “It's such a first draft.” It got better from there, but go see Wolf to hear it first hand. As they say in the business, it's all in the storytelling.
Wolf was one of 10 comics competing at the Hard Rock Hotel on Nov. 16, and two in particular brought to mind a comment Chris Distefano made in an interview Bulletin board last week, in which he talked about his comedy coming as a “defense mechanism” stemming from his parents' divorce.
The start of the competition, Soo Rawho is Korean, was born without fingers on one hand and was adopted as an infant after being found in a box left outside a police station. A devastating story, but Ra, whose delivery could be described as happy dead, burst into laughter, telling the crowd that she may have been abandoned when her real mother looked at her disfigured hand and decided: “This baby is not can fix Samsung phones.” She also said that when people ask her which Korea she's from, she says, “The one you can get out of.”
It was next Nick Viagaswho used his stutter to get a lot of laughs. He told the crowd that if he doesn't make it in comedy, “I can always get a job as a flash.” And that when he was counted down to a New Year's Eve performance, “This has been the greatest year.”
5. Ricky Velez
One of Judd Apatow's favorite comics — he even produced Velez The King of Staten Island, New York in which he co-starred with best friend Pete Davidson — the Queens-bred smart-ass returned the favor with a jam-packed set for Judd Apatow and Friends at the Beacon Theater on Nov. 9. In addition to the compelling narrative — check out his Dominican drug dealer bit online — Velez likes to anger the politically correct, and in addressing the influx of immigrants in New York, he told the audience, “I really like immigrants because they jump the white women's agenda. This makes me very happy. [In] In 2017 white women canceled catcalling in New York. Well, guess what. Venezuela has never been through a #MeToo movement. Well, good luck telling Papi that ass isn't okay, Mom.'
He also hailed the biggest crime in the city, which he said was “the war on gentrification”, adding that he recently saw “three men eating croissants on the corner”. Declaring such a brazen act of refined taste “crazy,” Velez got the crowd booing when he said, “This is New York City. This cannot happen. These men need crime,” adding: “Croissants and bags. If you have a bag as a man. Time to move, bro. We're coming back.”
6. Chris Distefano
Distefano did back-to-back shows at three outposts of the New York Comedy Club, which is owned by his manager, Emilio Savone — in part to re-record classics he's done on Netflix and other comedy platforms so he could re-claim the property. He named them “Chrissy's Version” as a tribute to Taylor Swift. But he also dropped the results of the presidential election and some of his successful friends' reactions to it. “I will say this. If you made a post crying about the president, you're an idiot,” Distefano said. “You have to be an adult here.”
He further explained that several friends he met through comedy are “doing great things. They present TV shows. I took the bus here.” Some of those famous friends are “crying,” he said. “I'm like, relax. You are a multi-millionaire who makes you believe. You live in America. Shut the f—up. Everyone needs to take a deep breath. It will be fine. Now, do I know for sure? No. I went to Nassau Community College.”
7. Stand Up For Heroes
Year after year, this benefit for military veterans showcases top talent to raise tens of millions of dollars. This year, Bruce Springsteen, Norah Jones, Jon Stewart, Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld and Mark Normand put on a really big show, which you can read more about here (and watch a video of The Boss performing the “Long Walk Home”).
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/culture/events/new-york-comedy-festival-best-performances-1235836824/
