In coming up with our version of a comic canon, we weighed artistic merit, technical proficiency and sense of timing, quality of their written material, their delivery and degree of influence - and often, their sense of what makes something, anything, funny. So you’d think assembling a list of the 50 greatest stand-ups of all time would be easy right? Riiiight. They eventually exit stage left and leave a lot of laughing folks in their wake. A man or woman walk into a bar (or a club, or a theater, or an arena …). And even as the medium has morphed from one-liner artists to political satirists, from social-taboo tweakers to didja-ever-notice observational humorists, from the club-comic bubble of the 1980s to the the alt-comedy boom of the 1990s, it usually boils down to a fairly simple set-up. Some of the best practitioners of the form are still alive … or at the very least, haven’t been in the ground all that long. Stand-up comedy grew out of minstrelsy and then vaudeville, which only makes it about a century old, tops. But the idea of getting onstage in front of strangers, just one person and a spotlight, and talking until they crack up – that’s new. Cavemen whacked one another in the nuts for cheap yuks, and Medieval fools jabbered in a flop sweat to keep from being beheaded.
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