Ten Awesome Comedians Most People Have Never Heard Of

I've long been a huge fan of stand-up comedy. The other night, after a really good Patton Oswalt live show, the friends I went with asked me if I could recommend anyone else to check out. My answer was a long, long list. They asked me to write it up as an e-mail. Then I remembered that I have a blog that needs filling with fresh content!

Man, but I love Content.

So. Stand-up comedy. It is a huge and varied field. If you're the sort of person that likes to split up a huge, varied field into two arbitrary chunks, and yes, I am that sort of person, stand-up comedy can be split in two arbitrary chunks.

The first chunk is big, mainstream comedy. Larry the Cable Guy. Bill Engvall. Jeff Dunham. Jeff Foxworthy. Dane Cook. Jay Leno. Mainstream comedy tends to be fairly unchallenging stuff, such as observations about the differences between the sexes (or the races, or the sexual orientations). I am a contemptible big-city latte-swilling elitist, so I don't know much about such things.

The second chunk is alternative comedy. A bunch of weedy little nerds, playing smaller halls full of people you'd probably want to beat up to take their lunch money. People like me. Comics in this arbitrary chunk tend to me more odd and experimental, with surreal or character-based humor, weird delivery, lots of unpredictability, and occasional jaunts into the dramatic, the disturbing, and the painfully offensive. They tend to be liberal, but not always. Odds are, you haven't heard of a lot of the comics on this page, which is why I’m writing this. I love recommending things.

Here's some funny stuff. Assume the links are not safe for work or children. I'll give a few intro pieces and then, if something really tickles you, a recommendation for where to go from there. This may involve spending money. Please spend money. A lot of these folks, talented as they are, don't make a lot.

Disclaimer For Touchy, Angry Internet People (If you are basically sane and sensible, ignore this section.)

Some of the things I link to here are really offensive to right-thinking peoples. I do not endorse the contents of the linked videos. Of course. I don't care for some comics I linked to, but I mentioned them because they belong in a survey of the field. If you don't like one of these people or I don't mention someone you love, you should get really REALLY angry at me. Finally, I've only mentioned comics who are alive and actively working, because this is a vibrant and active art form. (Sorry, Patrice O'Neal, Mitch Hedberg, and George Carlin fans.) All I wanted to do was post a bunch of funny YouTube links and waste your afternoon. Why are you so angry?

OK. Seatbelts on? Then here we go.

1. Patton Oswalt

The great gateway drug to alt-comedy, a tireless genius, one of the funniest people alive, and the voice of the Remy the rat in Ratatouille.   You want to know whether this brand of comedy is for you? Then listen to this, his famed steak house routine. If that goes down easy, his Sky Cake (his awesome deconstruction of religion) and KFC Famous Bowls routines are terrific.

Want More? - Oh, there's a lot of it. His Werewolves & Lollipops album is fantastic, and all of it is on YouTube. Or you could, you know, spend money.

2. Louis C.K.

I shouldn't be putting this guy at #2. Patton is #1 because he's my sentimental favorite, but Louis has been on fire for the last few years. His TV show on FX is mind-bending and terrific, and his last two comedy albums are as good as any ever created.

The big gateway for him is this viral video about how "everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy." Or this incredibly dirty and hilarious portrait from a crumbling marriage.

Want More? - Get his albums Chewed Up and Hilarious. They are as good as this stuff gets.

3. Paul F. Tompkins

It didn't get long to get to the obscure folks here. Paul F. Tompkins alternates between comedy and storytelling, and he's terrific. My personal favorite routine is his decisive answer to the eternal question: What's better ... Cake or Pie? And this hilarious routine about his mother's conversion to atheism before she died is a perfect example of the weird edginess of alt-comedy.

Want More? - His album Freak Wharf is a delight. On the free end, his HBO special Driven To Drink is on YouTube, and it's a great example of the storytelling end of his work.

4. Maria Bamford

Her specialty is playing different characters with wildly varied voices, and she is as good at is as they get. Patton Oswalt described her as an alien who came to Earth to tell racist jokes about humans. She is very good recorded but far better live, where you can see how she uses her face and body.

To get a good look, go to YouTube and watch the Maria Bamford Show, a 20 part series of short films showing off many of her best bits and characters.

Want More? - Her album Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome is very good, but it loses something from not being able to see her. Go. Spend money!

5. Amy Schumer

Foul-mouthed, profane, and hilarious. She is coming up so fast that she should almost be considered mainstream at this point, and very good. She is not unlike Sarah Silverman, a comparison that is probably starting to annoy her greatly. She first gained a lot of attention for her routine on a Comedy Central roast, and her recent special is on teh YouTubez.

Want More? - Buy her album Cutting and play it for your grandmother.

6. Aziz Ansari

Reasonably well known for his roles on Funny People and Parks & Recreation. His bits on Craigslist and bedsheets are great examples of his awesome nerdy hostility.

Want More? - Intimate Moments From a Sensual Evening is a great album. You can get his newer special, Dangerously Delicious, on his site for five bucks. Worth it.

7. Eliza Skinner

You haven't heard of her. I just picked her as an example of the countless insanely talented people toiling in show business, producing awesome stuff in the hope of breaking big. It makes me angry that she isn't rich, but Hollywood is a merciless place. Her videos are fantastic.

Want More? - So do I! Will someone please give this woman a multi-million dollar development deal?

8 & 9. Garfunkle and Oates

A comedy music duo based in L.A. I've linked to their videos on this blog before. They are one of the best examples I can think of how YouTube can help someone get the fame and career they deserve. Their YouTube channel can murder an afternoon. These three are my personal favorites. They tour, and they're a lot of fun live.

Want More? - Their albums All Over Your Face and Slippery When Moist are on iTunes!

10. Kyle Kinane

Kyle Kinane is a bitter, angry misanthrope on stage, which is already funny. That he can be so angry while saying things that are perfectly reasonable and true makes him excellent. For example,here are his routines on Trader Joe's or insomnia.

Want More? - His album, Death of the Party, is super-solid.

And Others

There's so much good stuff out there. Some examples, in no particular order ...

Eddie Pepitone. Tig Notaro. Donald Glover. Brian Posehn. David Cross. Zach Galifanakis. (Now more of a movie star.) Dana Gould. (This routine is killer.) Nick Swardson. Sarah Silverman. Doug Benson, king of the stoner comics. And, of course, the legendary Margaret Cho.

It's a varied field. If you don't like one (Sarah Silverman can be incredibly polarizing, for example), you might like another. But if you put any of those names into YouTube, something will pop up that is worth your time. If I didn't mention someone awesome, tell me about them in the comments!

And go to live shows! They're great. They make money for people who deserve money. And it'll get you out of the house. Don't forget to tip your server.

A Little Bit of Genius at PAX

There were things I saw at Penny Arcade Expothat I wanted to go on about. Something besides Microsoft trying to push us into our exciting Windows 8/Internet Explorer 9 future by providing the world middling adaptions of ancient Atari games for some reason.

There was one game at the Indie Megabooth that deserves special attention from all humans. Not only was it funny, but it has perhaps the best elevator pitch in the history of the human race:

OK. You're a guy living in the suburbs. You have a wife, two kids, and a secret: You're actually an octopus in disguise.

Obvious jokes aside, how can you not want to try that game? Especially when you know it's called Octodad: The Dadliest Catch.

Octodad!

This game is the purest epitome of the Indie spirit. (How's that for a pull quote?) It's unique, intriguing, utterly bananas, and no major publisher will ever do anything like it.

Sadly, the gameplay is focused on maneuvering the octopus, which means struggling to do normally simple tasks with an odd control scheme. I am a little skeptical about how much this particular style of gameplay can catch on. On the bright side, if it's priced cheaply enough, it can make a ton of sales based on the "Oh God. I have to try this out." factor.

My unsolicited advice for the developers: If the game turns out to not be that fun, sell it for five bucks. You'll move a lot of copies based on morbid curiosity alone.

Edit: Oh, yeah. You can support Octodad at Steam Greenlight here. I voted for it. KEEP INDIE GAMES WEIRD!

Quick Thoughts On Android

One of our games, Avadon: The Black Fortress, came out on Android recently. (It's also on the Amazon App Store.) The experience was very tiring and time-consuming, and it will great outside support (such as the Humble Bundle wanting to help with the port, as they did with Avadon) for us to go through it again. If you are a small development house without a hit big enough to get the attention of the big boys at Google and Amazon, it's really hard to summon up the resources to deal with the things that make Android so tough to develop for.

And what are those "things"? If people are interested in a developer's view of the Android situation, the Penny Arcade Report had a really good article on why one dev is avoiding the platform. It's only describes the beginning of the problems, but it's a very good start.

(If anything, the article sells short how many devices there are out there, each with their own weird quirks and bugs, and how much extra testing and debugging time you have to spend dealing with the mess. It's even harder when you write games for tablets, like we do.)

The comments on the post are very worth reading, as they provide a classic example of how evangelists for a platform can be capable of erecting a Reality-Dispersal-Field, through which not even the hardest facts can penetrate.

Avernum Out For Windows, For What It's Worth.

A few weeks ago, Spiderweb Software finally released our newest role-playing game, Avernum: Escape From the Pit, for Windows. It's also out on Steam.

It's OK if you didn't notice, as a far higher profile indie RPG, Legend of Grimrock, came out the same day. It's a lot of fun and I'm almost done with it. I'll blog about it soon.

I've taken this long to blog about it (or anything) because work stress, increasing age, and family health issues have given me a persistent case of burnout. Burnout is an interesting issue. I'll blog about it soon.

Avernum: Escape From the Pit is doing well. It is old material. It's a rewrite of Avernum, which is itself a rewrite of Exile: Escape From the Pit. And yet, thanks to iTunes and Steam, it has already, in only a few months, earned as much as either of those titles earned in years and years. The revolutionary effect of Steam and iTunes on people trying to have my career simply cannot be understated. I'll blog about it soon.

Since it's a rewrite, it hasn't gotten as many reviews, which is fair. GameBanshee wrote a tough, fair, generally positive review which makes me want to write some interesting things about video games and art. No, I'm kidding. Writing about video games and art is never interesting. Still. I'll blog about it soon.

I've also been playing Mass Effect 3, when I can work up the energy. I'm not feeling it the way I felt Mass Effect 1 and 2, but I'm sure I can come up with some interesting things to say about it. I won't bother to write an actual review, as you've already finished it and made a YouTube video about how angry the ending made you. I'll blog about it soon.

Finally, Community has been having an amazing season. I won't blog about it, as Community fans are almost as tiresomely aggressive in their evangelism as The Wire fans and bronies. Still. If you watch it on Hulu before it gets cancelled (which should happen ... ... NOW), you can be ahead of the nerd-culture curve.

Four Things To End the Week.

One.

I have a big article about the indie games biz up on Gamasutra. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Enjoy!

Two.

Everyone all justifiably atwitter about how Tim Schafer raised upwards of one million dollars on Kickstarter to make a new adventure game. It's a great proof-of-concept for the whole publicly funded game thing. If Tim Schafer couldn't pull in some coin to make an adventure game, nothing else has a chance.

I think it's brilliant, and it ties well into what I said in my Gamasutra article. The secret power of indie devs is to exploit underserved niches. Expect other Kickstarter-funded games in future. I only hope the results match the expectations.

Three.

Heaven forbid that I should be thought to criticize Notch or Minecraft. (I won't even point out that the whole end boss/enchantment/potion/combat system is taking the game in entirely the wrong direction to please exactly the wrong group of people.)

But, about this.

Hey, I wouldn't presume to give them advice. But, after I make my 30 million dollars, I'm not going to rely on Anonymous to finish my games for me. Just sayin'.

Four.

Every once in a while, I read someone's critique of OK Go as a band, focusing on the fact that they basically fine and only have one decent single. (Don't click that link. You've seen it already.) But that misses the point. They aren't a band. They're much more interesting than that. They're a meme-generation factory, and really good at it.

So here is my legally mandated one link a year to an OK Go video. Yeah, like you have something better to do with three minutes and fifty-four seconds.

Look for my next link to them in roughly fifteen months, when they play some pleasant and non-threatening power pop by shooting kittens out of a cannon into steel drums, or whatever.

Three Funny Links. (And Our Sale Is Ending Soon.)

So I need to write a blog post to remind people that Spiderweb Software's Glorious October Carnage 10% Off Sale ends in just a few days. But I don't have one of my standard 1000 word infodumps ready. You see I've been busy lately trying to finish our next game and playing Catherine on my XBox. (Working title ... "I Have Serious Issues With Women: The Game.")

So I'm going to post links to three thinks I really liked. Because that's what blogs are best at.

1. An Old Short Story

There used to be a magazine called Dragon. It was ostensibly about tabletop role-playing games, but who are we kidding? It was about Dungeons and Dragons. This was back in the good old days when you could play D&D and relax and unwind and keep up with what was going on without a computer, four whiteboards, and a specially trained idiot savant. (If you ever wanted me to write a review of Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, there it was.)

Every month, Dragon magazine also had a short story, for some reason. One of these stories has stuck with me because it was so amazingly prescient. It was about MUDs, but in the story they were weird free for alls and if you did the right thing you could earn game cash that converted to real money. It predicted the existence of Eve Online twenty years before the fact, and other SF writers are just now catching up with the crazy possibilities.

Someone just sent me a link to the story, so here it is:

Catacomb, by Henry Melton

Henry, if you ever end up here and see this, your work had a big, big influence on one particular misfit boy.

2. A New Video

So far, I've managed to avoid writing any blog articles on the subject of The Game Industry Might Maybe Have Woman Issues, Just a Little Bit. To anyone looking in from outside, this statement is about as controversial as saying that water is wet, but it still gets gamers really angry.

Anyway. IGN made some sort of online reality show thingy called The Next Game Boss. It's about indie game developers. That someone made a reality show (even a web one with a micro-budget) about people who want to do what I do is pretty fascinating. Not flattering, but fascinating. Because, um ... watch this cruelly edited selection of highlights from the first episode ...

Hey, Ladies! They're Still Single!

(It gets awesome one minute in.)

There are things I could say about this, but there's really nothing that can be added to perfection.

3. I Like Music

Everyone who knows me in real life is sick of hearing about Garfunkel & Oates. But you don't know me! So I can just drop a link or two.

They really broke big over the last year or so and are now making actual money (plus an HBO development deal). If you poke around on YouTube, you will find that these two have been working their asses off for years trying this and that before they broke big. They are a great example of a universal truth: It takes ten years to make an overnight success.

OK, that seems like enough content to justify a blog post. So. We're having a sale. It's over in a few days. Order one of our series on CD and you can totally get your Hanukkah shopping done early.

A Game Worth Noticing.

I feel bad for missing it, since it's been out a week, but Basilisk Games finally managed to get Eschalon: Book 2 out the door. I haven't played it yet, of course, but I will soon.

One of the worst things about what I do for a living is that hardly anyone else does it. You might think that not having competitors is a good thing. It is not. In the game industry, competitors help as well as hurt you. When EA spends millions of dollars advertising Dragon Age and Mass Effect, they aren't just pushing their games. They are also advertising the whole idea of playing RPGs. Dragon Age makes as many potential customers for me as it takes.

Also, I love writing Indie games, and I want others to have the same fun.

So I wish Basilisk Games a ton of luck. Releasing one game is a huge achievement. Releasing two games is, I don't know, what's bigger than huge? Huge-Prime?

Penny Arcade Calls It.

I normally have a hard time reading the main page text of Penny Arcade. Tycho's proclivity for plethoric verbiage can make reading his writing onerous. My eyes tend to just slide off of it.

But sometimes he just calls it completely perfectly:

It is not a mischaracterization to say that conversations with the hardcore PC community about software theft follow these tenets:

- There is no piracy.
- To the extent that piracy exists, which it doesn't, it's your fault.
- If you try to protect your game, we'll steal it as a matter of principle.

It's like, who wouldn't want to bend over backward in their service?

I would also add: "Trying to protect your game never keeps anyone from stealing it no matter what ever."

I've harped on DRM a lot in this space, and I imagine I will continue to do so. There's a good reason for that. It is THE issue now for music and software and (as eBooks become more popular) publishing. Intellectual property gets easier to steal pretty much daily. Coincidentally, profits at game developers, music publishers, and (soon) book publishers decrease on a pretty much daily basis.

It's a process, and we have not seen where it will end. No matter what your views on copy protection are, this should make the topic of great interest to anyone who likes music, books, or video games.

Sometimes, I Link To a Comic Strip.

Bwaaaaahahahahahaha.

Stolen Pixels #114

I have two things to say about this.

First, every aspiring Indie developer should set this comic as their screensaver, so that it flashes up at any moment when you are foolish enough to feel hope.

Second, I love the term "Indie games" because it doesn't have all the Loser connotations that "shareware" did. I now realize that it's only a matter of time before "Indie game" gets all the same connotations.

If you don't believe me, drop by XNA Community games (Soon to be XBox Live Indie Games. Thanks Microsoft!) and try those out. (Shudder.)