Rick Rosner On, 11: Favorite Comedians, Stand-Up Craft, and Comedy as Politics
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/07/07
Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks Rick Rosner about favorite comedians, resurrecting comics, comedy education, and comedians as presidents. Rosner praises Michelle Wolf, Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, Paul Mooney, and others while reflecting on craft, timing, offensiveness, growth, and cultural change. He argues that figures like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart could govern well because intelligence includes choosing competent advisers.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who was your favorite comedian?
Rick Rosner: There are people I think I like. Michelle Wolf. I like just about everything she does. Chappelle, of course. I have to look at a list. Amy Schumer had some specials that were really good.
Here is a list I am looking at. Bill Burr, I like. Rory Scovel. I listen to stand-ups in my car. Rory Scovel, I do not know. I feel like he was an actor who decided, “Hey, I should try stand-up.” He is great.
Mulaney is great. Anthony Jeselnik is good, though Jeselnik does short hits. His jokes are: he builds a little setup, and then he punchlines out of it. So he does short stuff.
Bert Kreischer is always pleasant. John Mulaney and Nick Kroll, when they do their routine together as two old Jewish lunatics who are the worst performers in showbiz, I like that stuff.
Sarah Silverman is pretty interesting. What I have noticed in thinking about these people is that comedians change. Sometimes they are kick-ass. Sometimes they go in a different direction that I may not like as much as their previous direction.
Sarah Silverman, in the past five years or so, has become kind. She used to be kind of faux mean. She thought it was funny, and it was, to say awful stuff while being cute and looking innocent. Lately, she has been emphasizing not being mean. And she is still funny.
Ali Wong, I liked her early specials. Iliza Shlesinger has painstakingly built a complete set of skills. A lot of stand-ups have to do it ten thousand times. You have to get onstage and do your bits at least a thousand times to get anywhere near competent.
With Shlesinger, you can see how she has built a complete set of skills: timing, voices, all of it. She came up through Last Comic Standing, which is a brutal reality competition.
Wanda Sykes, I have liked some of the stuff she has done. I am just looking at lists here.
Ricky Gervais is often good because he will say terrible stuff. Sandler, I have liked a lot of his movies. Some of his movies seem lazy, but actually, a good movie comedy needs to be loose, which kind of equals lazy. You need room to do fucked-up shit.
Nate Bargatze. Norm Macdonald was great. In his last couple of years, when he was dying, his skills declined a little bit.
I am just looking at lists here. I used to kind of like Louis C.K. Then he took the hit for coercing aspiring female comedians to stand there while he jerked off in front of them. But Chris Rock has been consistently good for years and years.
Oh, Fluffy, Gabriel Iglesias. I thought he was a hack based on nothing. Then I started listening to his stuff, especially his early stuff. Everybody’s early stuff is going to be more obvious and hackier than their more developed stuff, but as he has developed, he has become really funny.
That is plenty of people, but I do not know. Hold on. Now I have the Wikipedia list, and it is way too long to go through. I am missing a lot of people whose bits I am excited to hear when they come up on satellite radio. Who makes me fucking laugh all the time? I do not know. I am leaving a ton of people out.
Jacobsen: If you could resurrect a comic….
Rosner: Make a dead comic alive again?
Jacobsen:They are not unalive.
Rosner: I think it would be interesting to bring Richard Pryor back. Paul Mooney, too. Mooney was both a kind guy and incredibly angry. Paul Mooney was funny, angry, and scathing, but also rooted. He is somebody I knew a little bit personally, and he did not seem to be getting eaten up from inside by all the shit that made him legitimate. I mean, all the shit that legitimately should have made him angry, and did make him angry.
Tracy Morgan is great. Aparna Nancherla makes me smile a lot. Tig Notaro, I did not know she was funny until I started listening to her stuff, which makes sense. How do you know if somebody is funny until you listen to their shit?
Big Jay Oakerson is very filthy and always hits with his stuff.
Jacobsen: Were you ever a Bill Hicks fan?
Rosner: Not really. I kind of missed out on him. My comedy education, my stand-up education, is not as complete as it ought to be.
Jacobsen: Who would you consider to have the most complete comedy education?
Rosner: There is one guy who does a comedy report card as part of his stand-up routine. He does a report card every year. Who is that? I do not know.
But people who are in that world, if you are doing stand-up 350 nights a year, or a thousand gigs over a few years, you are going to know everybody.
Rich Vos, I like his stuff when it comes up on the radio. He is pretty filthy. Not filthy just for the sake of filthiness, but filthy because he can go places where most people do not go.
Some of the Wayanses, too. I do not know which Wayans I am listening to when their shit comes up on the radio. It is probably Marlon, maybe Damon. Unless there are details in the bit that locate it in time, I do not know whether the shit they are saying is from 2007 or from this year.
Though the further back you go, the less likely it is that it is going to be funny now, because the shit changes. If you came up with some brilliant way of presenting your shit, that shit might get tired out over the next 20 years. All this is kind of obvious.
Kumail Nanjiani, I like seeing him whenever he pops up in something. I do not know that his stand-up is exceptionally great. I do not know. That is about it. It is just me looking at this list of 700 people.
Jon Stewart is really good at what he does, which is not exactly stand-up. It is presenting what is going on in an entertaining way. John Oliver, same deal. Kimmel, same deal. Colbert, same freaking deal.
I found Carolla really smart and really fast. I have not listened to him much. He does not pop up that much on satellite radio, and I do not listen to podcasts, so I miss a lot of his shit. Plus, he has become, he would call it libertarian. I would call it hanging out with too many right-wingers.
Nikki Glaser, I like her. But if anybody can take right-wing bullshit and find the nuggets of reasonableness in it, it would be Carolla.
Okay, there you go. That is enough, right? Rachel Feinstein, I like her shit.
Tina Fey does not do much stand-up, though you could say Weekend Update on SNL was a kind of stand-up. And when she and Amy Poehler team up to do the Golden Globes or whatever, that is stand-up. Generally, I like her product. I like the shows she writes, produces, and appears in, except for The Four Seasons, one of her latest shows, which is weirdly comfortable. It seems targeted at people my age. I do not know. It is too cozy.
Rob Delaney, I like his stuff quite a bit. He is one of the people who inspired me to build my homestead on Twitter. If I could have seen the future, I would have built it on Instagram, because Twitter is kind of 1988 Detroit if Detroit had been taken over by Nazis.
There you go.
Jacobsen: If you could nominate a comedian as president, who would it be?
Rosner: Kimmel would do a good job as president. Colbert, Jon Stewart, any of the people who have to digest the daily news and present it. Not Gutfeld, obviously, but any of the mainstream people who got their jobs because of funniness and smartness would learn what it means.
More than half of being president is picking the right people to be around you. Any of the three people I just mentioned would talk to a bunch of experts. They would not go in fucking cold. They would find some kind of consensus on the best person for each job and test them out. If they turned out to suck, then they would get rid of them.
We have generally had presidencies that follow that model. Not every president has had the best objectives or criteria for picking the best people, which can lead to a bunch of shit happening that I do not like.
But Trump is singular as a president for picking people who suck but kiss ass. No president has gone as far with this as Trump has, and it is fucking terrible for the country.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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