Comedy Under Quarantine, Five Months In

Back in April, when most of the world had been in lockdown for about a month, we asked Roy Wood Jr. and Maria Bamford what it was like to try to perform comedy. At the time, the outlook for comedy (and the world) was uncertain and not especially hopeful.

Four months later, Jesse David Fox checks in with five stand-ups to see how they’ve adapted, and how comedy has changed.

Nikki Glaser (social media @NikkiGlaser) was all set to start her first theater stand-up tour when COVID-19 hit, and she decided to go back home to St. Louis to be with her parents for a week or two. Five months later, she’s still there, and wondering if stand-up will ever really return.  

Los Angeles-based comedian Jenny Yang (@JennyYangTV) has taken Zoom comedy performances to a whole new level by hosting shows on everyone’s favorite social simulation video game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

On July 3rd, Nore Davis (@NoreDavis) released his latest comedy album, Live from the Comedy Trap House, four days after taping it in front of an audience over Zoom. The album is the first of its kind, recorded in quarantine about quarantine.

A writer on “CONAN,” Laurie Kilmartin (@anylaurie16) may be best known for tweeting and then filming a special of jokes about her father dying of cancer in 2014. She then wrote a book about the grieving process, Dead People Suck. So it may not have been too surprising that when her mother got COVID-19 early this summer, her first instinct was to tweet about it.

Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) was in Europe when things started shutting down, working on a special in which he does a set of comedy completely about the country he’s performing in. He was only able to finish two countries in time - Canada and Spain. That special, The Pale Tourist, came out on July 24 on Amazon Prime. Now back in the U.S., Jim has tried performing shows at drive-ins, with the audience inside their cars. It’s as surreal as it sounds. 

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