Whats your take on stand up comedy?

It's a rare opinion, but I think the best medium for truly well-done comedy...

Is puns.

its harder than it looks

I like the kind that is either non stop puns or long weird/funny stories that have lots of setup for relatively fewer, but larger, payoffs.

I love it. When the comedian gets the room going it is just incredible. I like to do at least three shows a year.

I enjoy watching it on YouTube. I’m afraid I’d laugh wrong in public so I’ve never been.

As I mature, I find myself thinking very lowly of standup in general despite watching a lot of it when I was an edgy 18/19 year old. When I try to get back into it now I just see the various ethical problems with their jokes and that makes it not funny for me.

White standup comics get free reign to drop racist dog whistles and if you criticize them on it they get all snippy with you. The most popular "genre" of white stand up comedy still seems to be "I went to a [insert culture here] restaurant and here are my disrespectful and stereotype enforcing hijinks" or even "I went to [insert COUNTRY here] and will now proceed to joke about how their culture is different from us." I can only hope the whole thing is made up and they're not that atrocious in real life, though the vast majority of service staff seem to have stories about famous comics treating them like shit so I wouldn't be surprised.

Even a lot of ethnic standup comics portray themselves as the victims of racism in one joke but then have no problems using stereotypes of another ethnicity in the very next joke.

Also standup definitely seems to have an air of being attended by older generations who find insulting the younger generations funny. Things like participation trophies (which was a boomer idea by the way, the kids aren't planning school competitions or buying the prizes) or terms like "snowflake" seems to have gotten into boomer rethoric partly because of standup. Reactionary takes about progressive social movements like veganism or car-free living are also the norm because I assume they know most of the people who watch them are the type to get mad at how other people choose to live their lives. Standup in general seems to have a "let's make fun of anything people are doing that's different from how it was before because we don't want to do it that way and need validation that we're not assholes on the wrong side of history" attitude. Or they'll just make fun of random people living their lives, I remember watching a comic on YouTube doing a whole segment making fun of people who swim laps in hotel pools because it annoys him, like bro mind your own damn business.

Occasionally a comic will try to earn brownie points by saying the most superficial shit about a major societal problem and then act like they singlehandedly solved it. Bonus points if they're talking about another country's problems which the West fucking caused.

I'm not saying all standup is like this or all standup comics are racist or reactionary, but I am saying there are very few long running standup shows/podcasts with none of these problems.

My take?

Uhhhhh funny person get on stage, funny person make joke, me laugh.

Try going outside once in a while.

it's really boring to me with very few exceptions. i get depressed when i go to someone's house and they're watching it because it means nobody will be talking to each other they'll be parasocializing with the tv together instead

When the content and delivery is good, what's not to like?

Love it. It's one of my favourite forms of entertainment and pretty much the only thing I'll go see live these days. Been a fan since the early eighties.

I was more into them when I was younger. I think my high school friend forcing me to watch a new one every single time I visited made me not care for them anymore. Every now and then I'll remember a joke from Brian Regan or one of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour guys I liked, but that's it.

Can be kind of mean spirited

Don't know if I can take it sitting down.

Depends heavily on the comedy for me. I have an entire folder of stand up specials, and I really enjoy a lot of it, but I lean heavily away from political and broad social commentary, and toward personal/anecdotal and more nuanced stuff.

I want my comedy to be silly, not offensive. If you are going to be making racial/minority stereotype jokes, they better be about your own experience as that race or minority. That’s the one and only way they even could be funny (tho most still aren’t). If you are going to punch down or across, not interested. If you hit yourself, or punch up and get a fist full of shit for doing it, it might be worth watching!

There’s a HUGE amount of really shit standup out there, though. Punching down, shock comedy (especially shit like rape jokes, sexism, etc), that sort of thing. It’s a shame really because you have to wade through it to find good stuff. There’s also an absolutely absurd amount of totally vapid brainrot comedy that could also go extinct, imo, but at least it’s not actively harming anyone, I guess.

Always the least funny guy showing you a standup comedy clip on YT- maybe it's something that you have to see in person because I've never seen a special that made me forget the time I lost watching the next big sex pest fail to leave a positive impression on anyone in the crowd who won't follow them through their "career" until they capitulate to the right to regain a shred of notoriety

I am a little out of the scope as to who's who in today's stand-up comedy. I listen to Sirius XM channels of comedy stations based on a comic's arrangement.

Listening to stand up comedy at all, it's a little relieving. It does make you think but laugh too.

My take on stand up comedy is to sit down and cry.