The old comedy ways are dead. The waning relevance of longstanding career springboards such as HBO, Comedy Central, and late-night TV means there are fewer pathways than ever for emerging comics to find new audiences. In their place is the attention economy, a dystopian marketplace of slop merchants, brain-rot peddlers, AI scrapyards, and extortionate big-box streaming services with junk on the shelves, all haggling for your time and money. Cutting through all that noise to find the good stuff can feel endlessly overwhelming, so we have done the work for you with 2025’s list of Comedians You Should and Will Know.
