Podcasts About Stand-Up Comedy: A Not-Entirely-Comprehensive Guide

Best for: Hearing jokes while they're still under construction

Mike Birbiglia's premise is almost suspiciously well suited to comedy nerds: bring in another comedian or creator and actually work through unfinished ideas together.

That means conversations regularly get past career-interview territory and into why a joke works, where a story should go, what needs to be cut, and how a comedian finds the version of an idea that's actually worth performing.

The show continues to publish regularly in 2026. If you'd like to hear the sausage being made, except the sausage is a joke someone may eventually tell to 2,000 people, start here.

Best for: Going very, very deep on the craft

Stuart Goldsmith has been doing this long enough to have built an enormous archive of conversations with comedians about how they actually do comedy.

And that's the important part: not merely how somebody got famous, but how they write, perform, develop material, handle creative problems, and cope with the deeply sensible career decision of repeatedly asking strangers to judge them.

The archive has passed 500 episodes and the podcast is still publishing in 2026. This may be the closest thing on this list to an oral encyclopedia of modern stand-up.

Best for: Aspiring comics who want practical advice

Joel Byars' Hot Breath! is much more explicitly instructional than the average comedy interview podcast.

The focus is on the craft: joke writing, crowd work, performing, developing material, and learning how working comics approach the job. Its large archive contains interviews, lessons, and discussions specifically intended to help people get better at stand-up.

The show is still publishing in 2026, including new and archival material. Even if you never intend to perform, there's something fascinating about realizing just how much engineering can go into something that's supposed to sound spontaneous.

Best for: Taking a joke apart to see what's inside

Good One began with an almost perfect concept: take a joke and have the person who created it explain how it came together.

Hosted by Vulture's Jesse David Fox, the show has evolved into a somewhat broader interview series about comedy and the creative process, so not every current episode is specifically about stand-up. But its archive remains full of exactly the kind of obsessive joke analysis we're looking for here.

The podcast continues to publish in 2026. If you've ever heard a great stand-up bit and immediately wanted someone to explain why it worked, Good One understands you.

Best for: What being a working stand-up actually feels like

Jackie Kashian and Laurie Kilmartin have been doing stand-up for decades, and their conversations offer something different from a traditional interview show.

There's no weekly guest arriving to promote a special. Instead, you get two veteran headliners talking about comedy from inside the profession: gigs, other comics, audiences, material, booking, career weirdness, and whatever else comes with continuing to make a living onstage.

The show launched in 2016 and is still publishing weekly in 2026. It's less “Introduction to Stand-Up Comedy” and more “you have somehow been given a seat at the comics' table.”

Best for: Shop talk from working comedians

Brian Scott McFadden and Dustin Chafin host this newer show about the ongoing process of being a comedian: writing jokes, performing them, figuring out why they failed, and then doing the entire thing again.

It mixes general conversation with real stand-up shop talk, including the mechanics of writing and live performance. The show is publishing in 2026.

It feels closer to hanging around with comics after a show than listening to a formal masterclass, which is part of the appeal.

Best for: People who want to study joke mechanics

This is one of the more literal “how does funny work?” shows on the list.

Comedian and author Mike Lukas and co-host Chris Stiffler use stand-up examples to explore how jokes are constructed. Episodes compare different generations and styles of comics while digging into setups, punchlines, tags, heightening, act-outs, persona, and other mechanics.

Good choice if you're the sort of person who hears a punchline and wants to diagram it. You know who you are.

Best for: Joke writing and workshopping

Michael Halcomb's podcast spends a lot of time in the weeds of writing comedy: premises, punchlines, jokes that aren't working yet, performance, psychology, and the process of turning an idea into material.

Episodes regularly workshop jokes and talk through the mechanics of making them function. The show is actively publishing in 2026.

This is another one that leans toward comics and aspiring comics, but comedy fans who enjoy the mechanics of the form should find plenty to chew on.

Best for: Understanding how anyone gets paid for this

Stand-up is an art. Unfortunately, comedians also require food and housing.

Deadline's Comedy Means Business looks at the industry behind comedy: building careers, touring, producing, representation, audience building, and the people working behind the scenes. The show explicitly puts particular emphasis on stand-up while also venturing into television and film comedy.

It launched in 2025 and continues to publish in 2026. If the other shows explain how a comedian builds an hour, this one is more interested in how someone builds a career.

Best for: Keeping up with the actual comedy ecosystem

Jake Kroeger's Comedy Bureau has long covered live comedy, particularly independent and alternative scenes, and the Field Report turns that perspective into a podcast.

Episodes cover comedians, festivals, specials, production, venues, and the odd infrastructure surrounding comedy as an actual living ecosystem. In 2026, the show has covered topics including self-producing a comedy special, building comedy festivals, opening a new club, and making difficult personal material work onstage.

It's broader than stand-up alone, but it's one of the better options for understanding the world stand-up exists inside.

Best for: Following stand-up like it's a sports league

Most comedy podcasts assume you want two funny people having a conversation. Daily Comedy News assumes you would instead like someone to cover comedy as a beat.

Johnny Mac follows specials, tours, comedians, late night, and the business surrounding them, with new episodes arriving frequently. The show's own description frames comedy as an industry worth covering in much the same way reporters cover other entertainment businesses.

If you routinely know who's releasing a new hour before your friends do, congratulations: we found your morning news program.

Best for: Remembering that every comedian was once terrible at this

Karim Kanji's My First Joke starts near the beginning.

Guests talk about getting into stand-up, their first time onstage, bombing, finding their style, and learning how to function in different comedy scenes.

There's something reassuring about hearing polished comedians discuss a period when they did not yet know what they were doing.

Best for: Comedy-history rabbit holes

Rather than interviewing whoever currently has a special to promote, Why Are You Laughing? takes topics from comedy history and pulls them apart.

Episodes have covered individual comics, specials, controversies, eras, and broader storylines across stand-up. The show describes itself as breaking down the history of comedy and stand-up one career, special, controversy, and storyline at a time.

Its public feed includes episodes through 2026. We would treat it as a currently available show without promising a particular release cadence.

Best for: Comedy-club stories

Produced around New York's The Stand, 10 for 10 talks to comedians about the club, their development, and the larger experience of becoming a working stand-up.

Recent episodes have gotten into stage fear, bombing, building an act, and how the comedy business has changed over time.

It's club-centric by design, which also gives it a perspective a lot of comedian-interview podcasts don't have.

Best for: A produced history of the form

Wayne Federman and Andrew Steven's The History of Standup is exactly what the title promises: a produced history of the form, exploring the people, eras, rooms, and scenes that shaped stand-up comedy.

The second season focuses particularly on the places where stand-up developed, including San Francisco's Holy City Zoo. The series is no longer active, but its two-season, 22-episode archive remains one of the easiest recommendations on this entire list.

If you only listen to one discontinued podcast about stand-up, make it this one.

Best for: Deep dives into the science and craft of stand-up

Let's Talk About Sets! described itself as a podcast about the “science” and craft of stand-up, and that is pretty much exactly what it delivered.

Hosts Jeff McBride and Harrison Tweed took individual concepts — joke writing, pain, morality, audience relationships, and more — and explored them using conversations with comics and examples from actual stand-up.

The show ran through 2020 and left behind 58 episodes. The archive includes guests such as Mark Normand, Roy Wood Jr., Jay Jurden, and others, with episodes that dig surprisingly deep into how comedy functions.

The Mark Normand episode on joke writing alone is worth excavating from the archive.