The six comedians who gathered for The Hollywood Reporter’s first-ever Stand-Up Emmy Roundtable had plenty to catch up on, from their early days on the circuit to their complicated impulses to make comedy out of tragedy.
Perhaps fittingly, they also had little trouble taking playful jabs at each other.
The group — Mike Birbiglia, Alex Edelman, Jacqueline Novak, Jenny Slate, Taylor Tomlinson and Ramy Youssef — has plenty of shared history, after all. In fact, Birbiglia served as a producer on both Edelman and Novak’s specials, and almost all of them have worked together in some capacity: shows, tours, appearing on Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast or Tomlinson’s After Midnight late-night show.
“Jacqueline and Jenny and I used to do a bunch of shows at this place that no longer exists in New York,” recounts Birbiglia. “And I feel a warmth with you guys because we used to do shows often for, like, 10 people.”
Adds Slate, of a locale that’s now, apparently, a Buffalo Exchange: “You’d hope for 10 people. Unless it was Eugene Mirman’s show.”
Novak piped in: “Yeah, which felt like The Tonight Show.”
Edelman, for his part, came up around the same time as Youssef, and his first regular stage time was at Cake Shop, a show that Novak ran with fellow comic and frequent collaborator Kate Berlant. As for Youssef, “the first ever one-person show I saw was Jenny’s at UCB,” he tells the group. “I was probably 17 or 18, and it literally made me go, ‘I want to do that.’”
Again, that history allowed the sextet to be honest about all sorts of topics, including their fears and their failures, with at least one comic getting visibly emotional during the hour. Watch the full discussion above.
