The six comedians who gathered for The Hollywood Reporter’s first-ever Stand-Up Emmy Roundtable had lots to make amends for, from their early days on the circuit to their sophisticated impulses to make comedy out of tragedy.
Maybe fittingly, additionally they had little hassle taking playful jabs at one another.
The group — Mike Birbiglia, Alex Edelman, Jacqueline Novak, Jenny Slate, Taylor Tomlinson and Ramy Youssef — has loads of shared historical past, in any case. Actually, Birbiglia served as a producer on each Edelman and Novak’s specials, and virtually all of them have labored collectively in some capability: exhibits, excursions, showing on Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast or Tomlinson’s After Midnight late-night present.
“Jacqueline and Jenny and I used to do a bunch of exhibits at this place that not exists in New York,” recounts Birbiglia. “And I really feel a heat with you guys as a result of we used to do exhibits usually for, like, 10 folks.”
Provides Slate, of a locale that’s now, apparently, a Buffalo Alternate: “You’d hope for 10 folks. Until it was Eugene Mirman’s present.”
Novak piped in: “Yeah, which felt like The Tonight Present.”
Edelman, for his half, got here up across the similar time as Youssef, and his first common stage time was at Cake Store, a present that Novak ran with fellow comedian and frequent collaborator Kate Berlant. As for Youssef, “the primary ever one-person present I noticed was Jenny’s at UCB,” he tells the group. “I used to be in all probability 17 or 18, and it actually made me go, ‘I wish to do this.’”
Once more, that historical past allowed the sextet to be trustworthy about all kinds of subjects, together with their fears and their failures, with a minimum of one comedian getting visibly emotional throughout the hour. Watch the complete dialogue above.