A Piffany About Milestones, Millstones and Withstanding the Grind

Look. I’m as surprised as you are to see me publishing a comedy newsletter in 2025, but here we are.

NOTE: This edition of Piffany exists in a much longer form on my other newsletter, From The Comic’s Comic. But I wanted to give you an update on what I’m doing and thinking, so please do read on, thanks!

Between my various freelancing duties for The Daily Beast (where I cover Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and contribute essays from time to time) and for Decider (where I review new comedy specials/documentaries and interview comedians), and my decision to add a day job (GASP) to my schedule a little more than a year ago, I wasn’t sure how much more I had in the tank to offer in blog or newsletter form. If you’re wondering why the pace of my podcast episodes had slowed, that’s why. But the past year since Election Day 2024 has proven just how far comedy and comedians have come (for better and for worse) since I first started writing about them, and reminded us just how important it is for them to be held to account as much as the comedy industry, or any industry, should be.

This time of year always finds me checking myself, too. What am I doing well? What could I be doing better?

And I’m amazed at how long I’ve been at this. Thirty-two years in professional journalism. Twenty-nine years since I got onstage as a professional comedian; 27 since I blogged about the Seattle International Comedy Competition for my newspaper; 24 since I first interviewed Marc Maron; 20 since I landed my first weekly newspaper column in Boston about comedy, and convinced the newspaper to let me complement it with a dedicated section on the website; 18 since I moved to New York City and launched The Comic’s Comic; 10 since I started my podcast, Last Things First; also a decade since I began reviewing specials for Decider; seven years since I took over the comedy listings for The New York Times; and two years since I ditched Substack and migrated my newsletter here on WordPress as From The Comic’s Comic (I also sometimes write about non-comedy things on Piffany, which is now on Buttondown).

And yet, there’s still a role for me to play now. Perhaps now more than ever.

You might not need me to keep tabs on the mediocre-right comedy bullies. We’ve not only got Seth Simons punishing himself by listening/watching it all and transcribing the worst bits in his Humorism newsletter; we’ve also got YouTubers such as American Redact or The Elephant Graveyard racking up hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of views shining a harsh light upon the dim bulbs of stand-up.

Then you’ve got whatever the mainstream press thinks they’re doing with stories like this recap of a recent stand-up show at the Laugh Factory?!? Bless Jamie Masada for still finding ways to lure the press into his club and create publicity. This night with Matt Rife and his buddies making fun of Sydney Sweeney may age about as well as the night Chris D’Elia invited a teenaged Justin Bieber onstage to roast him. Ahem. But still, this would be shockingly bad for my colleagues in entertainment journalism, if only the work in recent years by my colleagues in political, business and tech journalism wasn’t so horrific by comparison.

The temptations of access journalism, the proximity to fame, power and money, is only becoming more blurry with the rise of TikTok influencers and AI slop to go along with the rich and powerful doing their damndest to reinforce their positions through global fascism and/or feudalism. Which isn’t funny at all, sadly. So what should I do now? What can I do now? I can do the best I can with the platform I have.

So I’m going to pop in here whenever I have an idea I think is worth sharing with the group! Hopefully soon!

Read the rest of this dispatch, and subscribe for comedy news specifically, on From The Comic’s Comic.