Billboard’s Top 15 Musical Comedians Right Now (Critic’s Picks)

One of the lodestars of comedy in the digital age — set to music or otherwise — Burnham grew up alongside and inside YouTube, where he began posting songs in 2006 at age 16. The duality of IRL and online existence is one of the subjects of his 2021 pandemic-isolation special Inside, in which he builds videos inside videos, songs within songs, and worlds within worlds. A Grammy, Emmy and Peabody award winner, Inside layered jokes and commentary — political, philosophical, and existential — in ways that repaid repeated views, with the self-reflexive byplay reaching a peak in the song “How the World Works” when Burnham silenced Socko, a puppet who lives on his hand and whose Marxist critique of, well, everything had reminded Burnham of his own privilege.

A prolific director, writer, and actor, Burnham has been silent since the 2021 release of Inside, except for an outtakes expansion of the special and album. But devoted fans spotted a conspicuously 6’5” masked figure in HBO’s Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show last year. Known in the show as Anonymous, he offered support to Carmichael while giving the side-eye to the soul-sucking reality genre. In a typical Burnham world-building touch, the black goggles that Anonymous wore throughout were self-reflexively branded with a logo reading “ANON.”

In another era, de Guzman — whose sweet face provides cover for edge-skirting comic songs about racial stereotypes (“Asian Guys Can Smash”), oral sex at Christmas (deck the halls with “fa-la-latio”) and ableism (“Amputee Girlfriend”) — would be several seasons into a network sitcom based on his life story. Born in the Philippines, he and his family moved to the United States when he was a year old. “Just an ambitious little baby . . . tired of working in the factory,” he jokes in his special I’m Your Son, Papa. His father and brother are dentists; he graduated from the University of California, Davis and started teaching music to third graders.

A comedy class led to open mic nights, and he’s been mixing music and stand-up for over a decade. His stand-up leans to classic joke-topper-capper structures, but his punchlines land, and his routines build to songs that work the same way — a bit about political division leads to a tune about uniting in the bedroom, called “She’s a Conservative in The Streets, A Liberal in the Sheets.” “I lean to left, she leans to the right,” he sings as he strums an R&B melody on his acoustic guitar. “Let’s get together and f–k all night.”

Trained as a musician — she graduated from the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins with a degree in music composition in 2016 — D’Uva creates her own backing tracks for pieces that are less songs than mini-musicals in which she plays all the characters. “After college I started doing improv and standup,” she says. “I had an idea to do a sketch, but I wasn’t in a sketch group, so I started doing everything myself.”

Her work can be absurdist, associative, and shape shifting — she cites Bjork as an inspiration (“every song is like an opera”) — often rooted in childhood, like a piece that unpacks gender roles while recounting her memories of playing a cow in a kindergarten nativity play or “Nanny Franny,” a Mary Poppins fantasy based on her own day job. But after losing her father to Covid in the pandemic, D’Uva says she wasn’t sure she remembered how to be funny anymore, and the result was an Off Broadway show at Playwrights Horizons called This Is My Favorite Song that explored how grief transformed her relationship to comedy.

“I’m still discovering that,” she says. “But now my work is a lot more autobiographical.”

Able to swing from intimate to over-the-top in a single breath, Everett counts among her many superpowers an effortless ability to erase distinctions: alt and mainstream, personal and power ballad, vulnerability and hilarity. How great is her range? She may be the only person to have shared stages with Broadway legend Patti LuPone (who invited her to a Carnegie Hall show to duet on “Me and Bobby McGee”) and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz (who plays bass in Everett’s frequently filthy and always rocking band the Tender Moments and co-produced 2013’s Pound It).

Her too-good-for-this-world HBO dramedy Somebody Somewhere — set in Manhattan, Kansas, where she grew up — wrapped last year after three seasons of exploring the joys and sorrows of small-town life, found family, and the way music works in everyday life, with Everett’s character finding her power performing songs by Peter Gabriel and Miley Cyrus at an LGBTQ gathering in a church. She’s now on tour with Tender Moments, delivering the gospel of “What I Gotta Do (To Get That Dick in My Mouth),” “Titties” (no explanation needed), and “Pussy Power” (ditto).

Gordon specializes in millennial song parodies: nü metal (as Stool Sample, he sings “Crawl to Me” seated on a toilet much smaller than the one Limp Bizkit once took on tour), emo (as Our Wounded Courtship he performs “My Life [Is the Worst Life Ever]” complete with guyliner, green hair and fingerless gloves), and early-’00s EDM. (His Eurodisco spoof as DJ Crazy Times, “Planet of the Bass,” was so spot-on that the song debuted at No. 46 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart in 2023, and his character ended up on The Simpsons.) His albums express nostalgia for old media: the first, Kyle Gordon Is Great, was set up as a spin through the radio dial, and the recent follow-up, Kyle Gordon Is Wonderful, takes the form of a VH1 countdown.

At his best, he’s unshakably committed to the bit — he recently followed a morning TV performance of the Mumford/fun send-up “We Will Never Die” with an in-character interview as Kody Redwing that was all-too believable: “You probably remember me from season 11 of American Idol… I was sort of infamous — I was the guy who did five different versions of ‘Hallelujah.’” He recently teamed up with the trio OCT (see below) for a summer-jam about middle-aged men behaving badly in “Myrtle Beach”: “Butt naked in the swim-up bar! Now we’re banned from the swim-up bar.”

Though Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! made him an alt-comedy legend, Heidecker has always been more a conceptualist than a comedian — so much so that his stand-up album An Evening With Tim Heidecker is a withering vivisection of crowd-work and observational comedy, with the only remotely straightforwardly funny moments saved for the songs he performs: two from 2013’s Urinal Street Station, an entire album of faux-‘70s skunk-rock tunes about drinking urine, and one from 2017’s Too Dumb For Suicide, his sadly once-again-relevant album of songs about Donald Trump’s toxicity.

For the past few years, though, his concept has been real songs, not jokes, with his Very Good Band opening shows for Waxahatchee and making a very good album of cosmic American music, Slipping Away. But perhaps sensing that Trump’s return demanded some comic relief, he told Rolling Stone last year that the time had come to remind people that he still loves the “overtly funny,” and he’s followed through with the munchie-fueled “I’m Hungry,” a slice of harmony-laden pop recorded with indie duo the Lemon Twigs, which would have been at home on one of the crackpot late-’70s Beach Boys albums.

Lean and laid back — all the way back — Jay has made a specialty of Auto-Tuned crowd work that is a pure joy to watch. Mic in hand, with the digital enhancement “set all the way to Travis Scott” and his accompanist vamping hushed R&B chords, he works his way through the audience, poking at the usual topics (relationship status, jobs, clothes) in an Auto-Tuned falsetto that traces boudoir-ready melody lines while he prods his subjects to sing their responses. Which they often do — his TikTok sensation “Just Friends?” (in which a guy named Ethan nails his own Auto-Tuned replies) has been viewed more than 129 million times, so the crowds now don’t just know what to expect, they show up for it.

But with Jay packing 1200-capacity theaters (often for multiple nights), they also show up for his songs. Topics include difficult couple conversations (“What Are We”), moving in together (“Home Intruder”), and latent homosexual desires (“Bro”). Meanwhile, the tone ranges from the calculatedly outrageous “Fuck Right Now,” a yolo-themed plea for everyone to smash as often as possible, to the actually thoughtful “The Other Side” — which dares to ask, “Is being single really that brave, or is loving someone really what makes you afraid?” amidst jokes about the tyranny of dating choices, and noticing that the super-hot drunk girl you’re coming onto is missing a tooth.

A true renaissance man, Lane’s recent Hulu hour The Al Dente Special was accompanied by a cookbook, Your Pasta Sucks. And though he no longer spotlights singing in his standup, there may not be a better pure vocalist on this list. A trained opera singer with a six octave range when his voice is rested (“I used to have whistle tones like Mariah Carey — they popped out of nowhere — but when you’re touring they come few and far between”), Lane once opened his sets warbling the Puccini soprano aria “O mio babbino caro” (“Oh my dear Papa”), bowed, then said, “That is a true story of how I came out to my dad.”

He limits his crowd work to the yearly Q&A sessions that form his must-see Advice specials, and his occasional singing has racked up big numbers in social media clips. Those have included a towering-inferno impression of Christina Aguilera’s melisma (“what I love about her is that she adds words to words”), the behavior that clued his mom into his sexual orientation (serenading the birds in their backyard like Sleeping Beauty), and an improv’d song that explained the polymorphous flexibility of being “vers”: “When two men love each other . . . or just know each other . . . or don’t even know each other . . .”

You may know Lindhome as one half of Garfunkel and Oates, the comedy-music duo that she and Kate Matucci began in 2007 and spun out into three albums, one EP, and one season of an IFC series that surrounded their songs with sitcom plots that did for women’s conversations (and dissatisfactions) what Curb Your Enthusiasm did for grumpy old men. Or you may know her as one half of the Bellacourt Sisters, the turn-of-the-20th-century siblings that she and Natasha Leggaro played in the Kardashian-spoofing Comedy Central series Another Period.

Or perhaps you know her from one of the clothing-optional film roles she begs her two-year-old son not to search for online in the recent lullabye “Don’t Google Mommy”: “Mommy’s an actress, and sometimes she acts in scenes that are naughty/ And now everyone in Gymboree can see your mommy’s body.” “Don’t Google Mommmy” will be on Lindhome’s first solo full-length, No Worries if Not, in March, alongside songs from Dead Inside, her one-woman musical about the decade she spent on the road to motherhood, including the rock-me-gently bedroom come-on “Middle Age Love”: “You wear a sleep apnea machine, I’m early menopause — let’s f–k.” 

This trio specializes in songs that push silliness up the asymptote towards the infinite: “Don’t Touch My Clogs” is an epic story that spans generations without ever straying from the instructions of the title; “Dim Sum Paradise” is the tale of a bus trip to Chinatown to find the Shangri-La where your “taste buds burst like a distant star”; “(So Sick Of) Giving You Up” is a just-can’t-quit-you bop about trying to stop Juuling; “Half Horse Half Man” is a would-be Eurovision contender about not being man enough (literally) to make a relationship work.

Each one is hooked to a track that turns the vulnerabilities and synth-cold loneliness of ‘80s rainbow pop inside out and accompanied by a video overstuffed with ridiculous imagery (to call these videos reminiscent of the Lonely Island is to understate the case). OCT (stands for On Company Time) has recently teamed up with Kyle Gordon for a summer banger about divorced dads gone wild, “Myrtle Beach”: “Blackjack at 3 p.m! We’re gonna make mistakes! Big Gulps every meal — free refill, that’s a hell of a deal.”

A mild-mannered absurdist, Platt promises “jokes and songs and characters and stuff,” all of which he delivers with charming command from somewhere way out in left field. His songs — sometimes just snatches of melody anchoring a single head scratching thought or punchline — are rooted in the natural-born surrealism of childhood, living in the vast and untamed space between Syd Barret and Phoebe Buffay. So it makes sense that he’s contributed a song to Sesame Street, the salad roll call “V is Vegetable” (“Broccoli and cauliflower, your tops look just like little clouds! Imagine veggies flying in the air!”).

But along with a brief goof about spreading mustard on a cucumber and a jingle celebrating the ability of pencils to both write and erase, his recent debut album, Teeth Like Beak, includes the more fully developed “God Is Real,” a satire that jauntily explores the “fantasy that we believe a good God pulls the strings” when we know “the horror that faith in God doth brings” but also professes a real faith complicated by the Almighty’s toxic masculinity: “If he was she and she was queer, we wouldn’t need this song.” It’s a complex and hilarious must-hear that makes you want to see what Platt would do with a Broadway stage and an unlimited budget.

Rebillet is more an improvisational producer than an improv comic. Known as Loop Daddy, he shines in let-him-cook livestreams which find him building ready-for-the-floor layers of beats and keyboard runs into trancey funk, bluesy r&b, electro-house, or spaced-out hip-hop tracks and then ranting, rapping or singing on top of the results. Collaborations with Flying Lotus, Erykah Badu, and Elle King bear out his musical bona fides, as does the recent gospel-and-funk-soaked single “Vibes Alright.” But if you’re looking for a laugh, dial up his late-capitalism tirade “Fuck You Boss I’m Late,” as some 33 million Tik-Tok viewers already have, or head to your DSP for “Look at That Ass” or “Work That Ass for Daddy,” both of which hover just above (or is that below?) the parody line.

Rogers co-hosts the “Las Culturistas” podcast with Bowen Yang, a dryly intoxicating gabfest that goes down like a glitter-spiked martini. But — move over, Mariah — since 2017 he’s also been the self-proclaimed Prince of Christmas, mixing the committed-to-the-bit deadpan outrageousness of Sandra Bernhard with the over-the-top diva stylings of the Queen of Christmas herself and making the Yuletide very gay with such songs as “Lube for Christmas” (Santa needs a way to fit all those presents in the sleigh), “Hottest Female Up in Whoville” (Martha May Whovier is done with the Grinch and coming for your man), and “Also It’s Christmas” (“It’s been months, now I’m finally ready to get back in the game/To connect in a dark corner and then forget your name”).

His pop-star-trapped-in-snow-globe concept started with shows at Joe’s Pub in New York City and has blossomed into a Showtime special and album, Have You Heard It’s Christmas?, as well as seasonal tours that, this year, will see him ringing in the holidays at Manhattan’s 3000-capacity Terminal 5. “You know how they say in musicals when you can no longer speak you have to sing? That’s my reality,” Rogers says. “I’ve always been someone who will just break out into song. I don’t know what that is. Probably a deep, deep gayness.”

Is he a comedian? A musician? A bricolage artiste? His comedy specials and music are so radically recombinant it’s perhaps better to let Watts define himself: “An eccentric, an artist, a connoisseur of weed and Robitussin and old James Bond flicks. A performer who created a constantly changing melange of music and improv and technology and just plain f–king around that’s so abnormal I still have no idea what exactly it is.” That’s how he puts it in his 2023 autobiography, Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again. Give Watts — who partnered with Billboard and Amazon for his MuSick performance at Coachella this year — your attention and he will not simply make you laugh, he will blow your mind.

His songs work like magic tricks as he piles up human-beatbox loops, electronics, and Monty Python-esque surrealism, creating them out of thin air. And as if classics like “Fuck Shit Stack” (which brings George Carlin’s seven dirty words into the hip-hop era) weren’t enough, he’s equally capable of straight-up dancefloor fillers, as his recent EP with electronic provocateurs Capyac proves. Not convinced of the sprawl of his genius? Dial up his cover of “Brownsville Girl” and listen to him recast Bob Dylan as a dancehall reggae and drum-n-bass songwriter.

Keyboardist Tom McGovern describes the Wolves as a rock band “trying to write the best songs we can about the dumbest things we can.” True enough, though he, guitarist Ethan Edenburg, and drummer Eric Jackowitz push those dumb things to a truly epic scale. In the bro-country stomper “Ricky,” a wage slave tries to lasso some cowboy freedom by buying the horse in the song’s title, but he’s in over his head (“Ricky is looking hungry but I don’t know what he eats/ So I make him ravioli and I pray he goes to sleep”). The yacht rocker “Olivia” is about falling for the 200-year-old ghost who haunts your apartment (“she says I kiss better than Thomas Edison”).

Both songs captivate in their gleefully absurdist videos, and both pile up more plot twists than your average Netflix comedy: Ricky’s owner ends up punching a mounted policeman and goes to jail; Olivia’s boyfriend has to feed her neighborhood puppies to maintain her corporal form. All of which has won this Los Angeles trio an audience so dedicated it pelts the band with stuffed dogs during the sacrificial climax of “Olivia.” “At the end of the night we’ve got 50 stuffed animals,” says Jackowitz. “We look like Beanie Baby hoarders.”