10 Best Stand-up Comedians of All Time

I have been a fan of stand-up comedy since I was a little boy, watching a flickering black and white television when I was supposed to be asleep, but I never really thought to try to break down a list of the 10 Best Stand-up Comedians of All Time. The task required a ruthlessness with myself to keep it down to ten, diminishing my universe to the very essence of my history as a fan.

My earliest stand-up heroes were the easiest to recall. Jonathan Winters on television and Bill Cosby on my phonograph. My friends and I memorized all their bits and did them for the kids at school, but mostly for ourselves. But for a short kid, who was also usually the new kid, the power of making people laugh was my first brush with popularity. On any given Sunday night, somewhere in ninety minutes I would find Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin or Richard Pryor in their earliest incarnations, long before they became comedy icons, making it almost worth sitting through the endless parade of dancing bears, divas and acrobats that was the Ed Sullivan Show. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In introduced me to a young Lily Tomlin, who shared her thoughtful view of the world so hilariously. In the late seventies, Robin Williams fell to Earth in Mork and Mindy, but it was his stand-up that proved him to be the spiritual son of Jonathan Winters. Bill Hicks was sadly not as famous as he should have been, nor the star he would have been, but his brilliant political observations are still quoted by the pundits. In Ellen DeGeneres, in or out of the closet, has brought a whole new segment of society to comedy. Today, Eddie Izzard blazes bright in my very own funny, and ever-expanding, firmament.