Tig Notaro
June 4 at The Egg in Albany
Tig Notaro’s comedy works by subtraction. Where many comics escalate toward chaos, Notaro deadpans her way into it, letting long pauses, strange observations, and microscopic shifts in tone do the heavy lifting. That understated style has made her one of the most influential stand-ups of the last decade, equally at home in memoir, television, podcasting, and deeply uncomfortable silence. At The Egg. This show is sold out.
Patton Oswalt
June 25 at Tarrytown Music Hall
Somewhere between comic-book scholarship, middle-aged panic, and doomscroll-induced existential collapse sits the comedy of Patton Oswalt. Few stand-ups can move as fluidly between pop culture and grief, politics and nerd minutiae, without sounding like they’re delivering a TED Talk. His “Effervescent” tour finds the Emmy- and Grammy-winning comic wrestling with aging, anxiety, and the psychic wear-and-tear of modern life. At Tarrytown Music Hall.
James Austin Johnson
June 27 at Bard’s Spiegeltent
Few comedians working right now understand the musicality of speech quite like James Austin Johnson. Best known for his eerily elastic Donald Trump impression on “Saturday Night Live,” Johnson approaches voices less as caricature than full psychological possession. His stand-up folds those shape-shifting abilities into sharp observational comedy and oddball digressions that can veer from political absurdity to hyper-specific Americana in seconds. At Bard’s Spiegeltent.
“Grey Arias”
July 24 at Bard’s Spiegeltent
Adrienne Truscott has spent years detonating the boundary between comedy, cabaret, performance art, and political provocation. Best known as one half of the anarchic burlesque duo the Wau Wau Sisters, Truscott approaches live performance with equal parts intellectual rigor and glorious absurdity. “Grey Arias” continues that sensibility, blending satire, music, and cultural critique into something deliberately difficult to categorize with drag artist Le Gateau Chocolat. At Bard’s Spiegeltent.
Robby Hoffman
July 24 at Mass MoCA in North Adams
Every Robby Hoffman set feels faintly combustible. The Montreal-born comic barrels through stories about religion, class, family, and sexuality with the rhythm of someone daring the audience to keep up. Raised in a Hasidic Jewish household and blessed with a voice that sounds perpetually midway through an argument, Hoffman has become one of comedy’s great chaos agents—equal parts deeply cerebral and aggressively confrontational. At Mass MoCA.
Jeff Dunham and Gabriel Iglesias
August 8 at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts
Arena comedy doesn’t get much bigger—or stranger—than this pairing. Gabriel Iglesias’s buoyant storytelling and cartoonish vocal dexterity collide with Jeff Dunham’s aggressively old-school ventriloquist spectacle for a night built around maximal crowd appeal. Iglesias finds humor in family life, food, and cultural misunderstandings with an affable looseness, while Dunham’s rapid-fire character work turns ventriloquism into something closer to insult comedy and theatrical performance. At Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.
Ilana Glazer
August 11 at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
Ilana Glazer’s comedy thrives in the space between millennial burnout, political anxiety, and total absurdity. Best known as the co-creator and star of “Broad City,” Glazer helped define a generation of comedy that treated chaos not as a punchline but as a lifestyle. Their stand-up carries that same loose, hyper-verbal energy, mixing cultural critique with stories that can pivot from deeply personal to gloriously unhinged in a single bit. At Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.
Please Don’t Destroy Live
August 22 at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
Please Don’t Destroy emerged from the internet-comedy ecosystem with sketches that feel less written than spiralingly detonated. The trio—Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy—built a devoted following through densely layered videos that weaponize awkwardness, escalation, and the energy of friends making each other laugh. Though no longer working together as an official “Saturday Night Live” unit, their sensibility still carries the show’s anarchic late-night spirit: hyper-verbal, deeply online, and committed to pushing dumb premises to gloriously unreasonable extremes. At Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.
Jay Jurden
August 29 at Mass MoCA in North Adams
There’s a velvet smoothness to Jay Jurden’s delivery that makes his sharpest jokes land half a beat late. He specializes in observational material that sneaks up on audiences—slipping from dating, etiquette, and identity into stealth cultural critique without changing tone. A writer for “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” Jurden belongs to a generation of stand-ups whose comedy feels shaped as much by internet discourse as traditional club work. At Mass MoCA.
David Nihill
September 20 at Assembly in Kingston
Few things are funnier than watching Americans explained back to themselves by an Irishman. David Nihill’s comedy turns cultural confusion, travel disasters, and social awkwardness into tightly wound observational storytelling, delivered with the rhythm of a seasoned pub raconteur. A former winner of the San Francisco Comedy Competition and finalist in the Moth storytelling competition, Nihill excels at finding the absurdity buried inside everyday interactions. At Assembly in Kingston.
