The Best Comedy Specials to Watch This Month: Critic’s Picks

When last we saw Barbosa (in his 2023 Netflix special Cowabunga) he was trying to drink less, in a relationship, and scoring with self-deprecating material delivered with a cool slyness that made clear he was actually a boss. (On his sexual abilities: “I’m bad at sex, but I’m a good kisser. I’m like a really cool movie trailer — to a really bad movie.”) This time out, he’s working on his anger, recently single, and using the b-word to refer to anyone and everyone. On feeling uncomfortable when an eight-year-old white girl keeps saying hello to him in a park: “Before y’all judge me for calling this little girl a b–ch, I want to remind you I live in Texas. She had a gun.”

He’s passing that discomfort on to you: a lot of this material revolves around power, and twists in ways designed to make us confront our own thoughts and feelings. On Texas following its “extreme” abortion laws with a ban on PornHub: “That’s where I draw my line. ‘Cause now they’re messing with my body — my body, my choice.” On the women he’s dating wanting to spend money on vacations: “That’s why I only go out with women who are here illegally. Undocumented women, y’all are done traveling.” (“That was a dumb-ass joke,” he says, then caps it with another dumb-ass joke: the women who didn’t laugh are probably undocumented.)

It’s not until 40 minutes in that Barbosa puts himself squarely in his own crosshairs with a story about losing a fight when someone throws the b-word at his cousin: “I’m not tall enough to have a temper.” His narration of the ensuing brawl tops is a showpiece, topping itself again and again. It ends with the b-word. 

Watch on Hulu

Fabrizio Copano, From the Future

“I think Latinos, we’re from the future,” Copano says in the intro of his first English-language special. “Because all the crazy shit that’s happening in this country right now already happened in our country.” That would be Chile, where Copano was born 36 years ago at the tail end of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship. That intro includes jokes about Luigi Mangione and January 6th (“the U.S. staged coups all over the world… but when you did your own, you did the shittiest one possible”) and is capped by footage of Copano outside a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office where he’s taking his citizenship test — he wants to trade up from his green card so that he can keep jokes about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in his act.

Not everything here is at that level, and compared to the scale of his Spanish-language hours for Netflix and Amazon Prime, From the Future has a claustrophobic feel. But Copano is a star in Chile — host of his own late-night show, first South American comic with a Netflix special — and his flawless rhythm carries him through to the bits that land hard, including one about AI. “I hate when people say that AI’s gonna take our jobs, because I’m an immigrant and that’s my thing,” he says. And then comes the topper and capper: “Just call me JuanGPT. [Pause.] I hate that joke so much. But it works. Because you guys are racist.” 

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There’s a pure, uncut power to this half-hour. No crowd work. No requests for the audience to clap it up. Just Flores’ gleeful, explosive delivery — if he needs a reaction, he demands it or provides it himself. (His delight in his own material is less a signal to the audience than unrestrained pleasure.) A self-professed “fat b–ch” who jokes about having to mute his IG stories because his wheezing freaks people out, Flores shifts from subtle eye rolls to ALL CAPS punchlines as he talks about getting too big to wipe his own ass and why he won’t be getting any smaller: “It’s hard to get in shape when your favorite restaurant is a buffet.”

He grew up outside of Chicago in Aurora, Illinois (Wayne’s World territory) where his dream wasn’t comedy, it was to be a gang banger, and his story of getting fired his first day on the job is the hilarious closer to a special charged by raw power and the joy of having found his place in the world. There’s a tragic side to that joy: This is Flores’ first special and his last. He died in January of congestive heart failure on the eve of a tour that would have brought him more of the recognition he deserves. 

If you’re not already a Jefferies fan, this might not be the place to start. (Try 2009’s I Swear to God or 2020’s Intolerant.) He comes out swinging way too hard, calling Johnny Cash “the most overrated artist in American history,” and it’s not about whether he’s right or wrong. It’s his stage, and wringing laughs out of the indefensible — which, as always, he does — is pretty much his brand. But if you’re going to score laughs taking down strawmen targets, it’s a little lame to have to build the strawmen as you go. And surely there’s another way into a truly brilliant bit about having sex with another man to turn on his wife — shocker: it doesn’t work — than complaining that bisexual women aren’t really an oppressed or marginalized group because porn makes them the most revered community in our society.

But if this isn’t the best Jefferies special, it’s still a Jefferies special, which is to say: the work of a man who dances with outrage like he’s Fred Astaire. Home runs include the aforementioned gag about blowing a guy, the story of his wife walking in on him having a casual wank, and his explanation of why he’s in favor of gay conversion therapy — but only from heterosexual to gay: “I’ve been heterosexual for 48 years, and let me tell you something: it can’t be natural. Men and women shouldn’t be together. We have absolutely nothing in common. We don’t enjoy other’s company, and every f–king day is a struggle.” 

Watch on Netflix

This special is a small miracle: not quite a half-hour long and filmed at the Denver club Comedy Works, it combines the intimacy and off-the-cuff feel of a late-night set with the precision of a seasoned professional killer. The premise is simple: Stelling confessing her undying annoyance with her landlord — the wife of the married couple who run her Los Angeles building — with indignities and intrusions piling atop each other in the march to a boss-battle confrontation.

Stelling has a conversational ease that lets carefully written punchlines land like they’ve just occurred to her in the moment (it’s part of why her hours for Netflix and Max fly by) and the footage has an up-close cell-phone feel. But each piece — even each camera angle — locks in place perfectly. Stay tuned for the credits to discover that the cartoon demon voice Stelling gives her landlord (“every conversation is like falling in a prickle bush”) is less an exaggeration than a dead-on impression.

Watch on YouTube