Welcome to Crosstalk, wherein A.V. Club writers discuss their varied (or unvaried, as the case may be) perspectives on a pop-culture topic. This time, with the first half of 2026 firmly in the rearview, senior TV editor Erik Adams and staff writer Matt Schimkowitz talk about the laughs we shared along the way, the state of film and television comedy, and why hyper-specific joke craft might be fix our collective funny bones.
Matt Schimkowitz: The post-lockdown comedy landscape has been a nightmare. Stand-up has become the chosen medium of modern fascism, infecting podcasts with gutter racism espoused in the cadence of jokes as lazy comics filled social media with crowdwork clips, a “genius business comedian movie,” letting the audience do your work for you, according to the “Joke Explainer.” Meanwhile, television and especially movie studios struggled to refill the pipeline after nearly a year of strikes. Between 2022 and 2025, there were so few comedies in theaters that anyone who moderately enjoyed laughing in the dark with strangers was praying to Leslie Nielsen for a strong return on a Naked Gun reboot. Thankfully, it feels like Frank Drebin broke the logjam. Comedies have slowly but surely been flowing their way back into theaters, culminating in Scary Movie and The Devil Wears Prada 2 becoming two of the biggest comedy hits since, I don’t know, Barbie? And even that is more remembered as an IP play more in line with a superhero movie.
But you can see comedies making strides throughout the year. While the legacyquels made the big bucks, Nirvanna The Band The TV Show The Movie refreshed its 20-year-old cult with a host of new converts. Even efforts in the genre that didn’t immediately click represent modest gains. Nate Bargatze tried to resurrect the family comedy with The Breadwinner, as I Love Boosters seized the means of laugh production—Boots Reilly really split the difference between Prada and Breadwinner with that one. I’m so optimistic about this year’s slate of comedies. But Erik, I turn it over to you. How does the comedy world look to you?
Erik Adams: Fragmented, like just about every other corner of the pop-cultural landscape. I think because comedy is one of the easiest forms of creative expression to pick up—all you need is a camera, stage, or microphone and an idea (or, for a lot of podcasts, a microphone and no idea)—it was also the quickest to splinter off and migrate far, far away from the mainstream. I was kicking this idea around when The Chair Company premiered at the end of last year, but “quotable comedy” has pretty much died because, outside of memes, there are so few shared reference points for the stuff that makes us laugh these days. (Give or take a fluke breakout like—speaking of The Chair Company—I Think You Should Leave.) And I’m certainly guilty of contributing to that trend: In recent years, I’ve sort of built my own comedic universe out of the talent that floats between the worlds of Comedy Bang! Bang!, Dropout, and Podcast: The Ride. But as big as the audience for and influence of CBB has grown, I know that if I ran out to the sidewalk right now and asked the first person I saw if they’ve ever heard of cooldickshoes.com (link NSFW, obviously), they’d give me the same look I’d give them if they’d dropped some inside joke from their podcast network of choice.
And yet I feel like this lack of common ground might ultimately be a boon for comedy? Relieved of the obligation to be everything to everyone, stand-ups, sketch acts, and filmmakers can get hyper-specific with the subjects of their jokes or the objects of their parodies. Clearly, Scary Movie’s box office receipts reveal a hunger for broad comedy, but I refer back to the last time you and I shared a byline, Matt: The micro-targeted gags of The Napa Boys and Programme 4 really work for you and me. Having caught up with The Napa Boys myself, I really admire that movie’s willingness to pursue a premise whose limited appeal is built-in—”What if Sideways had its own deathless series of in-name-only sequels à la American Pie“—to increasingly ludicrous ends. Are you seeing the present and future of comedy in smaller audiences and niche projects, Matt?
MS: I see it in both. Broad and niche comedies make for a healthy ecosystem, and the better broad comedies do, the more niche comedies we’ll see. Moreover, that so many audiences are being served in a single year is sadly remarkable, especially compared to 2025, which was mostly limited to Naked Gun and the underrated and sadly forgotten sleeper hit One Of Them Days. On a recent episode of The Doughboys, comedian Brandie Posey mentioned the death of comedy’s middle class and what it will take to revive it. And it really takes comedies, large and small, to repair the middle. The success of hit sequels like Devil Wears Prada 2 gives comedians like Caleb Hearon a chance to shine alongside movie stars and convince Disney bean counters to greenlight more comedies. Meanwhile, an indie like John Early‘s Maddie’s Secret offers a specific comedic voice, like Early’s, and the freedom to make that voice as loud as they want. And, what do you know, it was a record-breaking opening for Magnolia. That indie studios are even willing to make niche comedies when the smart money is making horror only bolsters my confidence that there’s an audience for all of it.
I do think we’re at the start of a new wave, and, thankfully, it looks nothing like The Roast Of Kevin Hart. Hanging ten ahead of the rest is Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which has inspired an honest-to-goodness cult in the style of Wet Hot American Summer. Like Napa Boys, Nirvanna is the playground of a specific sense of humor, one that isn’t immediately welcoming to outsiders. In February, I spoke to a woman in line at AMC’s MacGuffin’s Bar, who beamed with excitement as she told me she and her partner were going to see Pillion, another great comedy worth mentioning. When I told her I was seeing Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie for a third time, she looked at me like I was a link to cooldickshoes.com. (CBB really has been cooking this year, by the way. See Eugene Mirman’s recent appearance for the proof.) Despite Nirvanna being based on a TV show and webseries most caught up with after the movie, myself included, it’s inspiring Zoomers to throw on an ugly fedora and scream about a Toronto nightclub on TikTok. It fills my cold little heart with Orbitz.
My optimism isn’t limited to film. For all the discussion of The Pitt, Justin Spitzer and Eric Ledgin’s St. Denis Medical is a worthwhile addition to our medical show present, and an extremely funny one to boot. I’m also with the rest of The A.V. Club in my love for Widow’s Bay. Is Must-See TV back, or am I just in love with two shows?
EA: I mean, even if you are, you’ve picked two good ones to love! I’ve made no secret of my affection for Widow’s Bay, and St. Denis Medical’s second season continues the lineage of strong, classical-feeling-yet-contemporary-minded workplace comedy that Spitzer started with Superstore. And at 18 episodes per season to boot—numbers practically unheard of in 2026!
Network comedy’s giving us reason to be both optimistic and pessimistic at the moment. NBC’s back in the sitcom game (again, relatively speaking for these industry-contracting times), renewing both St. Denis and the tremendously funny The Fall And Rise Of Reggie Dinkins while lining up a third show with links to past single-camera glories: Sunset P.I., created by Brooklyn Nine-Nine vets Dan Goor and Luke Tredici and starring New Girl’s Jake Johnson. And while I don’t feel as bullish on Téa Leoni and Tim Daly’s Dharma And Greg Plus 30 Years comedy Newlyweds, there remains some comfort in a) NBC wanting more than one new comedy in primetime, and b) that new comedy boasting two stars (plus recurring guest star Jamie Lee Curtis) who know their way around a multi-camera show.
That “primetime” is an important distinction, because late night is cooked. Stephen Colbert’s out; Jimmy Kimmel certainly talks like he wants out, but appears committed to sticking with his show out of a sense of civic duty. Colbert’s valedictory procession to the final Late Show was a highlight of the year’s first half, and you can feel the depth of his absence in both the commercial and creative sinkhole that opened up after CBS leased his old timeslot out to Comics Unleashed. Way back when, Saturday Night Live was ushered to the air so that The Tonight Show could take more time off, but it’s easy to see a future where Saturday is the only night where you can expect to see new comedy on a network after 11:35 p.m. At least the show still knows how to pick new cast members: I enjoyed Ashely Padilla’s breakout season as much as anyone else, but it was also exciting to see Jeremy Culhane make the leap from Dropout to the featured players roster at the beginning of season 51. Even more exciting: Seeing him destroy on such a big stage with a bit that’s as ornate in presentation and silly in execution as Weekend Update correspondent Mr. On Blast.
Still, when I think about the TV that really cracked me up in 2026, it’s mostly on the smaller side of things. It’s Ben Schwartz, Lisa Gilroy, and Colton Dunn hijacking a Rohrshach test prompt on Make Some Noise to improvise one of the year’s stickiest earworms. It’s the absolute firehose of gags in every episode of Netflix’s Strip Law, a show taken from us too soon. It’s Swan Boy’s recently concluded “Noel Goes To Hooters” arc, a truly unpredictable fantasia starring Branson Reese’s dirtbag funny animals that had me reading a webcomic on a daily basis as if it were 2005 all over again. Matt, you’ve already shouted out a couple of your off-the-beaten-path comedy favorites from 2026, but would you care to dig deeper?
MS: The Napa Boys and Maddie’s Secret are perfect examples of the types of risky movies that I’d love to see more of. Maddie’s Secret, which just opened, bears the influence of Todd Haynes’ May December by way of Kids In The Hall, building a ’90s Lifetime movie out of Sirkian melodrama. It follows an up-and-coming gourmand named Maddie (writer-director John Early), who must overcome an eating disorder to make her food influencer dreams a reality. It’s a comedy where the tone is the joke, with Early leaning hard on archetypes and camp to draw humor out of touchy subjects. Both it and The Napa Boys are destined for cult status.
I’d also echo our editor-in-chief, Danette Chavez, who recently advocated for Joe Cappa’s hilariously sweet animated comedy Haha, You Clowns, which premiered late last year and will hopefully be back by the end of this one. Essentially a take on Home Improvement set after Jill’s death (you can still recognize the Taylor boys in the character design), the show started as a mean-spirited send-up but transitioned into a profoundly empathetic statement on masculinity by the time it landed on Adult Swim last fall. These 15-minute episodes use sweetness as a punchline and the boys’ earnest love for their father, each other, and their community to elevate low-stakes scenarios into moments of genuine tension and catharsis.
On the other end of the spectrum, Connor O’Malley continues to embody the screaming id of modern masculinity on YouTube. His latest video, “Irish Zionism,” exercises his groundbreaking approach to sketch comedy by following a character through several seemingly unrelated social media Reels as he falls further down the social media rabbit hole into viral infamy. Pretty much every moment of “Irish Zionism” plays like something that probably exists somewhere in the algorithm. But O’Malley’s work is just absurd enough to stay ahead of reality.
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