Lifestyle
We needed comic relief in 2024. Here are 5 stand-up specials where we found it
Hasan Minhaj’s Off With His Head, Hannah Einbinder’s Everything Must Go, and Ronny Chieng’s Love to Hate It were some of the specials that cracked us up this year.
Netflix; Max; Netflix
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Netflix; Max; Netflix
“In some ways, stand-up comedy is like a documentary of your own life,” explains Mike Birbiglia in his recent special Good One: A Show About Jokes. By that measure, there were some really good – and funny – documentaries this year.
Hasan Minhaj shared hilarious conversations with his immigrant dad. Tom Papa enjoyed the freedom of being an empty nester. Fortune Feimster got huge laughs as she mimed a fight with her wife while stuck in a train’s quiet car, and Ali Wong detailed her sexual escapades as a newly divorced woman.
Here are some of our favorite stand-up specials from 2024:
Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It (Netflix)
Ronny Chieng: Love To Hate It
Marcus Price/Netflix
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Marcus Price/Netflix
In his new special, Ronny Chieng agrees with some of his MAGA friends that America’s not doing great right now. “Our kids’ math scores are down. Our children’s science scores are down,” he laments. Underlying Chieng’s jokes are some unflattering truths. When his MAGA friends tell him they would “die for their country,” Chieng’s reply is, “Why aren’t you willing to learn math, also for your country? … We’re losing the engineering jobs to Asia.”
He says he’s constantly trying to get his mom off social media. “Baby boomers don’t have the antibodies to deal with the Internet,” he exclaims, “They can’t remember a single password … but for some reason can make any piece of misinformation go viral.” Fortunately, Chieng is charming enough to make looking in the mirror funny.
Hasan Minhaj: Off With His Head (Netflix)
Hasan Minhaj: Off With His Head
Amir Hamja/Netflix
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Amir Hamja/Netflix
Hasan Minhaj says his “white, NPR tote bag friends” can’t understand why so many Mexicans voted Republican when President-elect Donald Trump once called them “rapists.”
“I’m like, ‘Chelsea,’” Minhaj instructs in his special, “‘Do you know what I would let a politician call me if I could pay 0% income tax?’”
Like Chieng, Minhaj isn’t just telling jokes, funny as they are. He’s commenting on bigger issues like generational trauma and cultural differences. “White people: you’re not even the best at racism,” he quips before talking about how some South Asians discriminate against each other.
As much as he teases others, Minhaj self-mocks plenty. “Insufferable,” he says of the time he corrected Ellen DeGeneres’ pronunciation of his name.
Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go (Max)
Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go
Eddy Chen/Max
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Eddy Chen/Max
“Humanity is a toxic, abusive husband,” says Hannah Einbinder, pausing between almost every word, “And climate change is just planet Earth recognizing her worth and filing for a divorce.” She then proceeds to impersonate the earth, sun and moon, commenting on the state of affairs.
It takes years of practice to perfect a full hour of stand-up. Einbinder’s drawn out pacing in her first full-length special might be off-putting for some, but I found it refreshing.
Einbinder’s mood swings from seductive to cartoonish to professorial. She tells delightfully wicked stories about her teen years as a friendless stoner and a competitive cheerleader. She describes herself as “feral” when she’s on her period. To prove it, she drops to the ground on all fours, slinks around and hisses, doing what she calls “my Benedict Cumberbatch doing motion capture for The Hobbit.” That moment alone is worth the price of admission.
Mike Birbiglia in Good One: A Show About Jokes (Peacock)
Mike Birbiglia in Good One: A Show About Jokes
PEACOCK/PEACOCK/Peacock
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PEACOCK/PEACOCK/Peacock
“Origin Stories,” “Workshopping” and “Finding Your Voice” are names of some of the chapters in Mike Birbiglia’s latest special. Equal parts autobiography and stand-up deep dive, we find out he was raised hearing his dad insist, “Don’t tell anyone” about personal stories. Birbiglia’s made a successful career doing exactly that. We learn about him getting bullied as a kid (“Running away works,” he jokes), his methodical approach to his sets (“So many different index cards,” marvels Seth Meyers) and watch how, with a little tweaking, a one-liner goes from just ok to a winner. True students of the art form soak up wisdom from their elders.
Early in his career, Birbiglia told a joke about Oprah when he opened for George Lopez. Afterward, he asked the veteran comedian for advice. Lopez told him, “You should make fun of yourself before you make fun of other people.” That is good advice for just about anyone.
Michelle Buteau: A Buteau-ful Mind at Radio City Music Hall (premieres Dec. 31 on Netflix)
Michelle Buteau: A Buteau-ful Mind at Radio City Music Hall
Netflix
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Netflix
Michelle Buteau is like the smart, fun, unfiltered friend who’s got your back. Her descriptions of the people in her life are hilariously specific, like her “sassy” five-year-old daughter: “Hazel has the energy of a 53-year-old Black woman that works at the DMV,” Buteau declares, “She walks up on the playground and she’s like, ‘Is this what y’all meant to do?’”
Buteau admits to feeling “rundown” as a working mother of twins, “like the door at the end of the movie Titanic. Just like less buoyant, and everyone’s climbing on. My whole family’s trying to take a seat and my whistle won’t work.”
Her stories of “vibing” with a lizard at a reptile sanctuary and being high on edibles at a Knicks game are comedy jewels. Buteau says she wants to make “millions of dollars” doing comedy that makes people feel “safe, seen, secure, heard and entertained” and asks the audience to let Dave Chappelle know he should do the same.
And before we go …
A few more notable 2024 moments in the world of stand-up: The documentary Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution explored the history of LGBTQ comedy, Jamie Foxx went back to his stand-up roots to talk about the stroke that landed him in the hospital, Kevin Hart took home his Mark Twain Prize, and Nikki Glaser crushed it at The Roast of Tom Brady.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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