Written by Jack Alano If you had asked me what the highest accomplishment a comedian could achieve was when I started doing stand-up five years ago, I would have likely said “getting a Netflix special.” If you had asked someone else five years before that, they might have said “getting a show on Comedy Central.” I don't know, I'm not them, I wasn't really paying attention back then, but these shifts happen. I believe that we are experiencing another major change in long-form stand-up publishing, a trend that rivals Netflix, Max (the streaming service formerly known as HBOMAX), and all other competitors. That is the trend of high-quality, independently-released, full length stand-up specials being dropped on YouTube. This enormous collection of newly released stand-up has me the most excited I have ever been to be a comedy fan. Although the prestige and paychecks of getting published on a major streaming service are still very much the pinnacle of the industry, I haven't been watching the majority of my stand-up on Netflix. In fact, the last time I subscribed to a month of Netflix was to watch their “Verified” collection, which featured comedians that I have grown to love from their…

Written by Chloe Fimiano TW: Suicide I want to take a moment before I write any of this to cherish all comics, especially the ones who felt without hope and didn’t make it to the other side. This article isn’t a judgment on their decision, but instead an argument for remaining hopeful, in a pursuit that can sometimes leave you without it. I didn’t start comedy until I was 28, but the outright obsession started much earlier. I was obsessed with comedy, comedians, and jokes. I used every party, dinner, and shift at work as my secret stage. I distinctly remember leaving a dinner party and thinking “I crushed” before crushing or murdering meant anything to me. In my early 20s, I rarely listened to music. Instead, I incessantly listened to interviews with comedians, and every interview with a comic that I consumed felt painful in a way I couldn’t quite articulate yet. They, being comics, were describing their upbringings, values, and lifestyle and listening felt like pressing your tongue against a canker sore. A good kind of pain you can’t stop doing. At the time I was living in Philadelphia and I had a live-in boyfriend who just didn’t…

Written by Chloe Fimiano (@chloefimiano.freak on IG) “Beauty is short-lived tyranny” is something Socrates once said – and then someone repeated it on a podcast and that is how it trickled into my brain. It’s true though isn’t it? To be young and conventionally beautiful feels like being handed a blank check, especially in the digital age. Now – with the tik-tokification of stand-up comedy, I fear there are large swaths of burgeoning comedians growing more and more discouraged by the shiny new packaging of an art-form that was once fueled by cocaine, freaks, and dark sketchy rooms. For the sake of everyone’s time – I’ll forgo the age-old debate of whether or not hot people can be funny. Hot people are here to stay, and as much as I actively try to avoid friendships with the symmetrically blessed – some of them have grown on me. I even consider some of them close personal friends, and much to my chagrin, funny is funny, even coming from their stupid, genetically blessed faces. But at times I find myself wanting to ask them – Why can’t being funny be our thing? Just us freaks. Speaking on behalf of every millennial who…