Hello and welcome to a good one, a podcast about jokes. I'm your host, Jesse David Fox.

Catherine Van Aeron-Aradonk is back, my friends, to talk about the state of stand-up specials.

Catherine is vulture's comedy critic, who you might know from her biannual appearances on this very podcast.

Catherine also co-hosts with me a Patreon podcast called The Specials, in which we discuss stand-up specials,

not unlike you're about to hear us do right now.

This episode, we're going to run through Catherine's list of the best

specials of the year so far, based on an article of the same name that ran on Vulture.

We'll include a link to the article in the show notes if you'd like to read and you should.

So here is Catherine Van Aeron Dunk.

So I am here with the one, the only, Catherine Van Aerondyne.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

So we're going to talk about your list of the best specials of the year so far.

That is half the year.

I like to start these with a general sense of sort of how you approach this as a sort of value system and a sort of rhetorical or journalistic exercise.

So people have a sense of like what this list is telling them yeah so uh you know every time we do one of these uh we have a version of this

conversation and i i like continuing to check in with it because it changes you know know, like as I as I work on them,

as I do the list for more years, as the world and the circumstances under which we are

making the list have changed quite dramatically in the last several years. I think it is

useful to check in and also to adjust, right?

Like what a list is doing and how it works.

So the biggest change from last year when I was putting this list together in the middle of the summer is that we are no longer quite as much in that point of scarcity post-COVID

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