Television Shows
Stand-Up File List – Stand-Up Interstitials/Ads File List
Movies (#-M) | Movies (N-Z) | Television Shows | Miscellaneous
Archer
Year: 2009
Synopsis: An incompetent and insufferable team of secret agents work together and against each other to tackle international crimes, with the disagreeable Sterling Archer at the helm.
Arrested Development
Year: 2003
Synopsis: A deeply-dysfunctional extended family try not to fall apart after their patriarch is thrown into prison for embezzlement.
Beavis & Butt-Head
Year: 1993
Synopsis: Two dumb slackers kill time, annoy their neighbors, and watch music videos.
EMN Notes: This is one of those shows from the 90s that was so entrenched in 90s early cultural attitudes and pop culture that you’d think it hasn’t aged well, but thanks to Mike Judge’s sharp wit, penchant for dumb comedy that doesn’t make you feel dumb for watching it, and plethora of funny voices, it’s somehow still a treat. It’s fun, too, because with this we get to enjoy music videos even if they’re being riffed over. It adds a lot to EMN atmospherically to just have this hanging around one of the channels, and it has been a pleasant surprise.
Bob’s Burgers
Year: 2011
Synopsis: A man and his family own a burger joint in the city and have trials, tribulations, and misadventures.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Year: 2013
Synopsis: Officers in an NYPD precinct do their best to get through their daily lives, but they’re all just a little quirky.
EMN Notes: This show is spectacularly funny. We started watching it a few years ago and I remembered enjoying it immensely. However, it wasn’t until we added the Halloween specials to Horror and they came on that I remembered how damn funny this show is. The characters have incredible chemistry, with Andy Samberg’s incredible delivery and body language making Jake Peralta both a complete idiot and someone sweet that you fall in love with. The entire cast of characters care for each other, and there’s a real sense of camaraderie that helps turn this from another workplace comedy to a heartwarming and hilarious and even exciting and action-packed workplace comedy. It’s such a fun time.
Cheers
Year: 1982
Synopsis: A group of friends meet after work every day to hang out in the same bar and talk about life.
Clone High
Year: 2002
Synopsis: Way, way back in the 1980s a group of scientists cloned a whole bunch of famous people, and now they’re angsty teenagers.
EMN Notes: Though I remembered it from my youth, revisiting this show surprised me with how laugh-out-loud funny it can get. The writing is satirical and sharp, over-the-top and melodramatic, silly and strange, and it’s all in all a lot of fun with this great unique vibe to it that comes from it being a clear parody of teen angst shows.
Comedy Bang! Bang!
Year: 2012
Synopsis: A strange riff on the late-night talk show featuring celebrity guests, parody skits, and Weird Al Yankovic.
EMN Notes: This show was added for some variety, which is funny because on the surface it seems rather similar to something like Space Ghost Coast to Coast or Eric Andre in concept. However, while those shows focus on non sequitur over anything, this show is more about the celebrity guests as characters who are in on the joke, playing exaggerated versions of themselves as the host slowly breaks down in his quest for fame. It can be very funny moment-to-moment and the music is always really good thanks to Weird Al.
Dad’s Army
Year: 1968
Synopsis: During World War 2, old men from Walmington-On-Sea form the Home Guard, a platoon devoted to protecting their little English village.
EMN Notes: As mentioned, this show is an incredibly nostalgic and meaningful piece of work for me, a way of celebrating the life of someone I loved dearly, but it’s also a pretty darn hilarious sitcom with great characters that are full of bluster who are always getting into ridiculous shenanigans. The unique premise leads to the platoon being stranded on an island, threatened by the warden, or entertaining a group of loudmouthed American soldiers, and it’s always so funny. It makes me just a little homesick, but in a nice way.
Freaks & Geeks
Year: 1999
Synopsis: A comedy-drama with an ensemble cast (or at least, one that would later be seen as one) going through the realities of high school.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Year: 2005
Synopsis: The worst people on Earth try to keep their dive bar afloat.
EMN Notes: My friend Sciura showed me this show, and while it took a while for me to sink into the vibe, as soon as I did I was hooked. This show takes the Seinfeld idea of a cast of truly self-centered and fairly unlikable characters and takes it to the extreme, and yet it more-or-less stays funny. I love how this series uses music – it sounds like nothing else on TV – and while there are jokes that will definitely offend, it’s all because the characters are honestly reprehensible. Because they’re so reprehensible, though, they get into some honestly unbelievable situations and many episodes just continue to escalate like a hellish whirlwind. There are episodes that even thinking about make me double over laughing, so while this isn’t a show I’m always in the mood for, it’s a show that hits when it needs to.
Key & Peele
Year: 2012
Synopsis: Comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele present social commentary, standup, and a whole lot of skits.
EMN Notes: This show can be absolutely razor sharp at times with some gut-bustingly-funny skits. It can also dig deep and hit hard as they never shied away from both lampooning and shining a light on racism and stereotyping. There are laughs of all kinds here, with each skit that Key & Peele perform feeling like tiny slices of a movie where they are the stars. It’s a trip.
King Of The Hill
Year: 1997
Synopsis: A family in Texas looks to live an honest life.
EMN Notes: We decided to add King of the Hill to this channel because we decided that since Simpsons is on main EMN and also Flashback, it just made sense to let King of the Hill shine somewhere too. I don’t need to reiterate how fun and sly and quietly funny this show is, but it’s always nice to get another episode here and there.
Love Lab
Year: 2013
Synopsis: Two girls, unlucky in love, start an after-school club to learn what it takes to get a boyfriend.
EMN Notes: While I don’t see this staying on the lineup for long, I am glad this was added for at least one of the years. Love Lab is a sorely-underrated little comedy with absolutely hilarious characters (including a dakimakura named Huggy) and some excellent visual gags. It does also have one very unfortunate gag that comes out of nowhere, and perhaps that’s why it got swept under the rug, but apart from that it’s packed with little moments I remember that always make me crack a smile. Early on, one of the girls decides she wants to meet someone by having an anime toast-in-mouth-bump moment only to shove a loaf of bread into her mouth and tear down the hall in a full on sprint. I laugh every time. It’s a series that seems familiar, but has a charm all of its own. That said, following the first year of Stand-Up, we removed it from a later revision of the channel. It’s cute, but sadly the energy of the show was too different from the other programming in a jarring manner.
Malcom in the Middle
Year: 2000
Synopsis: The gifted and creative middle child of a seriously strange family tries his best to navigate life.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Year: 1969
Synopsis: A series of patently-absurd comedy sketches featuring England’s arguably greatest comedy troupe.
My Brother, My Brother, And Me
Year: 2017
Synopsis: Three brothers take your questions and in return offer…questionable solutions.
EMN Notes: Is this the part where I once again complain about this show only having six episodes? Because I’ll do it! Seriously, the sheer laughs this show provides relative to the amount of content it actually had is unreal. There are so many funny lines I remember, so many funny moments. The brothers are all very weird people, and their ideas of “solutions” to the questions posed are…unique. We’re talking “load up a dorm room with haunted dolls they bought on eBay to scare an annoying roommate and get a paranormal investigator to actually test how haunted the room is” unique. It’s so funny.
Nathan For You
Year: 2013
Synopsis: A reality show where Nathan Felder, Canadian business school graduate, goes to failing businesses and pitches ideas that are sure to work. They don’t.
Parks & Recreation
Year: 2009
Synopsis: A chipper government worker just wants to do what she can to make her little hometown the best it can be.
EMN Notes: This is one of those shows that you want to recommend to everyone. It’s incredibly funny and incredibly sweet, especially starting with the shake-up mid-season-2. Leslie is competent and passionate and a little bit naive, but her optimism and genuine love for her job is so sweet. The rest of the cast truly shines, too, as does seeing all their arcs and interactions and character development. The dialogue is quippy and sticks in your brain, and once it got out of the shadow of The Office and became its own thing it became one of the best comedies on TV. Watching the final season of this show live was a treat.
Pop Team Epic
Year: 2018
Synopsis: A referential parody series that goes a mile a minute, anchored by the adventures of two weird little gremlins.
EMN Notes: This is another show I’m unsure is staying in the lineup but my god what a fantastic piece of work this is. If I have to think of the funniest punchline in anime history, it’s in a skit from this show. I don’t want to spoil the joke, but the ungodly shriek I made at a certain reveal will never be topped. This show is full of moments like this, and it’s also so bizarre and animated in so many different ways and there’s so much effort poured into it that it cannot be topped. A truly wild ride.
Scrubs
Year: 2001
Synopsis: The life and times of a group of dysfunctional doctors who have to work inside a hospital where they deal with life and death.
Seinfeld
Year: 1989
Synopsis: A comedian and his New York friends look out for themselves and nobody else.
EMN Notes: What else is there to say about this one? It’s a show that is still funny to this day, a show that turned the sitcom genre on its head and birthed a thousand imitators. It changed communication and added so many little words and phrases into the lexicon, and it’s also so fun to keep joking about because the character voices are just so strong and so funny. It’s just a good show!
Space Ghost Coast to Coast
Year: 1994
Synopsis: The galaxy’s favorite talk show host is here with celebrities and other cartoon characters to bring joy over the airwaves.
EMN Notes: While I’m not incredibly fond of this show in comparison to others, I think it’s definitely an interesting piece of work. It can be very funny, but it mostly cultivates a strange and amusing atmosphere through how it uses recycled Hanna-Barbera footage. Space Ghost’s voice actor is also hilarious. It was a very experimental show for the time, and I like it for that reason.
SpongeBob SquarePants
Year: 1999
Synopsis: Under the sea, a fun-loving sponge lives in a pineapple and works at a fast food restaurant.
EMN Notes: SpongeBob is in an interesting position where the early seasons are still as funny as you remember them, if not moreso. It’s almost incredible how everyone can quote every episode from that era – seriously, pretty much every single iconic SpongeBob moment is from those early seasons. That said, despite the nostalgia for me, I wasn’t sure about adding it to main EMN if only because, well, we can quote episodes verbatim by this point. But adding it to Stand-Up was such a great idea, because it’s just as pleasantly nostalgic and super funny as it was and it adds so much nice variety to the channel.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Year: 1990
Synopsis: After getting into a fight, city-born Will has to move across the country to his rich uncle’s house and clean up his act.
EMN Notes: Just like with EMN, this show just fills me with good vibes. The characters, actors, and music are all such a comfort to me, and the actual humor is charming and nice and silly. It’s a very fun show, and I’ve gushed about it enough in the EMN1 programming guide so I’ll refrain from doing so here, but it definitely belongs in this lineup.
The Golden Girls
Year: 1985
Synopsis: A group of hard-boiled old women who are long-time friends live out their golden years together with candor and humor.
The Good Place
Year: 2016
Synopsis: After her death, Eleanor Shellstrop ends up in The Good Place. There’s just one problem – she definitely doesn’t belong there.
EMN Notes: One of the most inventive, visually beautiful, smart, touching, and hilarious shows I’ve ever seen. The thing that makes The Good Place different from the other sitcoms on this list is that after a certain point it completely changes to a tight, driven narrative that never loses the humor and beauty of the initial premise. I don’t want to say too much, and I would recommend you watch this show in its entirety yourself. While drunk on my birthday I needed something light to put on and I knew Mandy liked the show, so I turned it on and ended up bringing the entire series in a week. I laughed, I cried, I gasped. It really has the pacing of an anime and is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Year: 1981
Synopsis: After Earth is demolished to make way for an interstellar expressway, the last remaining Earthling finds his world is far larger than he ever imagined.
EMN Notes: I love The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Douglas Adams is one of my literary influences along with Terry Pratchett, and I’ve read all the books multiple times. I also saw the movie multipple times, which has issues but is overall a fun time. And yet I haven’t seen this show! Yet! I know it’s excellent and at 6 episodes it was a no-brainer to put on here (and likely on sci-fi too).
The Office (US)
Year: 2005
Synopsis: The employees of Dunder-Mifflin, including the incompetent boss Michael Scott, deal with the funniest and most infuriating parts of corporate America.
The Venture Bros.
Year: 2004
Synopsis: A self-absorbed former child adventurer is older now and drags his sons on crazy capers around the globe, all while being pursued by the villainous Monarch.
EMN Notes: A parody of old teen adventure shows that grows into something much deeper, this show fascinated me as a kid due to being one of those Adult Swim shows I wasn’t allowed to watch. I actually remember my brother showing me the Fantastic Four parody episode, and I just think I was too young to really Get It. Mandy is the real Venture Bros. fan in the house, so I got this show for them, and as I was watching I realized that it really is about the cycle of parental violence and expectation and how the generations force the next ones to clean up their messes. It’s still a very humorous show, but I think I appreciate it much more with that context in mind.
Tom & Jerry
Year: 1940
Synopsis: A cat tries his best to chase a mouse, often with comical, violent, and slapstick results.
Veep
Year: 2012
Synopsis: A character played by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss becomes the vice president of the United States. Shenanigans ensue.
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Year: 1998
Synopsis: Four improv comics compete in a meaningless game show to see who can do the funniest skits live.
EMN Notes: I’ve said it before but this was a super nostalgic show for me. Being from the late 90s and early 00s, there are a lot of off-the-cuff bits that haven’t aged well, but the gold here is still as sparkling and funny as I remember. I love the whole cast and all the guests and the skits they perform, and the live studio audience makes this show feel absolutely electric. The new seasons are funny, too, but the classics are what we have on here.
Workaholics
Year: 2011
Synopsis: A group of college buddies may have grown older, but they haven’t grown up as they work in a call center together.