[category]
[title]
There are probably about as many comedy clubs in Los Angeles as there are In-N-Out locations—you’re never more than a few-minute drive from one. Whether you’re after arena-caliber performers in a small comedy club on the Sunset Strip or genre-defying acts at an old playhouse near the L.A. River, there’s a comedy scene for you somewhere in the city.
So seeing top-tier comedy in L.A. often becomes less a question of where and instead one of who—and we think you should beeline it to just about any show that has one of these on-the-rise local comedians on its lineup. A mix of stand-ups, actors, writers and sketch performers, these are the folks who can snap you out of the doomscrolling doldrums or singlehandedly rescue a ho-hum evening. That’s why these three solo performers and one duo were inducted into the 2026 class of Time Out’s Comedians to Watch in America—and while we’re enamored with the other eight picks on that nationwide list, we wanted to make sure to give the Angelenos in it some extra local love.
Very special thanks to Joel Mandelkorn and Mandee Johnson, who curated and helped craft this list of L.A. comedians.
Andrew Orolfo
We all have those “truth is stranger than fiction” moments, but we can’t all craft those random encounters into a funny story quite like Andrew Orolfo. A fixture at the Comedy & Magic Club and on Don’t Tell Comedy lineups, Orolfo lures in crowds with relaxed setups that give way to surprisingly outlandish punchlines, whether that’s about tolerating a bit of casual racism when you’re dating or sharing an edible with your mom. The L.A. by way of the Bay Area comedian’s cleverly silly perspective extends to The Meter, a game show he first hatched on long car rides to find out which Hollywood actor has the highest of-the-moment STARmeter rating on IMDb in as niche of a category as possible—say, the most famous person who’s ever worn a cowboy in a film or actors who’ve been really, really sweaty on camera.
What’s the funniest thing about your life right now?
My mom vapes, and sometimes it has a screen on it.
The one joke that always lands: Comics, we all just kind of dress similar for the most part. I always open with, “Do y’all like the lineup?” And then the crowd is like, “Yeah!” And I’m like, “Yeah, me too. Everybody’s been very funny, but am I tripping, or does this whole lineup look like we all work at the same thrift store? This is the most Buffalo Exchange–looking lineup I’ve ever been on.” In other cities I’ll just switch the thrift store, and find the local thrift store. It works most of the time—if the wind conditions are right.
You can stream The Meter each week on YouTube or watch live at DSP Studios in L.A. Check out Andrew Orolfo’s website for his upcoming shows, and follow along with him on Instagram and TikTok.
Curtis Cook
When Curtis Cook left Portland in 2016, he published a self-interview in the city’s alternative weekly about where he saw himself in five years: broke and broken in a world without comedy because his then-upcoming farewell PDX show was just unsurpassable. “Guess I’ve always been kind of a dreary guy,” Cook tells me today, noting that while we’re all doomed due to climate change and its survival-necessitated decline of “the arts,” it has been a thrilling decade of opportunities since he moved to L.A. You might’ve caught some of his TV writing credits on American Dad!, the criminally overlooked This Fool or recent hangout sitcom Adults. On-stage, Cook’s stand-up presence is one-of-a-kind, at once care-free, provocative and insightful whether talking about telling his six-year-old daughter that her family identifies as goth or trying to join the military to feed an insatiable blood lust.
What’s the funniest thing about your life right now?
I’m gonna die. Every day I live is a step closer to death, and through it all, I’m like, “Please follow me on social media so I don’t get kicked outta comedy.” It’s funny how much of this one, short, precious life I spend tryna get my numbers up online so I can keep doing what I love in person. That said, please follow me on social media so I don’t get kicked outta comedy.
The one joke that always lands: I am, for better or worse, one of those stand-ups who revels in the knowledge that I could always lose the audience. It’s fun to play with uncertain energy. That said, this joke [about coercive interrogation–inspired role play] tends to work more often than not.
Catch Curtis Cook on Wednesday nights at Zero Lounge in Hollywood, where he cohosts the weekly Zero Hour Comedy with Brandie Posey, Rick Wood and John Michael Bond. You can follow him on Instagram and TikTok.
Felicia Folkes
Don’t try hitting on a bank teller when you have a negative balance—because, as Felicia Folkes did in her former job, she’ll literally see that you can’t afford to take her anywhere. The Inglewood native brings charm and raw honesty to takes on relationship compromises and overly aggressive encouragement that’ll still have you talking on the car ride home. Folkes first got into stand-up as an after-class diversion at Santa Monica College and then was the first Black woman to be a door guy—and she really puts the emphasis on it being mostly guys—at the famed Comedy Store, where she worked her way up to being a paid regular. A breast cancer survivor, when Folkes was first diagnosed, she was hesitant whether she could turn an experience that intense into something funny. But she certainly can, whether talking about accepting advances when you think you’re on your deathbed or being irresistible to men even if you’re radioactive. “For the first time, my comedy’s doing that cheesy kind of thing where it’s doing more than just making people laugh for the night,” she says. “It’s really making people laugh for a while, and it’s healing them through their own journeys as well.”
What’s the funniest thing about your life right now?
I was just on that Netflix show [with Kevin Hart], and so now people recognize me. But like, I’m still in L.A., I’m still in Leimert Park, you know? So people now [in my go-to local shops], they’ll be stopping me, like, “Oh, wait, are you from that show, can we get a picture?” But I’m like, I was here yesterday, and the day before, I’ve been here for years, I see you all the time.
The one joke that always lands: I have my own personal beef with Trader Joe’s, and I feel like it looks like a kid built a grocery store, and the carts are too small, and they’re drawing the prices on, and I want them to go in the back and print out the prices and put it on and stop playing these games with me. And the parking lots are all crazy. So that always works because people feel very personal about their grocery store. They start messaging me about Erewhon and what they think about that—people in L.A. have a lot of opinions about grocery stores.
You can see Felicia Folkes live most Sundays at the Comedy Store, as well as at the New York Comedy Festival in November. Keep up with her on Instagram.
Kim & Aliya
A surreal short film about a dystopian marketing app, a satirical talk show, a card-based party game about gossip: No matter the form their comedy takes, you can expect something truly singular when Kim Seltzer and Aliya Kamalova are behind it. The improv and sketch collaborators, who go by Kim & Aliya for short, excel in authoring all sorts of offbeat, often exquisitely awkward bite-sized videos, whether that’s slightly unnerving cooking demos, half-baked business pitches or, most recently, parodies of late-analog-era commercials. (Also, if you’ve seen TikToks of messy-faced friends demanding to know who ate the last powdered doughnut, you can thank Kim & Aliya for starting that trend.) But the L.A. performers’ talents extend beyond phone-sized-screens: They’re currently developing their debut feature, Pistols at 3:45, a mockumentary about two feuding local politicians trying to valiantly chicken out of an old-school gun duel.
What’s the funniest thing about your life right now?
We made a half-joke about how funny it would be if we launched a web arcade on our website because of how much we loved Flash game sites from the early 2000s. We took the joke too far and actually built an online game based on one mildly successful video series we have called “Kitchen Hacks.” We taught ourselves pixel art and game development and created a game where you can play as Aliya in her demented kitchen hacks world. Then we became addicted to our own proprietary game. The highest score we’ve gotten so far is 198,020, which is actually quite high for a score if you know anything about this game which most people don’t.
The one joke that always lands: Anytime we have a visual component while performing live, we try to always run the tech from stage via Aliya’s laptop. Instead of seamlessly switching to the screen we want to share, we “accidentally” show Aliya’s desktop which we fill with embarrassing open tabs like Google searches for “how to get people to like you easy,” “when is too old for a first kiss?” and “are Minions real life animals?” Kim tries to vamp while Aliya struggles to navigate to the right screen. The audience always feels a split-second of horror until they realize it’s a bit and then they laugh, laugh, laugh all the way home.
You can keep up with Kim & Aliya’s latest games and videos on their website, and follow them on Instagram and TikTok.
