Jokes You Should Know from Unknown Comics
Today’s unknown comic could very well be tomorrow’s headliner. Or in the case of the actual brown-paper-bag-wearing Unknown Comic from The Gong Show, both are possible — simultaneously no less! Given this core comedy truth, we’re here to help you be all my smug with your friends as these careers bloom — “Oh, you’re only finding out about the Unknown Comic now? I knew him when…” For the record, this is a very poor reflection on you when referring to a comic from the 1980s most famous for obscuring his face with a bag, but you get when I’m saying more largely.
Anyway, here are some great jokes from names that aren’t of the household variety yet but may be soon…
Ari Matti
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“It’s fucked up being from a made-up country (Matti is from Estonia). Two weeks ago, I was at the Vancouver airport, the border guy closed the window and called another guy over. No bullshit, I saw them Googling Estonia. The most fucked-up part is it came up on the fourth page. This is how little Estonians give a shit about our country: We didn’t even do a Wikipedia page. Some people are like, ‘What is Estonia like?’ ‘Go home, put your head in the freezer. You like it? Move there. It fucking sucks. That’s why you’ve never heard of it.’”
John Wynn
“I actually have two first names. I have an American name — John. But my real name, my Vietnamese name is spelled H-U-Y. It’s pronounced we. Huy Nguyen is my real name. Yeah, sounds fun. Not fun in Waco, Texas. I have an older brother who has it worse. His name now is Ben, but his real name is Huu Nguyen.
“When you’re an immigrant, you come to America and you gotta make a decision: Keep your name out of pride, or change it. We changed it, obviously. I’ll tell you what happened: We were really young, and we were on a family vacation in Hawaii. My brother and I got separated from my mom for like two minutes at the Pearl Harbor Memorial. This little Asian woman, my mom, is walking around freaking out yelling, ‘WHO WIN?!?! WE WIN?!?! WHO WIN?!?! WE WIN?!?!’”
Cody Woods
“Cigarettes are the most addicting ‘cause they ban it indoors. That’s what makes it really addictive. Because you talk to smokers outside, they’re way more interesting than people inside. They’re going through shit, that’s why they smoke. Inside, it’s fake with co-workers: ‘It’s casual jeans Friday! Hehehe...’ ‘Whatever, Susie, you fake b-tch.’
“You go outside, that smoker’s interesting immediately. ‘(Takes a drag) Well, she said she’s keeping it.’
“‘Fuck, give me a lighter, I gotta hear this shit.’”
Nicole Aimée Schreiber
“Why can’t adult diapers have patterns? I feel like this is a perfect opportunity for the NFL. Imagine you’re an old man. She comes home, and she brings home a pair of Patriots diapers. You’re like, ‘I told you, woman! I hate the Patriots! How dare you?’ And she’s like, ‘Wait, wait! Don’t strike me! I was thinking tonight, when you watch the game, you could wear the Patriots diapers. So when you’re cheering for the Colts, you can shit on the Patriots!’”
Billy Anderson
“I have a dog that lives with me. It’s not my dog; it’s my roommate’s dog. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the worst way to have an animal in your home. Because if you think my roommate has trained this animal at all, you’d be mistaken. All he does is chew up everything I love, pee everywhere, he bit me — I’m a prisoner in my own home. Send help.
“I was reading online that if you neuter a dog that, medically, it’s supposed to mellow them out. And I like to think even if that isn’t true, if I get it done, maybe he’ll learn his lesson. I’ll take him to the vet myself, slip the vet some extra money, be like, ‘Hey, doc, give them the Lance Armstrong. Just take one of them.’ And the doc will look at me and be like, ‘Why, I don’t really—’
“‘Cause I still want him to have something left to lose.’
“He goes to lift a leg up in my home, goes to bite me again, and I’ll just point to my silver necklace where I’ve gold-plated the thing I took. I’ll look him dead in the eyes, and be like, ‘Try me. You saw what happened last time.’”
Carlos Rodriguez
“If heartbreak had to smell, it would be burnt popcorn. You smell burnt popcorn? It makes you sad as fuck. You walk into the kitchen crying, you can smell it. You’re going, ‘(sniff) Oh fuck, I did it again! I didn’t spend enough time with it! I should’ve watched it! I only got two more chances to get it right!’”
Leah Bonnema
“I’ve noticed that people from cities tend to be very uncomfortable around the idea of hunting. I grew up in a very big hunting area, and I think maybe it’s because it was explained incorrectly. So this is how I explain it to people who don’t like hunting: For example, deer season. You can’t kill female deer because they can have babies, and you can’t kill baby deer because they’re not fully grown. In other words, the only deer you can kill are adult male deer. Don’t you feel so much better about it now? You’re like, ‘I’m sure he did something...’ There’s probably some nice lady deer down by the brook drinking water, and he comes over and he’s like, ‘Let me show you how to drink better...’
“Shut up! You’re like, ‘Shoot him, stuff him, put him on a wall! I can’t take it anymore! Are you stagsplaining? Are you stagsplaining me right now?’”
Lace Larrabee
“He was cheating on me, and I had found the most recent one. He had three months of evidence in his phone. He didn’t delete anything. I could have confronted him in the middle of the night, but it had been six years — so I needed to collect all the information so I could do it the next day at his job in public. It’s much easier now because we have AirDrop. You can just send that over real quick.
“It’s not what I had to do though. I had to do the old scroll/screenshot. You gotta collect all the evidence — scroll, screenshot, scroll, screenshot, scroll, screenshot. Then you gotta text yourself the screenshot of the text messages that you found out of his phone. But you gotta cover your tracks — go into the photo album, delete the screenshots of the text messages that you already took on his phone, go to the conversation between the two of you, delete the screenshots of the text messages that you already texted to yourself. Don’t forget the deleted album. Go in there, and delete all the screenshots of the text messages that you already deleted out of the album and out of the text messages.
“I just bring this up to tell y’all how good it feels to be in a healthier place.”
Mat Alano-Martin
“How many of you know this old-timey phrase: ‘the little man in the boat’? It was more common in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but it was a very quaint way of talking about the clitoris. It’s how you find the clitoris — you look for ‘the little man in the boat.’ Here’s my question: Why is it a man? Is that how deeply ingrained the patriarchy is in our society — that the only way you can get a guy interested in pleasuring his lady is to tell him another dude needs a high-five down there? Answer: Yes. And he’s in a boat. It’s like a fishing trip you used to take with your grandpa. So if you want to keep your lady happy, every now and then, you gotta get down there and lick your grandpa. Lick your grandpa until he stands up in the boat.”
David Kousgaard
“One of my neighbors came up and talked to me the other day. He didn’t make small talk, what he did instead is ask if he could put something in my garbage can on trash day. I’ve listened to enough true crime podcasts to know the answer to that question is always no. You don’t let them put anything in your garbage — that’s how you become a suspect in a murder you didn’t commit. And that’s the main reason I don’t get to know my neighbors, because if one of my neighbors did something super fucked up, I don’t want to be that idiot on the news that they interview who goes, ‘I had no idea that he was capable of doing something like this!’
“If they come to interview me, I’m going to look like a completely different type of idiot. They’re going, ‘Sir, what can you tell us about your neighbor, Greg?’
“’I am just now finding out his name’s Greg.’
“‘Okay, well, are you surprised that he murdered his wife?’
“That dude was married? He always struck me as the single bachelor type, which I mean, I guess he is now...’”
DJ Sandhu
“There was a little bit of drama on the flight over here, ‘cause there was a medical emergency mid-flight. If you’ve never been through that before, it’s terrifying. ‘Cause I feel like that’s how it’s gonna go for me. When my time comes, I’m gonna be mid-flight, there’s gonna be no doctors on board, and we’ll be stuck over Wyoming or some shit, where there’s no civilization and they just pray the gay away.
“Luckily, when they got on the intercom, they said, ‘Do we have any medical professionals on board?’
“Eight people chimed in. Isn’t that dope? There were eight doctors on my flight, which I thought was so comforting. But then I started thinking, ‘This is Frontier Airlines. They can’t be good doctors. This guy is fucked!’”
Erica Rhodes
“There were some clues he wasn’t the guy for me. One clue was we had very little in common, except we both really loved him. I swear he actually said this to me once: ‘I love you more than you love me, because I love myself so much. You need to love yourself more, so that you can love me more.’
“I was like, ‘Actually, I think we both need to love you less, because the more I love you, the more I hate myself — for loving a guy who loves himself so much.’
“Our breakup was interesting, because he was a little competitive with me. That was one of our problems. One time, out of the blue, he just said, ‘You know, you’re not smarter than me.’ I was like, ‘It’s actually ‘smarter than I am.’
“Then he said, ‘Well, between you and I, I finished college and you didn’t.’
“I was like, ‘It’s actually ‘between you and me.’
“Then he said, ‘You and I are done.’
“And I was like, ‘You got that one right.’”
Gianmarco Soresi
“My best friend’s name is Josh. He’s my age. He just went through a second divorce. He’s been very depressed, and I told him,‘You should go to therapy.’ And he was like, ‘Nah, running is my therapy.’
“I was like, ‘That’s so interesting, because sushi is my hair cut. What the fuck are you talking about?’
“We need to treat depression like the disease that it is. You wouldn’t tell someone with diabetes to run it off — ‘cause you need both feet!”