Many of the year’s best comedy specials share a reflective sense of mid-career reconsideration. The most striking of these is from Kumail Nanjiani, whose special Night Thoughts allows him to reassess his career and relationship with comedy after more than a decade away from regular stand-up. For other comedians, the retrospective meditation is about grappling with existential dread rather than Nanjiani’s focus on the trap of his external public persona. Mike Birbiglia’s The Good Life , Marc Maron’s Panicked , Cameron Esposito’s Four Pills , and Bill Burr’s Drop Dead Years are all hours in which the comedians openly wrestle with conceiving of their own mortality and think about how to keep making comedy when they’re so conscious of their own fear and frailty.

Atsuko Okatsuka’s F

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