The 6 Best Performances We Saw at the 2025 New York Comedy Festival

The old line that if you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny didn’t apply to two panels held during the festival. On Nov. 15, the cast of NBC/Peacock’s very funny mockumentary, St. Denis Medical — which takes place in a financially strapped Oregon hospital — and its co-creator and showrunner and Eric Ledgin gathered at the Hard Rock Hotel to discuss the hit sitcom.

After screening an episode from the series’ second season, which is currently airing, Ledgin and cast members David Alan Grier, Allison Tolman, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Kahyun Kim, Mekki Leeper and Kaliko Kauahi took part in a Q&A moderated by Mara Webster.

Kauahi, who plays the deadpan Nurse Val — in season one, she dragged a giant wooden crucifix into the room of a patient who wouldn’t undergo an appendectomy without it —revealed her favorite line of dialogue: “I’m sorry your finger smells like that, but you have to move to the back of the line.”

Aussie Josh Lawson, who plays the cluelessly egocentric Dr. Bruce — in pretty flawless American English — and Ledgin talked about the curious items in the surgeon’s on-set office, which include a golden football, second-place talent show trophies and an electric guitar. “He’s that guy, good God,” Lawson said. Ledgin also recounted how Lawson’s office display came to include a samurai sword after a prop guy asked him about one of the awards in the office. “I said, ‘His sword?’ And he said, ‘No, his award.’” Ledgin’s reply: “We’ve got to get him a sword.”

“Comedy Is Not Pretty,” goes a song (and album) by Steve Martin, and Ledgin gave testament to that declaration when he said that working on the second season of St. Denis Medical gave him “a lot deeper acceptance for how not fun my life is while we’re making the show.”

But as Joyce, McLendon-Covey’s hospital administrator, might say in an attempt to ease the pain: “We’re working late, and there’s pizza!”

There were no snacks for Strangers With Candy creators Sedaris, Dinello and Colbert, who sat for a panel discussion that was billed as a celebration of the 25^th anniversary of the cancellation of the out-there Comedy Central show that ran from 1999 to 2000. On Nov. 7 at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, the trio — who Colbert said often “would write all night and go to the set” — revealed that they were never actually told their show was canceled. “They just stopped filling our snack drawer,” Dinello said.

The series was a spoof of after-school specials — ham-fisted morality plays that ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast from the ‘70s through the ‘90s — and featured Sedaris as Jerri Blank, a former prostitute and junkie high-school dropout who resumed her education as a 46-year-old freshman. Colbert played married history teacher Chuck Noblet, who was carrying on a secret affair with Dinello’s art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck. “We were improvising while we were writing a lot,” Colbert said of the trio’s creative process, adding: “If we laughed, we couldn’t cut it from the show.”

Although Strangers was satire — one of its funniest episodes is a spoof of the 1962 film The Miracle Worker, in which the illiterate Jerri, in the Helen Keller role, learns to read — the show, which is available on Paramount+, was more than groundbreaking. Its surreal vibe defies imitation. As one audience member observed, Jeri Blank was one of the first gender-queer characters on television.

The series also featured some memorably absurd dance sequences, and at the end of the discussion, the audience was treated to a montage of fascinating footwork by the characters that should be available to stream as well.