Cody Hughes
A working regional comic who tames rowdy bar rooms with deliberate awkwardness.
1 special · 2023
Get an email when there's a new special. You'll need a Google account.
Cody Hughes speaks with a hesitant, slightly alien rhythm. He projects the aura of a man surprised to be holding a microphone, but the awkwardness is entirely deliberate. He knows how to handle a loud bar. He will drop an absurd, jarring line right up top to force the crowd to pay attention. Once they settle, he rides that momentum into a quiet, patient story, delivering jokes with the pacing of someone who has spent years testing premises in mostly empty rooms.
Specials
On stage
He is a longtime Asheville standup who relocated to Cincinnati. He operates at the ground floor of the business, the exact kind of working comic that other comedians trade names about. He has zero illusions about the job. He treats the stage as a workspace to bridge old jokes with new connectors, talking plainly about the blunt reality of doing standup in your thirties.
His material in Hello Fellow Human leans hard on his strange demeanor. He details getting recognized by strange children on hiking trails, or the anxiety of having to defend political opinions he learned entirely from memes. He lays out a premise about his own social failures, lets the audience feel sorry for him, and then undercuts the sympathy with a tag that makes him look even worse. He builds looping sets, dropping a line about high school devil sticks and retrieving it twenty minutes later.
He started at seventeen, opening for Lewis Black after winning a local competition, and has spent the years since putting in reps across the South and Midwest.
Turning points
-
Release of Debut Standup Special Hello Fellow Human
Hughes released his first full-length standup special, offering a self-aware, candid exploration of career dynamics in standup comedy.
-
Named Funniest Person in Cincinnati
Hughes won the title of Funniest Person in Cincinnati after establishing himself across the regional comedy club circuit.
-
–
First Standup Set Opening for Lewis Black
After entering a local comedy competition to settle an argument with his sister, seventeen-year-old Hughes won and opened for Lewis Black on his second-ever standup appearance.
At a glance
- Style
- storytelling, riffing, crowd work, observational, meta comedy
- Breakout
- Hello Fellow Human
- Influences
- Daniel Kitson, Stewart Lee
- Topics
- Elsewhere
- Website, Wikipedia, Instagram
Fans also like
-
Stewart LeeHughes cites Lee as a key comedic influence, particularly adopting a self-referential, meta-humor approach about the act of doing comedy onstage.
-
Daniel KitsonHughes admires Kitson's unstructured narrative style and use of lengthy, improvised preambles before launching into storytelling.
Also on screen
- Cody's Movie Reviews
- Welcome to Wrexham
A clip to start with
When You Hold God Hostage | Stand Up Comedy | Cody Hughes