Gabe Liedman

He walks on stage looking like he just burst through the door with unbelievable news. He operates at a high-speed clip, leaning heavily into vocal fry, long dramatic pauses, and exasperated sighs. He builds momentum by piling extreme details onto minor events. When he describes a bad date or a hangover, he reports the specifics with the urgency of a natural disaster.

He is a central architect of 2010s comedy. Alongside Jenny Slate and Max Silvestri, Liedman ran Big Terrific, the weekly showcase that anchored the Brooklyn alternative scene for seven years. While he eventually left the stage to write and run television shows, his conversational looseness shaped an entire cohort of comics who learned how to perform in Williamsburg spaces.

His standup hinges on a specific stance: he performs as a hyper-confident mess. He discusses his dating life, his body, and his television habits with intense vanity, right up until the moment an anecdote requires him to play the fool. He highlights the contrast between his aggressive self-assurance and the indignity of his actual behavior. He rarely relies on traditional joke construction. Instead, he talks in long, spiraling loops, getting louder and more frantic until the audience is laughing just to keep up with his pace.

Liedman met Slate while attending Columbia University, where they formed a comedy duo before building the live shows that eventually pulled them both to Los Angeles.