Ryan Sickler

When Ryan Sickler gets going on a story, he leans into the mic and lets out a high-pitched wheeze that forces the audience to laugh with him. He has the cadence of a guy holding court in a garage, leaning on a cooler and telling you about the worst weekend of his life. His crowd work doesn’t stop at asking what people do for a living. He’ll pause a room to ask if anyone in the front row has ever actually died and come back to life.

He sits at the center of the comedy podcast ecosystem as a sounding board for the worst things that happen to funny people. Through shows like The HoneyDew, he built a devoted audience that tunes in specifically to hear him laugh at misery. He bypasses the usual industry machinery, dropping self-produced specials straight to YouTube for the fans who pack his live dates.

His standup relies on sprawling stories, mining his own terrible luck for material. The darker the subject matter, the harder he leans into it. In Live & Alive, he recounts surviving massive blood clots and a three-week hospital stay, detailing medical negligence and calling his friends from his deathbed. Instead of looking for pity, he delivers the whole ordeal with the energy of a guy recalling a disastrous bachelor party. The setups are completely bleak, but he refuses to let the room feel sorry for him. If a moment gets too heavy, he just cracks himself up until the crowd follows.

He grew up in Baltimore, and that specific East Coast edge never left his delivery. His accent kicks in the hardest right as a story reaches its most absurd point.