The 1995 Young Comedians Show

Seeing comedians before they find their final form is a strange anthropological exercise. Hosted by Garry Shandling, this hour-long HBO showcase puts a spotlight on five guys near the beginning of their national television careers. The draw is the sheer novelty of watching Dave Chappelle, Dave Attell, and Louis C.K. doing club sets in the mid-nineties, rounded out by Anthony Clark and Canadian comic Eric Tunney.

Filmed at the Wheeler Theater in Aspen, Colorado, for the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, the broadcast is firmly anchored in 1995. Shandling warms up the room with topical O.J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt references. When Chappelle walks out, he takes a long pause before asking the Aspen crowd where they are hiding all the Black people, eventually pitching his own made-up superhero, Trick Whitey Man. Attell actively works the audience, pointing out his thinning hair while testing early iterations of his sex-heavy club material. Louis C.K. delivers a set focused on being broke, utilizing a rhythm and stage presence noticeably different from the style he developed a decade later. Tunney notes that Hitler ruined a specific style of mustache, and Clark laughs at his own jokes, leaning into a college-circuit energy that landed him sitcom work shortly after the broadcast.