Who’s the GOAT, living or dead?
If there was a laugh-off between all the best of the best, who would win?
With apologies to any comedian who pre-dates TV, movies, and sound recordings—all you hilarious performers from the Middle Ages, you’re not in contention. Sadly, we’ll never know how how great you were.
Given that qualifier, and therefore basing this assessment solely on the comedians we can see, live or on tape, there’s one comedian who excels in every metric we think of when we think of great comedians, and I count him as the greatest of all time.
But you hardly ever see him on any of the lists of the greats.
He was a great writer.
He was a great improviser.
He was prolific—he produced dozens of comedy albums.
He had staying power—a 60-year career.
He had his own hit comedy TV series.
He was in movies. Not many, but he at least checks that box. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t a movie star. Hollywood wouldn’t have allowed it.
He was ahead of his time, and he inspired all the pioneering greats we always see on the lists: Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Prior, Joan Rivers, and Eddie Murphy. And he inspired just about every other comedian or aspiring comedian who ever saw him.
Perhaps most importantly, funniness exuded from his every pore. Everything he did and said was funny.
Beyond that, he faced obstacles that some of the all-timers didn’t have to. In fact, he paved their way. He had to be extra funny and work extra hard to break through the glass ceiling of segregation and racism in the pre-Civil Rights era to achieve mainstream success.
If you haven’t gone down the Redd Foxx rabbit hole and studied his comedy, you owe it to yourself.
Redd Foxx—my pick for the greatest comedian of all time.
Legendary n Ground-Breaking sho nuff. And one of mah Idols.
To this day when I do something stupid I utter the words “you big dummy”