Comedy Trivia
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213 free Comedy trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
51 free Comedy trivia questions with answers. Comedy is a much bigger world than movie night, and this quiz roams all of it. Fifty questions cover stand-up pioneers from Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor to Dave Chappelle, half a century of Saturday Night Live, sitcoms from I Love Lucy to The Office, British classics like Fawlty Towers and Monty Python, comedy duos, late-night TV, improv theatre, vaudeville and the Borscht Belt, and the slang comedians use backstage. The easy questions ask who created SNL and what a straight man is; the hard ones want the nightclub The Comedy Store replaced, the etymology of vaudeville, and who invented the improv form called the Harold. It suits anyone who quotes sitcoms in group chats, hosts a pub quiz, or has ever bombed at an open mic. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other primary reference pages, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01Who created Saturday Night Live?
Lorne Michaels
Lorne Michaels was 30 when he created Saturday Night Live in 1975; he walked away after five seasons, then came back in 1985 to run it again.
Q 02Which comedian hosted the very first episode of SNL on October 11, 1975?
George Carlin
George Carlin hosted the 1975 premiere, then titled NBC's Saturday Night, but appeared in none of its sketches.
Q 03What nickname was given to SNL's original cast?
The Not Ready for Prime-Time Players
The Not Ready for Prime-Time Players, a name coined by writer Herb Sargent, mocked the 'Prime Time Players' of Howard Cosell's rival ABC variety show, which was cancelled within months.
Q 04Which Saturday Night Live cast member, who joined in 2003, became the longest-serving in SNL history?
Kenan Thompson
Kenan Thompson passed Darrell Hammond's 14 seasons; in 2013 he refused to keep playing Black women in drag, and SNL hired Sasheer Zamata within months.
Q 05Who was the first recipient of the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, in 1998?
Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor's 1998 tribute night was so full of profanity that Bill Cosby refused the same prize in protest for years, finally accepting it in 2009.
Q 06Who received the Mark Twain Prize in 2010 at age 40, then its youngest honoree?
Tina Fey
Tina Fey was 40 when she accepted the 2010 prize, two years after she went back to Saturday Night Live as a guest to play Sarah Palin.
Q 07Which comedian left her guest-host seat on The Tonight Show to launch a rival late-night show on Fox in 1986?
Joan Rivers
Joan Rivers launched The Late Show on Fox in October 1986; Johnny Carson, whose regular guest host she had been, took it as a betrayal and never spoke to her again.
Q 08Which SNL alum earned an Academy Award nomination for the 2006 film Dreamgirls?
Eddie Murphy
Eddie Murphy won the Golden Globe for playing R&B star James 'Thunder' Early in Dreamgirls, but the Oscar went to Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine.
Q 09Which comedian walked away from a $50 million Comedy Central contract when he quit his own sketch show in 2005?
Dave Chappelle
Dave Chappelle walked out during production of the third season in 2005 and flew to South Africa, later settling back on his farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Q 10Which 1950s sitcom pioneered the three-camera setup filmed on 35mm in front of a studio audience?
I Love Lucy
I Love Lucy (1951) shot with three 35mm film cameras before a live audience; the film prints, unlike kinescopes, kept the episodes sharp for endless reruns.
Q 11In 'Job Switching', Lucy and Ethel fall hopelessly behind a factory conveyor belt carrying what?
Chocolates
The belt carries chocolates; Lucy and Ethel stuff the candies into their mouths, hats and blouses to hide their failure from the supervisor.
Q 12On a 1990s NBC sitcom, which character's mother Babs revealed that his first name was Cosmo?
Kramer
Kramer went by his surname alone until his estranged mother Babs let slip 'Cosmo' in a 1995 episode; the character was modelled on Kenny Kramer, who once lived across the hall from the show's co-creator.
Q 13In Seinfeld, which made-up holiday does Frank Costanza celebrate with an aluminum pole and an airing of grievances?
Festivus
Q 21A gold record of which comedy routine was placed in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956?
Who's on First?
Who's on First?, Abbott and Costello's routine about players named Who, What and I Don't Know, now runs on an endless video loop at the Hall in Cooperstown.
Q 22Harlequin and Pantaloon were stock characters of the masked comedy troupes that arose in which country in the 16th century?
Italy
Italy's commedia dell'arte troupes improvised around masked stock characters; one of them, Pulcinella, crossed the Channel and became Mr Punch of Punch and Judy.
Q 23Slapstick comedy is named after the slap stick, or batacchio, a club-like stage prop made of what?
Two wooden slats
Festivus was a real tradition in the family of Seinfeld writer Dan O'Keefe, whose father invented it in the 1960s; the aluminum pole was the show's own addition.
Q 14In Friends, which coffee house do Rachel, Ross and the rest of the gang treat as a second home?
Central Perk
Central Perk is where Rachel, who turns up in the pilot still wearing her wedding dress, takes her first job as a waitress.
Q 15Which sitcom's finale drew about 52.5 million US viewers in May 2004?
Friends
Friends signed off on May 6, 2004, before about 52.5 million US viewers; NBC sold 30-second ads for around $2 million each, a record for a sitcom.
Q 16The US version of The Office is set at a paper company branch in which Pennsylvania city?
Scranton
Scranton is home to Dunder Mifflin's branch; after John Krasinski was cast as Jim he visited the city to research paper companies and shot the footage used in the opening credits.
Q 17The original British version of The Office follows the Slough branch of which fictional paper company?
Wernham Hogg
Wernham Hogg's Slough office drew low ratings when it first aired on BBC Two in 2001, yet in 2004 it became the first British comedy to win the Golden Globe for best comedy series.
Q 18Fawlty Towers is set in a dysfunctional hotel in which English seaside town?
Torquay
Fawlty Towers is set in Torquay; Basil was inspired by Donald Sinclair, owner of Torquay's Gleneagles Hotel, where the Monty Python team stayed in 1970.
Q 19In Fawlty Towers, the waiter Manuel comes from which Spanish city?
Barcelona
Barcelona was the stock excuse for Manuel's confusion: 'He's from Barcelona.' Andrew Sachs, who played him, was born in Berlin and came to Britain as a child when his family fled the Nazis.
Q 20Which half of a famous comedy duo was born in Ulverston, England, in 1890?
Stan Laurel
Stan Laurel, born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Ulverston, sailed to America in 1910 with a music-hall troupe in which he was Charlie Chaplin's understudy.
Two wooden slats that smacked together on impact, so a stage beating sounded loud and painful while barely touching the victim.
Q 24The word 'vaudeville' is often said to derive from a French phrase meaning what?
Voice of the city
'Voice of the city', from 'voix de ville', is the popular story, but dictionaries instead trace vaudeville to the Vau de Vire, a valley in north-west France once famous for satirical songs.
Q 25Which silent film comedian's stoic expression earned him the nickname 'The Great Stone Face'?
Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton's unsmiling screen manner earned the nickname; in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) he stood still as the front of a house fell around him, saved by an open window.
Q 26In 1919, Charlie Chaplin co-founded which film distribution company to control his own movies?
United Artists
United Artists let Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith release their own films; a rival studio boss is said to have quipped that the inmates were taking over the asylum.
Q 27The 'Borscht Belt' resort circuit that launched generations of comedians was located in which mountains?
The Catskills
The Catskills resorts grew up because many hotels elsewhere turned Jewish guests away; the nickname comes from borscht, the beet soup.
Q 28Which Sunset Strip stand-up club opened in 1972 in the building that was once the nightclub Ciro's?
The Comedy Store
The Comedy Store took over the old Ciro's in 1972; under owner Mitzi Shore it paid its comics nothing, a policy that provoked a comedians' strike in 1979.
Q 29The Second City improv theatre took its self-mocking name from New Yorker articles about which city?
Chicago
A. J. Liebling's 1952 New Yorker pieces belittled Chicago as 'the second city'; the troupe founded there in 1959 embraced the insult.
Q 30In improv comedy, which two-word phrase is the cardinal rule for responding to a partner's offer?
Yes, and
'Yes, and' means accepting a partner's offer and building on it, since a flat refusal stalls the scene; businesses have borrowed the rule to make brainstorming more productive.