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48 free Stand-Up Comedy trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Stand-up is one person, one microphone and a room that decides in real time whether you are funny. This quiz covers the art form from music-hall monologues to streaming specials. The easy questions ask what a tight five is, what it means to bomb or kill, what a heckler does, which comedian listed seven words you can't say on television and where the Comedy Store stands. From there it moves into the craft: openers, features and headliners, bringer shows, callbacks and closers, punching up and down, joke theft, the paraprosdokian and the strange fact that most people fear the stage more than death. The harder end is for comedy nerds: Artemus Ward, the 1911 Stage review that first used the term, Mort Sahl at the hungry i, Lenny Bruce's obscenity arrests and posthumous pardon, Carlin at the Gate of Horn, Pryor's Grammys and the freebasing fire, Mitzi Shore, Budd Friedman's coffee house, the Harvard of comedy clubs, Phyllis Diller's twelve laughs a minute, Bob Newhart's number-one album, Andy Kaufman lip-syncing Mighty Mouse, Bill Hicks cut from Letterman, the Cambridge Footlights winning the first Perrier, Just for Laughs' bankruptcy and Ricky Gervais's record night at the Hollywood Bowl. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on stand-up, its clubs and its comedians, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our comedy, Saturday Night Live and sitcoms quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In stand-up slang, what is a 'tight five'?
A polished short set of best material
A polished short set of best material: a tight five is a five-minute routine honed until every line lands, the standard audition piece for bookers and a step toward paid spots.
Q 02What does it mean when a comedian is 'bombing'?
Failing to get laughs
Failing to get laughs is bombing, the set dying in silence; its opposite is killing, crushing or destroying the room.
Q 03What is a 'callback' in a comedy set?
A reference to an earlier joke
A reference to an earlier joke is a callback: the comic brings back a line or premise from earlier in the set, rewarding the audience's memory with a fresh laugh.
Q 04In stand-up slang, what does getting 'the light' mean?
The set's time is nearly up
The set's time is nearly up: a club worker at the back flashes a light at the comic, who is expected to wrap up promptly and clear the stage for the next act.
Q 05In club slang, what is the 'check spot'?
The set performed while the audience's bills are delivered
The set performed while the audience's bills are delivered is the check spot, a notoriously tough slot because the room is distracted by its cheques; clubs often hand it to a trusted regular.
Q 06In a typical club line-up, who performs immediately before the headliner?
The feature
The emcee warms up the room, then the opener, the feature and finally the headliner.
Q 07What is a 'paraprosdokian'?
A punchline that changes the meaning of the setup
A punchline that changes the meaning of the setup is a paraprosdokian, Greek for 'against expectation', as in 'Where there's a will, I want to be in it'.
Q 08What legal principle makes joke theft so hard to sue over?
The idea-expression distinction
The idea-expression distinction means copyright protects only a joke's exact wording, not its premise, so a rival who rewrites the idea in new words is hard to sue; accused comics often plead parallel thinking.
Q 09Whom do comedy historians consider America's first stand-up comedian?
Artemus Ward
Artemus Ward was the stage name of Charles Farrar Browne, whose deadpan comic lectures of the early 1860s toured America and then Britain; his act is usually cited as the first true stand-up.
Q 10Whose 1866 show, Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands, is cited as an ancestor of stand-up?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain delivered the Sandwich Islands lecture in California in October 1866, a solo comic talk built on his Hawaiian travels, and took it on tour; the format anticipates modern stand-up.
Q 11In which year did the term 'stand-up' first appear in print, in The Stage?
1911
1911 is the earliest known use: The Stage, the British theatre paper, praised Nellie Perrier's 'stand-up comic ditties', which were comic songs rather than spoken routines.
Q 12Which comedian made 'Git-R-Done' his catchphrase?
Larry the Cable Guy
Larry the Cable Guy, Dan Whitney's Southern alter ego, made 'Git-R-Done' his signature on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour alongside Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Ron White.
Q 13Which comedian pioneered topical satire using only a newspaper as a prop?
Mort Sahl
Mort Sahl walked on stage with a rolled-up newspaper and riffed on the day's headlines from his 1953 debut at the hungry i, later writing jokes for John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign.
Q 21On which street was the Comedy Store opened in 1972, in the old Ciro's nightclub?
Sunset Boulevard
Sunset Boulevard, at number 8433 in West Hollywood, is where Sammy Shore and Rudy De Luca opened the Comedy Store in April 1972 in the former Ciro's nightclub.
Q 22Who ran the Comedy Store from 1973 and bought the building in 1976?
Mitzi Shore
Mitzi Shore took over the club after her divorce from co-founder Sammy Shore, bought the building in 1976 and expanded it with a 450-seat Main Room.
Q 23Who founded the Improv in New York's Hell's Kitchen in 1963?
Budd Friedman
Q 14Where was Lenny Bruce arrested for obscenity in October 1961, over one word and a grammar lesson?
The Jazz Workshop, San Francisco
The Jazz Workshop, San Francisco, was where police arrested Bruce on 4 October 1961 for a ten-letter word and a riff on the grammar of 'to come'; a jury acquitted him the next year.
Q 15Why was George Carlin arrested alongside Lenny Bruce at Chicago's Gate of Horn in 1962?
He refused to show ID to police
He refused to show ID to police when they cleared the club after Bruce's arrest in December 1962; Carlin, watching from the audience, said he did not believe in government-issued identification and was taken away in the same wagon.
Q 16Why was Lenny Bruce barred from entering the United Kingdom in 1963?
He was declared an 'undesirable alien'
He was declared an 'undesirable alien' by the Home Office in April 1963 and turned back at the airport; he had played Peter Cook's Establishment club in Soho the previous year.
Q 17How many words did George Carlin's 1972 monologue say you can never say on television?
7
7: Carlin's 'Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television', from the 1972 album Class Clown, led to the 1978 Supreme Court ruling FCC v. Pacifica Foundation on broadcast indecency.
Q 18How many HBO stand-up specials did George Carlin make, starting in 1977?
14
14: Carlin's HBO specials ran from On Location: George Carlin at USC in 1977 to It's Bad for Ya in 2008; he also hosted the first Saturday Night Live in 1975.
Q 19Where did Lenny Bruce rank on Rolling Stone's 2017 list of the 50 best stand-ups of all time?
Third
Third: Rolling Stone's 2017 ranking put Lenny Bruce behind only Richard Pryor at first and George Carlin at second.
Q 20What happened to Richard Pryor on 9 June 1980 during the making of Stir Crazy?
He set himself on fire while freebasing
He set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine at his home, suffering burns over half his body; he survived, and his 1982 concert film turned the ordeal into material.
Budd Friedman opened the Improvisation on West 44th Street in 1963 as a late-night coffee house for Broadway performers, and it grew into what is often called the first modern comedy club.
Q 24What was Rodney Dangerfield's catchphrase?
'I get no respect!'
'I get no respect!' was Dangerfield's signature, the hook for thousands of one-liners about his wife, his doctor and his childhood; he opened his own club, Dangerfield's, in New York in 1969.
Q 25How many laughs per minute earned Phyllis Diller a Guinness World Record?
12
12 laughs per minute won Diller the Guinness record; her act was built on rapid-fire one-liners, and her 48-drawer gag file of more than 50,000 jokes went to the Smithsonian in 2003.
Q 26Who was Phyllis Diller's opening act at the Bon Soir in Greenwich Village around 1960?
Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand, then an 18-year-old unknown, opened for Diller at the Bon Soir nightclub in 1960, singing between comedy sets before her own career took off.
Q 27Whose 1960 comedy album reached number one and won the Grammy for Album of the Year?
Bob Newhart
Bob Newhart, a former accountant, recorded The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart live in Houston in 1960; it topped the Billboard chart and took Album of the Year at the 1961 Grammys.
Q 28Which host's Tonight Show established Joan Rivers's career after a 1965 guest spot?
Johnny Carson
Johnny Carson told Rivers on air in February 1965 that she was going to be a star, and the booking launched her; she later became his permanent guest host before their 1986 falling-out.
Q 29Which cartoon theme did Andy Kaufman lip-sync one line from while standing perfectly still?
Mighty Mouse
Mighty Mouse: on the first Saturday Night Live in 1975, Kaufman stood beside a record player and mouthed only the line 'Here I come to save the day!' from the cartoon's theme.
Q 30What became Steve Martin's trademark stage outfit once he was filling stadiums?
A white three-piece suit
A white three-piece suit became Martin's uniform so that crowds at the arena shows of the late 1970s could see him from the back rows, paired with props like the arrow through the head.