How Did the Emmys Get Writing for a Variety Special So Right?

The Emmys have struggled to recognize achievement in stand-up comedy. It’s more than a little embarrassing to have categories for best commercial, best game show, and “Outstanding Short Form Nonfiction or Reality Series” (which this year consists entirely of aftershows for The Daily Show, The Crown, Hacks, Saturday Night Live, and Shōgun), yet no distinct honor for stand-up specials. It’s a glaring oversight for a genre that’s been significant to the TV format for decades; part of the bedrock of the HBO brand is built on stand-up comedy specials, from Eddie Murphy’s Delirious to Comedy Half-Hour specials for the likes of Chris Rock, Janeane Garofalo, and Margaret Cho. Netflix, in its efforts to supplant HBO, has made the genre a huge pillar of its programming. Yet, currently, stand-up is uncomfortably woven into the Outstanding Variety Special Emmy category, where it competes with various awards shows, concert specials, and the Super Bowl halftime show.

But this year’s nominees in Variety Special offer a welcome glimmer of good taste, particularly in the Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special category. Vulture’s own Kathryn VanArendonk put it best in our analysis of nomination day’s snubs and surprises:

Traditionally, the Emmys is absolute garbage when it comes to the truly good comedy specials out there, and some of that underwhelm is still reflected in the directing categories of this year’s nominations. (Say what you will about Chappelle, or Trevor Noah, or even Tig Notaro, but those specials are not notably exciting direction choices.) In writing, though, Jacqueline Novak, John Early, Alex Edelman and Mike Birbiglia all got nominations! Those are all great picks, and it’s a little mystifying how the Emmys suddenly got great taste in writing but couldn’t translate that same taste into picks for direction or overall best? 

One reason the writing nominees reflect more refined taste in comedy could lie in the Emmys’ rules for voting. Every category that honors a show as a whole — with the exception of animated and documentary/nonfiction shows — gets voted on by the entire Television Academy, including Variety Specials, which actually have two categories: Outstanding Variety Special (Live) and Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded). But the rest of the Emmys are selected by what are called peer groups. It’s pretty intuitive, actually: Actors vote for the acting categories, directors vote for directors, production designers vote for production design, and all the writers — drama, TV movie, late night, etc. — vote in the writing categories.

In recent years, the writers’ brand of the Academy has done well by stand-up comedians. The last six winners in the Writing for a Variety Special category have been stand-up specials: John Mulaney’s Baby J, Jerrod Carmichael’s Rothaniel, Bo Burnham’s Inside, Dave Chappelle’s Sticks & Stones, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, and Mulaney’s Kid Gorgeous. But if you look at the common denominator of the six, each were the one comedy special to receive mainstream attention in their respective year. As Vulture’s Jesse David Fox explains in the discussion below, most people only know of a handful of comedians at any one time. It would make sense that these are the shows the general public would gravitate toward. But the writers’ branch of the TV Academy isn’t the general public, and it’s reasonable to wish they’d be more discerning in their choices.

This year, the comedy writers actually did just that. The nominees for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special are as follows:

Alex Edelman: Just for Us (HBO)
Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees (Netflix)
John Early: Now More Than Ever (HBO)
Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man and the Pool (Netflix)
The Oscars (ABC)

With the notable exception of the Oscars, which was nominated for its entire 24-person writing staff, all the writing nominees are solo comedians’ stand-up specials. Compare that to the general category, Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded), which selected specials from Dave Chappelle, Nikki Glaser, and Trevor Noah (alongside Billy Joel: The 100th — Live at Madison Square Garden and Dick Van Dyke 98 Years of Magic), and Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special, which again nominated Van Dyke and the Chappelle and Noah specials, swapped out Glaser’s show for Tig Notaro: Hello Again, and only overlapped with the writing category when it came to the Oscars. This is not usually how things go with the writing categories at the Emmys. With the notable (and welcome) exceptions of Girls5eva and The Other Two, 10 of the 12 nominees in the Writing for a Comedy and Drama categories were also Outstanding Comedy and Drama Series nominees, respectively. Writing for a Limited Series matched Outstanding Limited Series four for six. By diverging from the general Academy’s preferences in Variety Specials and nodding toward a highbrow-prestige taste level, the writers ended up putting together one of the strongest categories on the Emmy ballot. Jesse and Kathryn break it down below.

Jesse David Fox: There is a theory in comedy — I believe I first heard it from Scott Aukerman — that most people only know of five stand-up comedians at a time. These are people who do not go to live comedy but maybe hear of one special a year because its popularity transcended to people with no particular interest in the form. I’ve always thought of the Outstanding Variety Special nominees and the Best Comedy Album Grammy as a reflection of this phenomenon. Being voted on by the general body means name recognition is going to be the only thing that allows stand-up comedians to compete with famous musicians and TV legends. But Outstanding Writing for a Variety Specials — that’s for us girls.Writing nominees tend to reflect interest in both comedy and taste. Looking over the past nominees, it’s clear, more than a distinct sense of humor, there is a preference for formal ambition regardless of whether those ambitions have anything to do with, you know, “writing.” But even with this context, this year seems notable.

Kathryn VanArendonk: It does seem notable! I’ve grown so used to the Emmys’ Variety Specials categories being so far removed from whatever I think of as notably great comedy specials that it was about an hour before I even thought to look at the nominations when they came out. Even when the Emmys do tend to nominate specials I think of as worthwhile for Writing, they’re almost always unusually visible breakouts like Nanette or hours from enormously famous comedians like Mulaney, Chappelle, or Bo Burnham. Now, don’t get me wrong — I love Mike Birbiglia, and he’s hardly an unknown. But no one’s out here arguing that he’s as famous as Chappelle.

Despite this established track record of only picking famouses, the first Mulaney Emmy nomination was Writing for Comeback Kid, long before he ascended to everyone’s parasocial squeeze. So it’s not like this never happens. But it still feels unusual. Do you have any theories about why this relatively insidery list of comedians were recognized this year? Was there some big mainstream-appeal-type special that got overlooked in favor of them?

JDF: It’s useful to think about why others didn’t get a nomination. There are only so many notable specials a year from big-name comedians. Two such specials — Tig Notaro’s Hello Again and Jenny Slate’s Seasoned Professional — were really hurt by being on Prime Video, a streamer not particularly known for stand-up that also doesn’t make it easy to find its stand-up offerings. Otherwise, the specials that most reasonably could be nominated here are the ones nominated for Outstanding Special, right? Though Chappelle won this category in 2020, The Closer wasn’t nominated, and you can imagine writer types getting tired of his thing. Trevor Noah’s gifts as a comedian are not in his writing. So, for me, the real question is, why doesn’t Nikki Glaser get nominated? And, relatedly, why does John Early?

To be clear, I would die for both of these specials, but Early’s Now More Than Ever is made up of like 50 percent non-written content (cover songs and improvised backstage sketches), where Glaser’s Someday You’ll Die is probably the best joke-craft special in recent memory. It could just be voters’ sense of humor, but moreso, I think the Writing voters don’t see great joke-writing as being as notable as the overall crafting of a comedic piece. Even if you don’t get or like the specific comedy in any of the four stand-up nominees — and even if you don’t watch them! — you know what is significant about them: All four, especially the three one-person shows, got a lot of reverent highbrow press. And writers, unlike the general voting body, read. Also, all four appeared on my podcast, Good One, this spring. And Mike Birbiglia was the subject of a documentary version of Good One on Peacock.

KVA: Well, I think we’ve answered the question right there — Good One in both podcast and Peacock form has become the most influential voice in Emmy nominations. You heard it here first, kids.

My read of the Glaser vs. Early situation is, believe it or not, essentially the same as the “Is The Bear a comedy or a drama?” argument. That Early special, which is unquestionably hilarious, is also doing something with a more prestige-appeal valence. It’s weird, it’s a little snide, it’s formally inventive, it’s not doing jokes about longing for gangbangs. Glaser, from a very glancing stylistic consideration, looks like a multicam by comparison. I don’t think it’s entirely a sense of humor thing; it’s a sense of What Counts As Important thing.

To that end, both Alex Edelman’s Just for Us and Jacqueline Novak’s Get on Your Knees are the big-win contenders. They hit that tasty Emmys “it’s more of a one-person show” level of snobbery, and they’ve been building “real ones know” fandoms for a while before the specials were released. What do you think?

JDF: I believe Alex will win. It reads as the most “important” work because antisemitism is more “serious” than blowjobs, and being serious tends to be equated with “good” when awards come around. I also think there will be a portion of the general voting audience who won’t totally “get” the humor of Get on Your Knees. There is a small chance Early wins just because he is maybe the most famous, in that he has starred on a television show. I think Birbiglia should win. I don’t think his special is the best of the four, but it’s hard for me to imagine any of these four specials existing without Birbiglia’s influence. If Edelman wins, he should pull a Ving Rhames and give the statue to Birbiglia.

KVA: I tend to agree that Edelman will win, and although there are other specials from this Emmys period I like better, I could definitely live with that outcome. The direction nominees are a trickier situation. Unlike writing, there’s a less coherent sense of taste and perspective in the directing group, and that in part points to how this category becomes that one weird kitchen drawer where you throw everything that doesn’t go anywhere else. The Tony Awards, the Oscars, Chappelle, Tig, Trevor Noah, and a perfectly nice special celebrating the life of Dick Van Dyke! How is one to compare?

JDF: It seems pretty noteworthy that Natasha Lyonne wasn’t nominated for directing Get on Your Knees, since she is famous and that special had a clear visual style. So then we go back to the five stand-up comedians theory. The voters needed to fill out the ballot, there are only so many special events, and these are the comedians they know. Nothing against the direction, but I can’t say there is anything distinctive about any of these three. And I’m not sure that matters, because putting aside Bo Burnham and Inside, as he is a director himself and that was a clearly directed piece, this category has only gone to a regular stand-up special once. So, I think this one will probably go to the Tonys. Congrats to the Tony Awards. Come be on Good One.