A non-commercial archive of stand-up
Every comic.
Every special.
Every bit.
Ranked & remembered.
A hand-built home for the art of stand-up, and an argument about what's great. Made by one person, in public, for love rather than money.
- I
Discovery is systematic
The catalogue is filled broadly first, so judgment always works on a complete board, never a blank page. Obscure but important bits are logged with the gap flagged, never quietly dropped.
- II
Ranking is taste-driven
The lists are ordered by hand, one placement at a time. No algorithm, no crowd poll behind the numbers: a personal canon, argued and owned, with the reasoning shown.
- III
The list is alive
Comics and bits are added as they are watched and reconsidered, and everything stays re-rankable as the canon grows. A record kept in motion, not a monument poured once.
- IV
Always back to the source
Greatest Bits indexes the work; it never passes it off as its own. Nothing is hosted here. We prefer the artist's own channel and the major comedy networks; where no official upload exists, we embed long-standing public uploads the rights holders have left up. Every page points you back to the artist, and anything is taken down on request.
- V
Never fabricate
No invented link, quote, date, or attribution. Where something can't be verified, the gap is shown plainly rather than papered over.
the atom of stand-up — a single routine, joke, story, or sustained run that stands on its own. The project casts wide on type: built routines, long-form stories, one-liners, legendary crowd work, callbacks, act-outs.
"Carlin's Seven Words. Pryor's heart-attack act-out. A tight Hedberg one-liner run."
Two entities support every bit and link back to it: the comic who performs it, and the special — album, set, or broadcast — it came from. The model is built to stretch, so new kinds of entries can be added later without a rebuild.
Gather▸Style▸Rank
Gather and Style in progress · Rank next
The site is live and built up part by part. The home, the three lists, the Index, and per-comic pages are up, and profiles fill in era by era. The full ranking and the History come next, so today's lists carry a provisional order, flagged as illustrative until the real verdicts land.