The Modern Life

These half-hour specials showcased some of the best up-and-coming comedians of the moment. The show was a pivotal stepping stone for many of today's stand-up stars.

Jonathan Ross's take on current topics of conversation, guest interviews and live music from both a guest music group and the house band.

The Ed Sullivan Show is an American TV variety show that originally ran on CBS from Sunday June 20, 1948 to Sunday June 6, 1971, and was hosted by New York entertainment columnist Ed Sullivan. It was replaced in September 1971 by the CBS Sunday Night Movie, which ran only one season and was eventually replaced by other shows. In 2002, The Ed Sullivan Show was ranked #15 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.

Host Zach Galifianakis conducts comical celebrity interviews sitting with his guests between two potted ferns on a sparse set, in the awkward style of low-budget community access cable channels.

Based on Scott Aukerman’s popular podcast of the same name, COMEDY BANG! BANG! cleverly riffs on the well-known format of the late night talk show, infusing celebrity appearances and comedy sketches with a tinge of the surreal. In each episode, Aukerman engages his guests with unfiltered and improvisational lines of questioning, punctuated by banter and beats provided by bandleader, one-man musical mastermind Reggie Watts, to reinvent the traditional celebrity interview. Packed with character cameos, filmic shorts, sketches and games set amongst an off-beat world, COMEDY BANG! BANG! delivers thirty minutes of absurd laugh-loaded fun featuring some of the biggest names in comedy.

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson is an American late-night talk show hosted by Scottish American comedian Craig Ferguson, who is the third regular host of the Late Late Show franchise. It follows Late Show with David Letterman in the CBS late-night lineup, airing weekdays in the US at 12:37 a.m. It is taped in front of a live studio audience from Monday to Friday at CBS Television City in Los Angeles, California, directly above the Bob Barker Studio. It is produced by David Letterman's production company Worldwide Pants Incorporated and CBS Television Studios. Since becoming host on January 3, 2005, after Craig Kilborn and Tom Snyder, Ferguson has achieved the highest ratings since the show's inception in 1995. While the majority of the episodes focus on comedy, Ferguson has also addressed difficult subject matter, such as the deaths of his parents, and undertaken serious interviews, such as one with Desmond Tutu, which earned the show a 2009 Peabody Award.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the world's problems. It's harder to pinpoint the systems responsible for creating them. In this series, Jon Stewart brings together people impacted by different parts of a problem to discuss how we come up with change.

Da Ali G Show is a British satirical television series created by and starring English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. In the series, Baron Cohen plays three unorthodox journalists: faux-streetwise poseur Ali G, Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev, and gay Austrian fashion enthusiast Brüno Gehard. These characters conduct real interviews with unsuspecting people, many of whom are celebrities, high-ranking government officials, and other well-known figures, during which they are asked absurd and ridiculous questions.

Late Night with David Letterman is a nightly hour-long comedy talk show on NBC that was created and hosted by David Letterman. It premiered in 1982 as the first incarnation of the Late Night franchise and went off the air in 1993, after Letterman left NBC and moved to Late Show on CBS. Late Night with Conan O'Brien then filled the time slot. As of March 2, 2009, the slot has been filled by Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. It will be filled by Seth Meyers in the spring of 2014, after Fallon becomes host of The Tonight Show.

Stepping into the late-late slot vacated by David Letterman, Conan O'Brien stars in a show that far outdoes its competition in sheer strangeness. Along with the celebrity interviews and musical numbers typical of late-night talk shows, this program make frequent use of odd walk-on characters and frequent "visits" from celebrity guests.