Christmas expects generosity, Valentine’s Day demands romance, and Thanksgiving has somehow survived generations of family arguments. The holidays have excellent public relations, considering how much trouble they cause.
Anna Manis found a comedy premise in that contradiction. Stand Up and Laugh with Anna Manis was developed as a series of stand-up specials roasting different holidays, bringing comedians together to find the ridiculous side of celebrations people are usually expected to cherish.
The concept suits Manis, whose career has taken her through New York comedy clubs, improvisational theater, and television hosting. It also creates opportunities for other comedians to put their own irreverent interpretations on traditions everyone recognizes.
Giving the Holiday Calendar a Hard Time
Holiday comedy has a dependable supply of human behavior to work with. People who barely speak throughout the year suddenly share a dinner table, romantic partners negotiate expectations nobody has clearly explained, and entire families participate in traditions that stopped making sense several generations ago.
The celebrations are familiar enough that comedians can introduce an absurd perspective without spending several minutes explaining the circumstances. A disastrous family gathering or an overly ambitious romantic gesture needs little introduction.
But roasting a holiday is different from telling a few seasonal jokes. A roast gives the comedian permission to challenge the occasion itself, including the customs, sentimental expectations, and social rules that people usually accept without much resistance.
Consider Valentine’s Day, when an ordinary evening can become an expensive test of how well someone understands romance. The contrast between genuine affection and the pressure to demonstrate it offers endless opportunities for exaggeration, especially when people begin treating restaurant reservations and flower arrangements as measures of devotion.
Christmas offers another collection of contradictions. There is the expectation of peace and goodwill, the frantic preparation required to achieve them, and the familiar experience of discovering that even a carefully planned celebration cannot control everyone’s behavior.
These are possibilities inherent in the holiday-roast premise, rather than descriptions of jokes performed in the series. The concept accommodates different comedic styles because the occasions themselves contain so many recognizable frustrations.
In February 2023, Manis appeared on Cocktails with Dimples & The Beard, where the episode description identified Stand Up and Laugh as a collection of comedy specials built around roasting holidays throughout the year.
Instead of asking comedians to approach one broad subject such as relationships or everyday life, the series gives them a more specific target. Each celebration comes with its own customs, expectations, and opportunities for mischief.
Three Guest Comedians Share the December Lineup
The December 9, 2022 installment, Stand Up and Laugh at the Holidays, featured Jeremy Hall, Missy Hall, and Cortney Warner, with Manis credited as host and Eric Lowy as director.
The guest comedians brought professional backgrounds of their own. Jeremy and Missy Hall were already an established comedy couple, performing together and discussing their relationship through their podcast The Hall Way.
Their experience extended beyond appearing on the same bill. The pair had worked together before becoming romantically involved, and their comedy careers included live performances in different venues and cities.
Missy Grynkiewicz-Hall had released comedy recordings and worked as a warm-up comic for Harry Connick Jr. Her earlier credits also included acting and singing, giving her a performance background that reached beyond conventional stand-up.
Jeremy Hall developed his comedy career through open-mic appearances and live shows in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore areas. In a 2022 interview with The Unionville Times, he described his enjoyment of hosting and the responsibility of establishing the tone of an evening.
Their appearance in the same holiday episode adds an intriguing professional relationship to the lineup. Two comedians who know one another personally and have shared stages bring different histories to a program than performers meeting for an isolated booking.
Cortney Warner added another background. Born in South Korea and raised in Ohio, Warner developed a stand-up career that included touring, independent comedy projects, and published satire.
Her self-produced debut special, Pointy Boys, was released in 2022. She later appeared in comedy clubs across the country and developed additional work involving live shows, writing, and roast comedy.
The three performers therefore arrived with different experiences in stand-up, writing, and entertainment. The December episode brought them under a common holiday theme without requiring them to share a single comedic identity.
For Manis, hosting a lineup with several established performers meant occupying a different position from delivering a solo routine. The show was built around a collection of comedic voices, with the presenter providing its recurring identity.
From the Comedy Club to the Studio Audience
Stand Up and Laugh was also designed for an audience beyond the people physically attending a performance.
A Nashville event listing for the series invited people to become part of a live studio audience while comedians performed for a production intended to reach viewers on screen. The listing advertised an evening show with tickets required for admission.
That format places live comedy within two entertainment environments at once. The comedians perform for people who can react immediately, while the finished recording can reach viewers who were not present.
The relationship between a comedian and a live audience is unusually direct. Laughter can interrupt a sentence, a joke may produce an unexpected response, and a performer sometimes discovers that the audience has interpreted a line differently from the way it was intended.
A studio recording must accommodate those reactions while preserving a performance that remains understandable when watched elsewhere. The laughter belongs to the original occasion, but the timing and delivery must also work for people encountering the material through a screen.
Comedy television has a long history of using live audiences to retain that connection. From televised stand-up showcases to variety programs, the room’s response can become part of the experience rather than something deliberately excluded from the recording.
Manis has worked in both environments. Her official résumé includes Comic Strip Live, Flappers Comedy Club, QED, and Broadway Comedy Club, alongside television and live-event hosting credits.
Her theatrical training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and experience with improvisation extend that background into other forms of performance. These disciplines involve different kinds of preparation, but they share the immediate demands of presenting material before an audience.
The studio-audience format allows Stand Up and Laugh to occupy that intersection between live performance and recorded entertainment.
Anna Manis Has Explored More Than One Comedy Format
Manis’s television work also includes Dodging Reality with Anna, a comedy sketch and music variety project discussed during her February 2023 interview on Cocktails with Dimples & The Beard.
Unlike a stand-up showcase organized around guest comedians, sketch comedy creates opportunities for written characters, fictional situations, and recurring comic premises. A music variety format introduces another kind of performance with its own pacing and presentation.
The two projects represent different entertainment interests within Manis’s career. Stand Up and Laugh uses live stand-up and guest performers, while Dodging Reality was developed around comedy sketches and musical variety.
Her Backstage profile lists Dodging Reality as a 2023 television credit and identifies her as host of Stand Up and Laugh with Anna Manis. IMDb also records her participation in both productions.
Manis’s interest in comedy has extended beyond appearing in front of a camera. She has worked with performers through television projects and has hosted Stand Up and Laugh Chats, an interview series featuring comedians and musicians.
Missy Hall, who appeared in the December holiday episode, is among the guests in that interview archive. The connection brings the same comedian into two different kinds of entertainment associated with Manis: one centered on performance and the other on conversation.
The two formats also serve different purposes. A stand-up showcase gives the performer space to entertain an audience through a routine, while an interview can explore the experiences and personality behind the work.
Together with her live comedy credits, these projects reflect Manis’s sustained involvement in presenting entertainment rather than a single excursion into television.
There Is Always Another Holiday to Roast
A holiday-roast series has one advantage over a comedy program built entirely around topical headlines: its subjects return every year. The rituals endure, even when the people participating in them find new ways to make a mess.
That familiarity gives comedians plenty of room to work. A celebration can be affectionate, frustrating, absurd, or all three, depending on whose version of the occasion is being told.
Stand Up and Laugh with Anna Manis built its premise around that shared experience, with the December 2022 episode featuring Jeremy Hall, Missy Hall, and Cortney Warner. Manis’s combination of comedy-club experience and television hosting provides the professional backdrop to a show that puts several performers in front of the same audience.
The holidays already have countless traditions. Giving comedians a chance to roast them may be one of the more entertaining additions.
