Norm MacDonald

New comedy is a streaming-era wave of stand‑up and humorous spoken performance that blends classic joke craft with podcast sensibilities, autobiographical storytelling, and highly shareable short‑form clips. It thrives on platforms that favor rapid audience discovery (streaming services, social media reels, and podcasts), and often blurs lines between traditional club sets, live albums, and long‑form specials. Compared with earlier comedy album eras, new comedy emphasizes confessional material, cultural commentary, and digital‑native pacing, while keeping the live, in‑the‑room energy of stand‑up at its core.

Sketch comedy is a performance-based audio genre built around short, scripted comedic scenes featuring distinct characters, clear premises, and punchy twists. Rather than a continuous narrative, it presents self-contained bits that showcase heightened situations, wordplay, and rapid-fire timing. On record and radio, sketch comedy relies on dialogue-driven humor supported by sound design: stings, foley, crowd cues, and music bumpers. Its format favors memorable catchphrases, escalating stakes, and callbacks that reward attentive listeners. The result is a fast-moving mix of satire, absurdism, and character-driven jokes designed for laugh-per-minute impact.

Non-music is an umbrella category for recorded audio whose primary purpose is not musical performance. It encompasses spoken word, speeches, interviews, poetry readings, comedy, audio documentaries, instructional recordings, field recordings, sound effects, and other forms of organized sound meant to inform, narrate, document, or entertain without relying on melody or conventional song structure. Rather than emphasizing harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation, non-music foregrounds voice, text, ambient sound, narrative flow, informational content, and sonic texture. Its aesthetics range from raw, unedited actuality to highly produced studio works, and its scope spans archival preservation, education, performance art, and mass entertainment.

Comedy (as a music genre) comprises songs and recorded pieces designed primarily to make listeners laugh through parody, satire, wordplay, character voices, and situational humor. It often borrows the musical language of whatever is popular at the time—pop, rock, hip hop, folk, musical theatre—then subverts expectations with humorous lyrics, exaggerated performance, and sonic gags. Rooted in vaudeville and music hall traditions, comedy music ranges from novelty songs and topical ditties to elaborate pastiches and narrative sketches. It values comedic timing as much as musical craft, using hooks, rhyme, and arrangement to set up and deliver punchlines while remaining musically engaging.