"Funniest Comedian ELAYNE BOOSLER vs JOEL KIM BOOSTER"

ELAYNE BOOSLER

Elayne Boosler (born August 18, 1952) is an American comedian. Boosler was born into a Jewish immigrant family and raised in Sheepshead Bay, Brookl...

Elayne Boosler (born August 18, 1952) is an American comedian. Boosler was born into a Jewish immigrant family and raised in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She was the youngest child and only daughter of her father, a Russian acrobat, and her mother, a Romanian ballerina. She attended public schools in Brooklyn, including Shellbank Junior High School and Sheepshead Bay High School. After a job as a singer/dancer in touring companies and many unsuccessful waitressing jobs, Boosler worked as a doorman at The Improvisation comedy club in New York City for two and a half years. While working there, she met comedian Andy Kaufman, a regular at the club, who convinced her she should do standup comedy. They lived together in Greenwich Village for three years and remained close friends until Kaufman's death. For her "comedy education" Boosler credits Kaufman as well as her other peers at the time, which included Freddie Prinze, Jay Leno, Larry David, Richard Lewis, Richard Belzer, Jimmie Walker, and Ed Bluestone. In 1986, Boosler became the first woman to get her own one-hour comedy special on cable when Showtime aired Party of One. Having no credit cards or borrowing power, Boosler saved her money to produce the special herself when cable executives told her that they did not believe people would tune in to see a woman do an hour of comedy. She successfully toured for 50 weeks a year performing a two-hour comedy show. Up to 2011, Boosler has done seven cable specials. Her one-hour standup comedy concert specials for Showtime include Party of One, Broadway Baby, Top Tomata (broadcast live from Omaha and voted Best Comedy Special of the Year by readers of Cable Guide magazine), and Live Nude Girls. Her New Year's Eve comedy-variety special, Elayne Boosler's Midnight Hour, was a 90-minute special from a Town Hall in New York and telecast live on Showtime. She wrote, directed, and acted in two half-hour movies for Cinemax: Comedy From Here (a drama) and The Call. Boosler hosted the short-lived game show Balderdash on PAX (now ION Television). Other television guest-hosting duties include A.M. San Francisco, The Late Show, The Midnight Special, Comic Strip Live, Friday Night Videos, The Gossip Show on E!, and many specials. She has contributed field pieces to many shows, including The Today Show, Not Necessarily the News, and Donny and Marie. In the early days of cable, Boosler wrote and hosted the Cable ACE Awards. Her specials were nominated every year they premiered. She has also written and hosted awards shows for the Writer's Guild of America (both west and east), for New York Women in Film and Television twice, for the Pollstar Awards three times, the Daytime Emmys, the "Casting Director's Guild," and many others.

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JOEL KIM BOOSTER

Joel Kim Booster (born February 29, 1988) is an American actor, comedian, and writer. He is best known for his Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents stand-...

Joel Kim Booster (born February 29, 1988) is an American actor, comedian, and writer. He is best known for his Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents stand-up special. Kim Booster was born in South Korea and was adopted by a white American couple as an infant. He was raised in Plainfield, Illinois in a conservative, Evangelical Christian family and was initially homeschooled. He went to public school for the first time when he was 16, which he described as his "first time being around non-religious people." He knew he was gay from childhood but kept it a secret. His senior year in high school, his parents found out he was gay by reading his diary where he had described his sexual encounters with other boys. Kim Booster moved out and began to couchsurf until he stayed with a family friend. He studied theater at Millikin University for his bachelor's degree. Living in Chicago, he took a job as a copywriter and began to perform in theater and write jokes after work. Kim Booster began his stand-up career in an unconventional fashion by opening up for plays in Chicago's theater scene. He moved to New York in 2014 to pursue a career in comedy. He performed a set on Conan in 2016. He then appeared in his own Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents special in 2017. Kim Booster has also written for the shows Billy on the Street, Big Mouth, and The Other Two. On November 3, 2018, he released his debut stand-up album, Model Minority. The material covers racism in the gay community, growing up Asian in a white community, and his own non-adherence to stereotypes about Asian Americans. Kim Booster has acted in various roles such as with Susan Sarandon in Viper Club, a YouTube original film, Netflix's The Week Of, on Hulu's Shrill starring Aidy Bryant. He co-stars as Jun Ho in the NBC comedy series Sunnyside. In 2019, he co-hosted a digital series called Unsend with Patti Harrison on Comedy Central. Kim Booster is a regular panelist on the NPR show Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! and had appeared multiple times. Kim Booster appeared on the December 8, 2020 episode of The George Lucas Talk Show with fellow guest Eliza Skinner.

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