At this point in his career, veteran stand-up Nick Di Paolo doesn’t pull any punches. He’s made a name for himself as one of the most honest comics around, so if he upsets someone looking for political correctness in his comedy, he doesn’t care.

“I’ll have a table of people get up and leave,” Di Paolo told Revue. “It’s usually college-age kids who believe in safe spaces and they get offended by my act. They’re coming from a whole different world. It’s not their fault they’ve been brainwashed to think that life is a thing you go through without feeling uncomfortable. I don’t know how the f*** that idea came about. Sometimes I find myself just saying shit just to annoy those people. This country was built on freedom of speech and that’s all we have left.”

An unabashed nerd with a love for video games, cartoons and even cosplay, comedian Ron Funches is just a great big kid at heart.

So it’s striking to find out the reason why the LaughFest headliner first got into standup. It wasn’t so he could avoid growing up. It was actually because he had to – and fast – when his son was diagnosed with autism.

“I was just working at dead-end jobs, but once I had my son I was like, ‘I better figure out a career,’” Funches said. “And standup was the only thing that I was willing to start at the bottom at. It was the only thing I felt I could see myself working hard at and doing for the rest of my life. So it was really because of my son being born that helped push me to get this started.”