The ripple effect of COVID-19 shutting down live, in-person performances will reverberate for years to come. Along with the rows of big time live tours and tapings for both specials and albums for comedians had to be indefinitely put on hold, there are untold numbers of small time productions of albums, specials, big time one-offs, etc. that just didn’t get to happen in 2020.

Atlanta’s Andy Sandford had slated a taping for a full hour special in 2020 right around when every single type of in-person gathering (that wasn’t grocery shopping) was prohibited. Added on top of having to pre-empt that taping, Sandford encounter non-COVID-19 and COVID-19 issues, all while the world felt as close to ending as many of us have ever encountered, leading to only getting around to having hour shot, edited, and released to just about a week ago, November 2022.

That’s all to say that the artisanal quality of Andy Sandford’s jokes were worth the wait (such was the case before the pandemic).

All of his material is remarkably balanced on almost every level, a rare quality in comedian these days. There’s complete truth, abject abursity, hard punchlines, frank vulnerability (sometimes in the form of talking head interview clips), callbacks, getting meta with old jokes, wordplay, vivid imagery, etc. etc. Andy goes to great lengths to seamlessly blend all of those elements (a lesser comedian might seem sporadic and uneven trying to check all those boxes simultaneously) into beautifully intricate scaffolding constructing the hour of Basket Case. Even when he makes his COVID jokes, they feel less like well-trodden territory (see most comedians’ COVID jokes about any number of things they ate or put in their mouth when growing up and consequently “not being scared of COVID”) and fresh, sharp jokes on what might be the most relatable topic in all of human history.

Sandford left NYC after a decade and now resides back in Atlanta, which means Basket Case, now streaming for free on YouTube courtesy of 800 Pound Gorilla, is probably your best chance to see Sandford ASAP (i.e. how you should generally go and see him).