Michael Kosta serves a love game of comedy at the Kennedy Center

I don’t see too many standup-comedy shows these days, but it was intriguing on a whim to grab tickets to Michael Kosta for last night’s early show at the Kennedy Center.

Kosta is probably the funniest of the very funny crew staffing the desk at The Daily Show, and I would pick him as the logical heir to Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah (who incidentally was the last standup artist I saw).

Kosta offered an impressive array of jokes, with many of them riffing for the Washington D.C. crowd on all our funny inside lingo and acronyms (DOJ, DOD, NGO …). He told bits on how concussed and ape-like everybody having to do with the NFL is, how he nods blankly along to what his wife’s plans are for them 18 Saturdays from now, and how Trump’s whole deportation plan is really just an elaborate scheme to finally unload Melania.

But I love his tennis-inpired comedy the most. His stories on the differences between the U.S. Open in Queens, New York and Wimbledon are brilliant. I did know that he has a recurring mini-show on The Tennis Channel called Warm & Fuzzy, in which he interviews the pros (he once was a pro himself, peaking at #864 in the world, which is really good, but no, he never played Wimbledon, “it’s not an 11-month-long tournament”).

What I didn’t know until now is that he has a weekly podcast called Tennis Anyone with Michael Kosta. I’m now subscribed and the first episode I listened to was excellent. In it, he discusses Rafael Nadal’s retirement and notes both his worship of Nadal and the fact that he has no idea whether Nadal will continue to actually be a good person or not from here on. He offers an equally hot take on Jon Wertheim, saying it’s ridiculous that Werheim was suspended as a commentator for The Tennis Channel for being caught off camera saying something about Barbora Krejcikova’s forehead. I agree with Kosta: big whoop, this is a non-controversy that has been turned into something totally overblown. Get Wertheim back on TV. Kosta finally veers a little into politics with some intelligent observations about the oddly strong turnout for Trump when Trump and his ilk typically seek voter suppression.

Kosta is proving himself to be a dual powerhouse of comedy and political analysis. He’s making me want to always catch The Daily Show and his podcast is now my favorite tennis podcast over Jimmy Connors’ Advantage Conners.

And there’s even more to look forward to from this busy man. GQ has a great article about Kosta’s journey from the pro-tennis circuit into comedy, which will be the focus of his book—Lucky Loser—arriving in a few months.