A considerable amount of scholarly study has been done on the art of “Stand-Up” comedy, particular American Stand-Up, on its history and vaudevillian origins, and its impact on several fields such as teaching, public communication, politics, and culture. However, there is a striking absence of studies that quantitatively examine the origins and patterns of artistic influences on the work of American Stand-Up comedians. In this paper, we attempted to fill that gap. We analyzed artistic influence, an intrinsically unmeasurable variable, using a set of observable proxies. Using these proxies, we modeled artistic influences on American Stand-Up comedians as a social influence network and studied the diffusion of influence through this network. We found that chains of artistic influence on American Stand-Up comedians originated from times much older than the vaudevillian era of the late 1800s to early 1900s. Indeed, they originated from European writers of the late middle ages. We also found that an overwhelming volume (91.23%) of direct artistic influence on American Stand-Up comedians came from individuals who were at most two generations (50 years) older than the influenced comedians, and more than half (55.73%) of the direct influence came from individuals of the same generation. We found the total volume of artistic influence (direct and indirect) on the American Stand-Up comedians followed a pronounced Pareto pattern with 11.40% and 16.67% of influencers contributing respectively 79.64% and 90.06% of the total influence volume. We also found the social influence network of American Stand-Up comedians to exhibit “small-world” network behavior.