Outside Pantages Theatre on a chilly, late April evening in downtown Minneapolis, a crowd waits to get into a Maria Bamford comedy show. Fans angle up their phones for marquee selfies before they obey an usher’s shouts to get in line. I’m there to find out if anyone has come to see Jackie Kashian—Bamford’s amuse-bouche. 

“Don’t know her,” says a flannel-clad, 40-something husband. Neither does his wife. I ask a late-60s woman from Eden Prairie waiting for her friends about Kashian. She says, “I think I know who she is. If I could see a picture of her, I’d know.”

Another fan named Dolly, 27, wears dangly plastic earrings shaped like 100-length cigarettes and hits a vape a few steps from the entrance. She’s there for Bamford, too, a fan ever since she watched Old Baby, Bamford’s 2017 Netflix special. But she knows Kashian a little bit, from Instagram. 

These ticket holders are in for a treat. They don’t know that Kashian is a master of the craft, beloved friend to fellow comics, and joke workhorse who started performing stand-up at 19 while she earned a B.A. in political science at University of Wisconsin. Before college and comedy, the eventual Twin Citian grew up just outside Milwaukee with four brothers and a sister, raised by their father and stepmother, a household that makes its way into Kashian’s sets. Comedian Laurie Kilmartin, Kashian’s friend and podcast co-host, describes the Kashians as a “wild, rambling family of feral siblings.” 

Sorta like a David Sedaris essay? 

“No,” Kilmartin clarifies. “Jackie is telling the truth.”

Acme Origins

After college, when her comedy compatriots left for Chicago, Kashian moved to Minneapolis. Here, Acme Comedy Co. became her home club—that’s an affectionate show business term that Racket contributor Patrick Strait defines as “a sacred space where comedians first cut their teeth and find a sense of belonging in an art form that can be isolating and lonely.” While Kashian was trekking down the stairs to the basement of North Loop’s Itasca Lofts building for stage time, she lived in the Seward neighborhood and would frequent the 400 Bar as well as “the skid dive bar down the block. Huge fan,” she says. “Before I got my DUI.” She took the infraction as “a hint that you might not be good at drinking,” got sober, and moved to L.A. in 1997.

Kashian’s been married for two decades. No kids. She and her husband kept a pet iguana for a dozen years. Now they have dogs. And a mother-in-law. Kashian tours with her comedian friend, work wife, and fellow Minnesota-to-L.A. transplant Bamford around 20 weekends of the year, and on her own for another 20 to 25 dates. She has performed on Conan, The Late Late Show, and 2 Dope Queens. As a semi-finalist on season six of Last Comic Standing, “she destroyed a huge theater in Glendale” according to Bamford. Kashian has produced albums and hour-long specials every three to four years since 2004. 

She released her seventh special, Alter-Kashian, this past February. Onstage at Portland, Oregon’s Siren Theater, where Alter-Kashian was filmed, Kashian wears green-framed glasses that match the velvet curtain backdrop. Underneath her wavy auburn bob, a purposefully mismatched set of earrings adorns her lobes: a lucky cat and a shamrock. Her denim jacket, decorated with a skull on the button seam and airbrushed patriotic paint along the chest and sleeves, is further accessorized with three pins: Spooky Reading Girl and Meat Shield pins, which commemorate two of Kashian’s previous albums; the third a replica of a World War II-era pin she purchased at the French Resistance Museum in Paris. The jacket was originally worn by Xochitl Gomez, the actress who played America Chavez in Marvel’s 2022 film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Underneath, Kashian wears a red T-shirt that says “AUNTIFA: Aunties Against Facism” and light-green plaid, tapered ankle Debbie Harry x Wildfang trousers with a faux-wallet chain.

Kashian looks cool and effortless, an effect achieved by selecting her apparel with a great deal of care. Just like her set, which is deliberate, detail-oriented, and delivered with practiced professionalism. She gets her first big laugh from a joke about sending the Heritage Foundation into space, then another when she uses her middle-aged lady bod to poke fun at misdirected white-woman rage. In mother-in-law territory, where other comics might get mean, Kashian compliments her live-in elder and jokes about assembling pill organizers, calling the activity “craft night.” Kashian’s contralto still sounds Sconnie, with harrrd Midwesterrrn Rs. She’s got the brusk “c’mon, folks!” delivery of a gruff P.E. teacher who harbors compassion for the scared-of-the-ball kids when scrimmages go aggro.

“I’m not a fighter,” Kashian jokes in Alter-Kashian, explaining her temperament and life philosophy via Dungeons & Dragons analogy. “In D&D you get a lot of stats and you put them in different abilities. I have spent none of my stats on fighter. Absolutely none. I have no strength; I have no dexterity. I don’t have any agility. I have no aim. I put all of my levels in Bard. I’ve got wisdom and I’ve got charisma.”

Structurally, Alter-Kashian is virtuosic, with hilarious zingers and clever runners that play on altercation, joking about anger, picking fights, and road rage. Kilmartin loves how Kashian jokes about being full of bees, which has tapped into and “brilliantly articulated a low hum through society right now.” Kashian gives a considerate warning at minute 53 about imminent dick jokes, then a butt sex bit that leads into the climax.

One section of the special, set up for shock value, covers Kashian’s habit of driving while on her phone. So I’m not totally surprised when, at our appointed interview time, she crackles into view on my computer screen from her 2013 Toyota Corolla. She’s driving. Her comedian friend Anna Valenzuela holds up the phone so Kashian can make eye contact with me. As a practitioner of good-example-screen-free-mom-of-teenagers driving, I tell her to put the phone down. Audio is fine!

Storytelling with Punchlines

For her run of five upcoming shows at Acme, Kashian plans to perform material from Alter-Kashian, plus new work. She’s been writing furiously since the special was filmed, a process where she comes up with a premise and a punchline and, over many months, tightens it up and generates more punchlines and tags. (Tags—I had to look the term up—are additional punchlines that extend the laugh without requiring any set up.) Kilmartin praises-slash-laments Kashian’s relentless determination to arrive at the best version of a joke: “When she gets her teeth in a premise, she will take it and chew it until there’s nothing left on that bone. She does not quit.” 

Kashian concurs. 

“Sometimes I record an album,” she says. “And then one week later, I write a tag that would be the greatest tag that should have been on the album, but it’s a gift for those who come to see me live.” 

Collaboration helps, too. When Kashian is on the road with Bamford, they sometimes drive between one-nighter gigs and do a thing they call “joke machine,” where they help each other come up with a surplus of punchlines or angles. 

Kashian describes her comedy as storytelling with punchlines. She says it’s clean, but when I quibble about the bawdy ending of Alter-Kashian, she says, “It’s clean with adult content that can be sanitized for corporate events. There’s part of me that wishes I could be that squeaky clean, crazy comic, because then I would fill stadiums.” 

She then mentions a trip to Iraq with fellow clean comic Nate Bargatze in the mid-aughts, the kind of military tour described in her 2014 special This Will Make an Excellent Horcrux. Several years later Bargatze would be setting attendance records at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center, headlining the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand, hosting Saturday Night Live, and appearing at a crasser-than-fiction MAGA spectacle. 

Podcasting for Joke Love

It’s hard to imagine Kashian as a lone wolf top dog, not because she doesn’t have the talent or the work ethic, but because stadium stardom feels incompatible with her whole deal. 

Take, for example, her podcasts. The Dork Forest, which Kashian began on Bandcamp with shitty sound, just celebrated its 20-year anniversary. Twenty years! Podcasts were only invented in 2004; Joe Rogan and Marc Maron didn’t start their shows until 2009. As the Dork Forest host, Kashian interviews guests about their hobbies and obsessions. On a recent episode about Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way creativity self-help program, Kashian tenderly coaches Bamford through a recording software glitch, mid-convo. 

Sometimes the guests are funny and fascinating, with riveting obsessions, like Twin Cities comedian Brandi Brown, who’s slated to open for Kashian at Acme. Brown has appeared on The Dork Forest to discuss Canada, SCOTUS, Minnesota caucuses, and State Fair crop art. On other episodes, the guest just wants to talk about their Trader Joe’s shopping list. Either way, Kashian stays engaged. Indulgent, like an avuncular memory care unit staff member willing to discuss the weather for the 300th time. Before lunch.

Kashian co-hosts her other podcast, The Jackie and Laurie Show, with Kilmartin. The two comics met at Tough Crowd, an early-aughts Comedy Central talk show hosted by Colin Quinn. Kilmartin wrote for the show and Kashian was a panelist. The format was four comedians (never more than one female at a time) bantering about pop culture with surplus machismo. 

Just over a decade ago, Kilmartin and Kashian started their podcast. They fill an hour a week with comedy talk, often logging on from the road, unscripted, no guests, with as-is sound quality. “It’s kind of gritty because we’re kind of gritty and we’re just two stand-ups talking about stand-up,” Kilmartin says. Brown’s a listener, and knows many other comics who appreciate Kashian’s and Kilmartin’s inside baseball gift to the comedy community.

On The Dork Forest’s support-the-show intro, Kashian tells her listeners that the show costs $10,000 per year to produce, encouraging folks to chip in a hundred bucks each. As she drives through her Van Nuys neighborhood with me on her screen, face down on the console, she tells me that The Dork Forest nets around $6,000 dollars a year. The Jackie and Laurie Show makes about the same. (These sorts of paltry returns are not rare as the industry deals with the death of the comedy middle class, as recently explored in great detail by comic Chris Gethard.) 

How does she reconcile the gap between operating costs and revenue? “I supplement it with my stand-up career,” she says. Is she genuinely making the show out of love, for nearly 900 episodes? “Yup. Love of the game. Here’s the thing about The Dork Forest: I really like doing it. The Dork Forest makes me laugh.”

The Nicest Funny Lady

For all of Kashian’s professed hostility on Alter-Kashian, her colleagues portray her as a connector, a coach, and a confidante. Brown says that Kashian’s “a mainstay, a great resource and asset for comedians, in general, but especially women. If I need advice or want to vent on, say, gender balance, Kashian gives good advice.” Kashian is the type of friend who will run errands, drive out of the way to drop something off, and bring meals if someone’s had surgery. “She’s thoughtful and helpful in a way that would probably embarrass her to be told,” Kilmartin says.

Since early in their careers, Kashian has especially supported Bamford, who famously incorporates jokes about her oft-precarious mental health into her act. Bamford, who’s regularly touted as one of the greatest stand-ups ever, tells me they met “on a ladies of laughter night, where they put all the people who never get stage time on one show.” When Bamford started to headline, her subversive, performance-art-adjacent bits would make crowds angry. “Sometimes I would bomb so badly, Jackie would switch places and become the headliner for the rest of the week,” Bamford remembers. 

Kashian often champions other comics. She quotes other people’s acts, hyping them to peers. She takes calls and texts about contract questions. She sells native bee pins and donates proceeds. She brings tomato sandwiches to passengers on airplanes. Honestly, all the rah-rah about how Kashian’s a connective hub in comedy gets repetitive. Kashian connects this (unpaid) facet of her career to her upbringing. 

“It stems from being the youngest of six,” she says. “Because I like to be around a lot of people. And the more people you’re around, the less sort of deep conversations you have to have, and the more fun it is, right? So if it’s everybody just sitting around out to breakfast, telling stories, nobody has to hear that someone has bunions or whatever. Hanging out with comics is always fun because there’s always a funny story.”

I don’t 100% buy Kashian’s I-just-like-to-laugh reasoning. I think she’s more special than that. More nurturing. Like a lot of ladies, she can be selfless. Maybe to the detriment of her own financial success. Take, for example, one of her carefully phrased credits. She once recorded a segment with Ira Glass about a family tragedy, but Kashian says that when This American Life producers insisted on speaking to Kashian’s aunt about it, Kashian refused, to protect her family from further emotional damage.

Take, for example, this very profile. I hesitate to include this next part because it makes me look bad. But the events leading up to this story further illustrate Kashian’s magnanimous spirit, so I’ll go ahead and share it. A couple months ago, I knew less about Jackie Kashian than Dolly with the nicotine fetish outside the Pantages. I like comedy a regular amount. Maybe a little more than the average person. Not enough to know anything about Jackie Kashian. 

But I’m a huge podcast-head, so when I heard Kashian introduced as a “pillar of the Twin Cities comedy community” with a 20-year-old podcast on an episode of The Daily Zeitgeist, I did not google her. I did not skim an AI overview. I did not click a Wiki. I went straight to jackiekashian.com and, emboldened by her folksy “You can contact me. It’s an attainable goal,” message on the “contact” page, I filled out her web form and asked for an interview. In-person. She could tell I was a dummy from 1,800 miles away, but instead of ignoring my request, she politely pointed out our geographic difference and suggested a Zoom (from the literal road), and answered all of my questions, with hilarious panache. She was so nice. Even her cinematographer co-pilot, Anna Valenzuela, signed off the call with effusive enthusiasm for Minneapolis.   

Now, you can’t “discover” someone who’s had a podcast since before the iPod Touch went to market, who was on TV making wobbly jokes about Madonna’s first children’s book, who’s uploaded over 2,000 videos to her YouTube channel that boasts close to 10,000 subscribers. But I can report that a first time visit to Kashian’s online and audio prolificity feels like wandering into a Narnia-like wardrobe portal into The Dork Forest multi-verse. As I’ve giggled at her jokes, I’ve noticed that she wears the off-balance charm earrings often, maybe as a subtle, fun fashion reminder that we’re lucky to have her. 

Jackie Kashian
When: June 24-27
Where: Acme Comedy Co., 708 N. First St., Minneapolis
Tickets: $23.75-$43.75; find more info here