Nick Swardson is easily one of the top 50 most famous standup comedians to ever come out of St. Paul Central High School. Most recently, he performed 100+ shows (by his estimation) during his last standup tour, appeared in one of the most-watched movies in Netflix history (Happy Gilmore 2 was the streamer’s biggest U.S. movie debut ever), and became the first comedian to ever record a special at First Avenue.
The only thing it seems like Swardson hasn’t done lately is boozed.
“I feel awesome,” Swardson says, sitting in the lobby of Minneapolis's Hewing Hotel. “I quit drinking a year ago. I just kind of decided I had had enough. I always like to tell people, ‘I won drinking.’ There’s nothing more that I can do. I was the MVP.”
Last year, Swardson went viral for being fucked up onstage during a show in Colorado. After being escorted off the stage only minutes into his set, videos of the disastrous performance began circulating online, leading to concerns about his wellbeing. While it was certainly not his finest moment, Swardson insists the incident wasn’t what led to his recent sobriety.
“I’ve always been very open about enjoying drinking. I love it. I’ve drank before shows for almost 30 years. I had a handful of cocktails, some edibles because it’s fucking Colorado, and I was in a great mood. Then it all hit me when I hit the stage,” the 48-year-old Minnesota native recalls. “The next day I woke up to hundreds of texts about rehab and public apologies. It was crazy. The funny thing is that the people close to me blew it off. They were like, ‘Yeah that’s Nick. He brain-farted.’ I wasn’t proud of it or bragging about it, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the first person to ever get high and drunk in Colorado.”
Regardless of the initial spark, Swardson says the sobriety helped speed up his creativity, leading him to complete several new projects in the past year alone.
“This last tour was the first one I ever did completely sober,” he says. “I also wrote a TV pilot and finished four screenplays, and then I was in Happy Gilmore 2, which was like the biggest streaming movie ever. So yeah, sobriety helped me exponentially.”
The scripts, he says, are in various phases of development, but he hopes to get the first off the ground by the end of the year.
“I look at my life and the fact I’m coming up on being 50 and it’s like; you want to put in all your effort towards the finish line," he says. "I don’t want to look back at 85 and be like, ‘Look at all those movies I thought of! Let me put the pedal to the metal with my grey pubic hair.’”
Swardson doesn’t want to give away too much about his new projects before they come to fruition. He says that fans of his past hits, like Grandma’s Boy, Bucky Larson, or Malibu's Most Wanted, won’t be surprised that they share the same silly, insane sensibilities. But just because they might include suburban gangsters and pornstars with small dicks, Swardson says he doesn’t consider his movies to be made for dummies or by dummies.
“One thing I get offended by is when people say, ‘I love your movies. They’re so stupid but they’re so funny.’ I’ll call them out and say, ‘Why did you have to say it was stupid?’ and then they backtrack,” he says. “It annoys me. First of all, it’s really hard to write a movie. Second, if something is stupid, it’s because we know it is. It’s just like with my standup when people say, ‘Oh that’s so dumb.’ I know it is. I don’t just rely on diarrhea jokes, but I include one in every special because that’s what people think of me so I double-down. I know what’s going on. I’m a part of it.”
Local audiences have had the chance to see what the 2025 version of Nick Swardson comedy is like several times this past year, as he decided to record his new special at First Avenue this past winter. And then again in the spring.
“I did the special twice in December and I just wasn’t happy with it,” he says. “I didn’t even watch the first cut. I knew what I wanted to do with it, and I knew we didn’t get it, so we came back in May and did it again.”
The second take was a keeper, and Swardson says he’s in the editing phase with plans to have the new special out in the world by the end of 2025.
“We live in a world now where I can just drop it on YouTube,” he says. “As a comedian, you’re always worried about people having similar material and things like that. You just want everything out there. So when the streamers say that their schedules are full for the year and you might need to wait a year or two before they’re ready, it’s just sort of like, ‘Fuck it. I’ll do it myself.’”
The one thing he did have to thank the streamers for (or more specifically, the streaming subscribers), was the massive success of his buddy Adam Sandler’s new film, Happy Gilmore 2, which features Swardson in a small but crucial role: In a flashback, Swardson plays an old-timey golf legend, who unlocks the key to helping golfers hit freakishly long drives. He also gets a golf shoe up his ass, naturally.
“[Sandler] conceived this part for me, and when he told me about it I didn’t even know what he was talking about,” Swardson laughs. “He goes, ‘Just trust me.’ And you know, it’s his vision so I was up for anything he wanted. I was just very honored to be asked to be a part of it in any capacity. Sandler has become one of my best friends, and working together has sort of felt normal. But then with Happy Gilmore it felt surreal again. Like this is a movie I saw when I was 16 or 17 at Galtier Plaza, and now I’m a part of the franchise.”
While Swardson is still very much pushing himself creatively, he has become a comedy veteran who is able to offer advice to the next generation of comedians.
“The advice I give young comics all the time is to just keep creating. Keep writing,” he says. “Don’t just be satisfied with one thing. For me, people were like, ‘You wrote a screenplay. Go do that next.’ But I’m like no, I’m going to write three more. I’m going to write a TV pilot. I feel like right now I’m firing on all four cylinders. And that goes back to quitting drinking. It’s easier to fire on all four cylinders when you have all four. No one ever says, ‘I’m firing on all one cylinder.’”
