Jason Salmon is a Texas-born, New York-based stand-up comedian and actor. He moved to New York for an engineering job, took acting classes, and worked through theatre, sketch and improv before he tried stand-up. His debut album, Force of Nurture, reached number one on iTunes, his Dry Bar Comedy special ranked among Dry Bar's top ten of 2022, and his special Biscuits & Gravity is on YouTube. His acting and voice credits include Orange Is the New Black and Red Dead Redemption 2. He films his next special at the State Theatre in Austin on 11 December 2026.
After a show in Texas, a man from the audience told Jason Salmon that watching him was like getting the best advice from the dumbest guy. Salmon asked if he could keep the line. It is the most accurate review he has had, and it explains a lot about how he works: slowly, out loud, with long pauses, and with a rule that would alarm most performers. Every time he goes on stage, he thinks something should fail.
Acting classes to meet women, and the compliment he still treasures
Salmon did not move to New York to be a comedian. He moved for an engineering job and took acting classes because he thought it would be a good way to meet women. Then he found he liked the acting. Sketch followed, then improv, and stand-up came last.
“I never had stage fright, because I was always on stage. I was comfortable on stage. I just wasn’t funny on stage. So I had to learn to be funny.”
That is the reverse of the usual order. Larry Charles was too self-conscious to get through a stand-up set without being sick first, and Byron Bertram, like Salmon, was a performer long before he wrote a joke.
The acting credits kept coming. He voiced a character called Mark Johnson in Red Dead Redemption 2, a job unlike any other he had done, because the studio keeps everything secret until release. “I didn’t know what character I was even reading,” he says. He does not play video games, so he has only watched friends play through his own storyline.
The role he remembers best was on a much smaller stage: an off-off-Broadway production of Richard Greenberg’s Eastern Standard, in which this former Texas football player was cast as a gay man on the Upper East Side in the 1980s. He had to learn about modern art for it. He had to learn to smoke. After one performance, a woman he had once dated turned to his roommate and asked, “Is he gay?”
“She didn’t even say it to me, but that was still the greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten.”
He is wary of compliments in general. “People compliment you to make you feel good, but nobody criticizes you unless they really don’t think you did well.” Criticism, he says, he trusts more.
Learning to ally with the silence
The first laughs he went looking for were in church. As a teenager he sang solos, and to calm his nerves he would talk before the song, the way a musician does between numbers. “In my head I always thought, if I can make them laugh, then I’m in control and the song will be easy.” The talking turned out to be the better part.
What took far longer was learning to stop talking. A new comic in New York, he says, knows there are a thousand people after the same stage time and is terrified of any gap without a laugh. It took him years to see it differently.
“Sometimes the silence is not a lack of laughter. It is the build to a burst of laughter. You get to a point where you don’t fear the silence. You ally with the silence.”
His example is a bit about explaining gender to his father. Near the end, the room goes very quiet, because nobody knows which political direction he is about to take. He takes neither. He makes it a joke about people, and the punchline lands harder for the wait. He thinks of it in musical terms: written music has notes for quiet too, and “what makes something work is sometimes the silence before it.” We have a longer piece on why timing and the pause matter so much in stand-up.
The acting helps here. His aim is to perform a joke he has told hundreds of times as though he is saying it, and feeling it, for the first time. He also listens to how words sound. Sometimes a word has the right meaning and the wrong music, and he will change it for that reason alone. Ian Edwards made a similar point about saying it wrong to say it right.
Why every set should fail at something
Salmon writes by hand first. “My first writing is in a notebook, my last writing is on a keyboard.” In between is a lot of exploring on stage, and this is where his method gets unusual. If a joke goes perfectly, he keeps going. With a hot crowd that is laughing at everything, he will push a bit further and further until the laughter stops, because that is the only way to find where the joke ends.
“Every single time I go on stage, I should fail at something, because that’s where your jokes become better. You find the end point.”
He can afford to, he says, because he has been doing it long enough to win a room back. “I am willing to lose you in order to make this the perfect joke. But at the same time, I know I can get you back.” The exceptions are an audition or a taping. Everything else is practice, and he has a Texan’s way of putting it: “This is not baseball, where the game is every day. This is football. The game is only once in a while, but practice is every day.”
It also changes how he feels afterwards. A set where everything worked and nothing new was tried leaves him flat. A rough one does not. “If I get off stage having bombed, I’m like, look, that was rough, but I’ve got stuff to write down right now.”
The diner, the vampire and the first real joke
“When I started, I was terrible,” he says. For six months he could stand on a stage and be amusing, but what he had were “premises and thoughts and clutter”. Then a friend sat him down in a diner and told him he was funny, told good stories, and had yet to write a single joke. They wrote one together that night.
It was about his childhood fear of vampires, “which is weird, because that is the only monster that wears a tuxedo.” His mother’s solution was to let him sleep with a baseball bat, which he took as confirmation that the vampires were real and on their way. Once he saw how that one was put together, the rest followed, and within about a week he had five polished minutes. (If you are at that stage yourself, we have guides to the parts of a joke and the tight five.) The vampire joke is on Force of Nurture, included as a tribute.
That album reached number one on iTunes. He is realistic about how: everyone he knew bought it on the same day. “It pushed me ahead of Jim Gaffigan for a day. And then the next day I was back behind Jim Gaffigan. Life has a way of sorting itself out.”
Jason Salmon’s five rules for joking about a sensitive topic
We asked how a comic should handle subjects that audiences are quick to take offence at. He answered with a numbered list.
- Be very funny. A lazy joke about a sensitive subject will offend someone, and you will have earned it.
- The sensitive topic is the setup. The humanity is the punchline. The subject can open the joke, but the laugh has to come from something human.
- Be funnier than you thought rule one meant.
- Make it about yourself. “People have a hard time getting angry at your personal experience.”
- Remember rules one and three, and be ten times funnier than that.
Rule four came from experience. When he told jokes about what men do and what women do, people in the audience objected that they did no such thing. When he changed it to what he does and what his wife does, the same people recognised themselves. When we offered him a dark joke of our own, about a family haggling over the price at a crematorium, he took it apart on the spot: the death is the setup, the bargaining is the punchline, so it passes rule two. Judy Carter teaches much the same thing about turning the worst parts of your life into material.
What’s next: a new special in Austin, with an Easter egg
Salmon is on tour for the rest of the year and films his next special at the State Theatre in Austin on 11 December. Every special he makes contains a hidden repair: an improved version of a joke from an earlier one, because he always finds a better way to tell it after the cameras have gone. This time there are two. It is a kind of callback that only returning fans will catch.
Asked which comics he watches now, he names Ted Alexandro, for his ability to be completely still on stage, Matthew Broussard, whose writing makes him want to write better, and Mia Jackson, who makes a room happier just by walking on. He also tours with Paul Farahvar, whose deadpan sits well next to his own slow delivery; you can read Paul Farahvar’s press kit here. He does not think stillness is harder than filling a stage the way Sebastian Maniscalco does. They are different instruments, and he points out that Maniscalco’s jokes are well written underneath all the movement.
The thing he is aiming for is not a comedian at all. It is The Princess Bride, which he describes as “simultaneously silly and serious and romantic and heroic”. “That is what I would love people to feel when they watch me.”
You can follow him at @jsalmoncomedy on Instagram. For more conversations like this one, see all our comedian interviews.
Watch Jason Salmon talk about failure, silence and the first joke he ever wrote
