What is the most subversive thing a comedian can do in 2026?
During a recent stop on his “Make Laugh Not War” tour, Jason Salmon was approached by a new fan after the show. She introduced herself as the mother of his opening act. Smiling through tears she said, “Thank you. I didn’t know who you are. I want the world to see you.”
That reaction is no surprise to Jason’s audience. His first album, A Force of Nurture, topped the iTunes comedy chart, and his special Biscuits & Gravity has been viewed more than a million times.
His work has taken him from television series including 30 Rock, Orange Is the New Black and At Home with Amy Sedaris to performing for U.S. troops in Europe, South America, and Afghanistan. Since launching in 2025, his weekly series Another Weird Week has racked up tens of millions of views, bringing in fresh waves of fans.
It’s no wonder tickets to his stop at The Comedy Vault in Batavia this weekend are going fast.
How is a former mechanical engineer from Texas attracting such a devoted following? Jason calls his comedy subversive, though not in the way most people expect. Rather than encouraging audiences to retreat into cynicism, he does something that’s rare these days: he invites us to confront what’s broken in our world while still celebrating humanity’s best qualities. He practices a radical kindness that extends beyond the stage.
Ahead of his return to Chicagoland, Jason Zoomed with me to talk about why he’s still betting on people in 2026.
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IN THE BEGINNING
Teme: What parts of growing up in Texas do you bring to your comedy?
Jason: I titled my first album “Force of Nurture” partly because it was a fun pun that nobody ever got. Everybody said “force of nature” and I’d think, “Oh, that’s a way different title.” I dedicated it to my parents because my parents were kind, conservative Christian people. They were, what I’ve now learned in my adult life to see as “Jesus Christians”, people who were trying to make everybody’s life better, who focused on love of people, and everything flowed from that.
I had a very idyllic childhood. My mom always joked, “Your dad was in education. I was a teacher. We got to practice on everybody else’s kids to see what works and then we would bring all the best stuff home.” Being the child of educators was sometimes annoyingly educating.
I did not get away with a lot of stuff, but their instruction was wise and they explained, and they talked to me. I attribute most of where my comedy comes from to them.
Teme: Is there a memory that especially stands out?
Jason: My dad would do things for people. My mom would, too, but as a boy, you idolize your dad as a template for how you are supposed to be. One time, we were in church as everybody was giving prayer requests like, “Please pray for me. My husband lost his job. We’re having to struggle even to get gas and buy groceries.” And I saw my dad see this. I actually saw his face see this. He didn’t say anything.
After church, I watched him put money in an envelope and slip it through the slightly unopened window of that person’s car and walk away. Nobody else saw it. Zero people. Once I saw that, I was like, “There’s your template.”
When that woman got into her car, she experienced magic. She saw gas money appear out of nowhere. If you think about it, comedy is that. It’s that magic. It’s that alchemy. If I can make you laugh, that’s amazing. But if I’m doing my comedy right, I’m also making you smile tomorrow.
Teme: How did you start out as an engineer and end up in comedy?
Jason: I went to Texas A&M. I didn’t know entertainment was a viable option for an occupation. At 18 years-old, I was like, “I’m good at math. I’ll study engineering. I will make lots of money.”
I studied mechanical engineering. About halfway through, the classes had whittled down to only me and the twenty nerdiest guys I knew. I had some math classes where I couldn’t understand a single word that the professor spoke. By the time I graduated I realized I didn’t want that, but I didn’t know what I wanted.
I went into sales where I could interact with people. I also took the job that would move me out of Texas. In retrospect, I was a dumb kid, but that was a wise decision because the easiest way to change your circumstances is to change your surroundings.
The job moved me to Massachusetts and then to New Jersey. But when I got to New Jersey, I was like, “I hate this job.”
During training, we had to do presentations. People would come up to me after my presentations and say, “Are you sure this is what you want to do? Are you sure you don’t want to do something different where you speak to people?”
Teme: Because they saw your talent?
Jason: They saw that I was mediocre at all the things that this job needed. I was much better at all the things that were tangential.
Teme: What were you selling?
Jason: I was selling abrasives, everything from sandpaper to grinding wheels. Then I realized I don’t even like sales. Engineering was too boring and sales was too dishonest.
So asked myself, “Well, what’s exciting and honest?” – and I didn’t know at the time. I didn’t know anybody in New Jersey. I’d taken some acting and improv classes in college, so I started taking acting classes to meet women, to be honest. I’m not a great guy at a club. It’s not my vibe. I did meet women. I met some I dated. Some ended up being good friends. But I also realized, “I’m not bad at acting.” So I started acting. That was the beginning of it all.
Teme: Was there an audition or acting job that especially stands out?
Jason: It was my first audition. I was taking a commercial acting class and thinking, what’s my next step? I found an audition at a community theater for a play called Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). They had me fill out a form with my experience. I’m sure some people handed in a real resume. I filled out the form with jobs I had done as a camp counselor, sketches I had put on in camp, as if they were productions in Texas.
During the audition, I took chances that nobody else would take because everybody else was afraid of losing the job, but I was like, “I just want to see what this feels like.”
I got the part. It was a three-man show. My director was an instructor of Shakespearean sonnets at the local college. He told me later on, “I took a huge risk on you because your resume looked like garbage.” Then he said, “I hired you because you screamed like a woman better than anybody I had heard for two days of auditions.”
So I got my first acting job because I screamed like a woman. The play is about three guys who try to put on all of Shakespeare’s plays in a single evening. I played Juliet. I played Ophelia. I ended up playing all of the heroines in Shakespeare’s plays.
Once I did that, I was bitten by that bug. I remember telling my best friend at the time, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, but this has to be part of it.”
Teme: What spoke to you about acting?
Jason: It was taking material that was great in itself and together with the other actors, adding a layer of humanity that made it almost ethereal. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I knew there was something beautiful about it. That’s why, in my very stumbling way, I felt, “I don’t know what I’ll do, but I will do this.” Experiencing the alchemy of an audience affected by art is something everybody should experience.
THE ROAD TO STANDUP
Teme: How did you decide to take the next step into comedy?
Jason: Standup was the very last thing I did. I traveled with a theater group in New Jersey for about a year and a half then I moved into New York City and did more sketch and improv.
At that point, I had quit my abrasives job. I was working as a personal trainer because that was a good fit with going out on auditions and doing acting work at night.
A buddy of mine from improv class told me, “I’m thinking of doing some standup.” I thought, “I should do that if I’m going to be an artist of any kind in New York City.”
I went to my first open mic and I failed miserably. I wasn’t the worst person on the show, but I was bad. I didn’t try it again for a full year. On the one-year anniversary, I decided to try it again. I still wasn’t good at it, but I could see the mechanism of it and I thought I could be okay at it.
My buddy and I started doing an open mic every couple of weeks. Then he said, “I’m going to start doing it multiple nights a week.” I thought, “That’s crazy. There’s no way you can do that.” Meanwhile, I was still mostly playing around with standup because I was doing improv and booking commercials.
Then I went to see him perform after he’d thrown himself into it, and he was so much better than when we’d started. I realized, oh—that’s how you get good. You do it. A lot. I started hitting open mics regularly and really honing the craft.
Teme: Is he still doing standup?
Jason: He is not. He does music. He did the music for Biscuits and Gravity. He’s still one of my best friends – Luke Younger – he’s the guy who got me into standup.
WHERE DOES A COMEDY PERSPECTIVE COME FROM?
Teme: How did you develop your comedic perspective? After I hear your comedy, I feel better about the world. Where does that optimism come from?
Jason: That came over time. Luke and I were about six months into me doing standup at the same pace he was. He said, “You got to write a joke! You have a bunch of premises and you’re funny on stage. You know how to command attention. But you haven’t told a joke.”
They used to call me “the premise generator.” I would have tons of premises, but I would just meander. Luke actually took me to a diner on the Upper West Side after doing an open mic at Stand Up New York. We went in there and wrote my first joke.
Teme: What was it?
Jason: I actually put it on my first album as a tribute to it being my first joke. When I was a kid, one of my greatest fears was Dracula. So my mom let me sleep with a baseball bat, which is not a good parenting choice. It was like saying, “Your fears are valid. Here! Good luck!” Once I wrote that joke, suddenly stuff started clicking. Then once you figure out material, then you got to figure out your voice.
That was harder to do because I had done so much acting and sketch. I had played versions of myself or outright characters. I toyed around with an in-your-face cowboy style and with the Southern dumb guy thing. Then one of my buddies said, “You’re so different off stage than you are on stage. Just talk like you talk. I bet it’s funnier.” So I would have all the Southern drawling, but I would use words like “expeditiously.”
A buddy named Dustin told me, “You’re an actor. You don’t have to do these big motions. Just raise an eyebrow. Act with your face.” I’d done commercials for so long. My friends had all seen me sell Toyota trucks. So he said, “Why don’t you just do it like that?”
TURNING POINTS
Jason: As I got better at comedy and knowing my voice, I thought “What do I love about life? Why don’t I express that?”
That’s where the optimism and the joy came in. The beautiful thing about an occupation where you go into a room and create a platform for people to experience joy is that you see the best of humanity regularly.
There are so many people trying to steer us or manipulate us where the easiest way to get a reaction is to spur outrage. The hardest way is to spur joy. I would rather take the hardest way. Pleasure is much easier than happiness, but happiness is much better than pleasure. Pleasure is fleeting. Happiness digs deep. It forms roots. It anchors you.
Teme: In Biscuits and Gravity you say about your dad, “He was trying to understand a world that he didn’t come from, and I’ve tried to emulate that the best I can.” Would it be correct to say that your comedy helps people truly see and understand each other?
Jason: Yes. A portion of my next hour expands specifically on that wisdom that my dad gave me – to see people in a different light. I’m very fortunate coming from an acting background, where you have to inhabit characters who are villains and heroes. You have to find empathy in your approach.
I remember riding the subway in New York City on the way to an audition. In the audition I was playing a lower status character – a guy who was sheepish and didn’t want to bother anybody and didn’t want to assert himself.
On the subway, inevitably, you encounter all these different New Yorkers. My general stance had always been, “Oh, this person’s annoying. What are they doing?” But this time, I decided as a thought exercise to pretend everybody on that train was better than me and had higher status.
Everybody I looked at — people I would have judged the day before – suddenly I was giving them noble qualities. It made me feel a level of respect for these strangers.
I was doing it in service of the character, but I thought, “This is so strange. Look how quickly the feeling in my body changed when I went from “These people are the worst” to “I want only the best for these people.”
Weirdly enough, it gave me peace.
I didn’t get the role, but I was still curious. I thought, “it’s so interesting to give a person status over you first and then work from there.” Fortunately, I am confident enough that giving somebody else status doesn’t inhibit my existence on any level. It’s actually a great exercise in empathy.
It was a very instructive moment for my comedy. We all come to comedy asking “Why does this exist? Why does this happen?” My thought process shifted to “What can I understand better about this person or this group of people?”
Every time I encounter someone who’s different from me, instead of being threatened by those differences, I try to be curious and ask questions. That’s informed my comedy ever since. It informed the jokes in Biscuits and Gravity, and I think it informs my next hour even more.
THE PUN ALSO RISES
Teme: How do you come up with titles for your specials like Make Laugh Not War?
Jason: I’ve got a list of pun-based titles. If I get as many albums and specials as I have titles, I feel like I will have a solid canon of work to present to the universe. I love a good pun. I know a lot of people view puns as the lowest form of comedy, but I think a good pun is just fun. It’s ear music.
Teme: Agreed!
Jason: The difficulty is puns made me realize people don’t read whole words. They see the beginning of a word and think, “I know how this ends. I got it from here.”
That’s how Force of Nurture too often became “Force of Nature” – the worst possible misreading for my debut album. “Force of Nurture” is a fun pun that reflects on my parents being very formative.
But “Force of Nature” sounds like I’m saying with my first album, “I am a force to be reckoned with” which makes me sound like such a douchebag.
Then Biscuits and Gravity obviously gets mispronounced as “Biscuits and Gravy” all the time.
MAKE LAUGH NOT WAR
Teme: I don’t want to ask you to give anything away, but what can you say about the show this weekend?
Jason: I do have a little more politics at the beginning of the show since a lot of my following has come politically. The show starts off on the notion that politics has tried to make us petty and small. From there, the show builds on what is big and hopeful and joyous about humanity.
I think the greatest things about humanity are the things we can’t transact. As humans, we’re not very good at quantifying things we can’t count, which is why we assume that rich people and people who have more goods are better people. Whereas kindness, joy, generosity are not generally associated with status. They don’t necessarily give you pleasure, but they make you happy. Like I said, I come from a conservative Christian background. I think part of the reason I still believe in a God is that I believe that the foundations of humanity are so much bigger than what we associate with [status].
Granted, none of that sounds very funny, but that’s sort of the crux of my humanity. Plus, there’s a lot of giggles. I do talk about my wife all the time and she makes me laugh more than anybody in the world. She’ll make you laugh too, I promise.
HOW TO DEVELOP MATERIAL
Teme: How do you identify and develop your material?
Jason: Sometimes the joke just comes to me. My wife will say something and I’ll laugh and then she goes, “You can’t!” And I’m like, “I have to share this with people. They need to know!”
So sometimes it comes immediately. I always write about what I’m interested in. It can range from a humorous standpoint to my dad’s death from Alzheimer’s.
I started writing a book about my dad. By writing I figure out, is this funny? Poignant? A combination? Is this the script for a TV show? A book? Is this a joke? I follow the words until it lands.
Teme: Thank you for talking about your dad. My dad also passed away from Alzheimer’s last year and I appreciate you writing and talking about it.
Jason: Thank you. My dad was such a good father to me that the whole crux of the book is how I took the lessons he taught me and applied them in his waning years of Alzheimer’s. I got to pay back my dad for everything he had given me. It was helpful to have the infrastructure of my weird comedy brain to help me process it.
YOU CAN COUNT ON THIS
Teme: What do you hope this weekend’s audience will take with them?
Jason: Anybody who comes to the show will have a fun time, even if you disagree with me politically. My political jokes poke fun at power. That’s my general mantra. But the bulk of my set is about joy and fun. You’re going to laugh while you’re there and you’re going to smile for the remainder of the weekend. I want people to have a great time and to walk out of there feeling better about life.
I will tell you right now, I am so proud of my audience. If I come to a city and that is not the best tips that the servers have gotten, the most understanding crowd, the most kindness in a single room that you’ve experienced, then it’s not what I expect. My audience is phenomenal. There are so many more good people than politicians would have you believe.
TRAVELING FOR THE TROOPS
Teme: What is your most memorable USO experience?
Jason: The first one was in Afghanistan during the war. One day we had five different flights for five different shows, and we were flying all over Afghanistan in choppers and jets. The first base we played, a person had been killed two days before. As we’re doing this show, there was not a lot of laughter. It was a somber experience, which is not generally how you want comedy to go.
At the end of the week, we did a show on another base. It was the end of their day. Everybody was there to relax and the laughter was infectious.
At the end of both shows, somebody came up and said, “I can’t tell you how much this means for you to be here. Thank you for making us laugh.” With the first show, I thought, “I didn’t hear anybody laugh.” And in the other show, I was like, “Of course. You guys were laughing all the time.”
I realized that sometimes you’re moving somebody from a state of joy to a higher state of joy. And sometimes you’re just helping somebody stay steady and not fall. And that’s what life is – and I think that’s what comedy helps.
That encouraged me to do the work and to make the experience great. Whether somebody experiences it with an infectious laugh or with a nod or just with silence, it is still something that you’re giving to them.
ANOTHER WEIRD WEEK
Teme: When did you know that Another Weird Week was taking off?
Jason: I started on inauguration Friday (2025) because I was like, “This is weird. This is not the world that I thought I lived in.” I didn’t want to be political. I still don’t want to be political. I just want to spew good virtues and have entire political parties not disagree with me on that.
I hit at this weird time when kindness became subversive. Not a thing I ever expected to be a real driver of a marketplace. Weirdly enough, it did good numbers the first week and a bunch of people asked, “Will you do this every week?” And in my head, I’m thinking, “That’s crazy” because I can’t tell you how much work this was.
Then it started getting viral numbers, and it was retweeted by Sophia Bush and Alec Baldwin. Celebrities started pushing it out.
Teme: How do you get it done every week? You make it look easy, but it couldn’t possibly be given the world we live in.
Jason: I don’t sleep much on Thursday nights. I am working full tilt from Thursday morning till Friday morning with a lengthy nap in the middle.
As a comedian, finding the jokes is natural. But the jokes don’t always come when you think they’re going to come. Sometimes I spend a lot of time staring at a screen before something clicks.
Some weeks it gets great numbers and some weeks it doesn’t. But when people thank me and say, “Please don’t stop,” I feel a responsibility. For whatever reason, I have that strange comedian brain that looks into the chaos and finds a joke and wood chips it back into the universe. It gives me a sense of purpose and joy that allows me to breathe in the midst of all the chaos.
LAST QUESTION(S)
Teme: Absolutely anything else to add or ask that we didn’t talk about?
Jason: Yes. How are you doing?
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Jason Salmon’s Make Laugh Not War comes to The Comedy Vault, 18 E. Wilson Street, Batavia, IL
Friday, July 31: 7:00 p.m. TICKETS
Friday, July 31: 9:30 p.m. TICKETS
Saturday, August 1: 7:00 p.m. TICKETS
Saturday, August 1: 9:30 p.m. TICKETS
Full tour schedule here.
To learn more about Jason: