
Tony’s Twitter is available and waiting @tonycastleberry.
Jackie Kashian made her late night stand-up debut on Conan on Tuesday night AND is featured in this week’s edition of Inside Jokes?
Yeah, she’s obviously killing it.
Kashian is a stand-up veteran who has performed from Montreal to Melbourne, released CDs “Circus People” and the brilliantly-titled “It Is Never Going To Be Bread” and hosts The Dork Forest podcast.
She also got married recently to a guy who makes video games for a living, so if she decides she’s had enough of stand-up (shudder the thought) the happy couple will probably still be able to pay the electric bill.
One day after her appearance on Conan, Kashian answered my questions about married life, her favorite comedy clubs and pet turtles. For more Kashian, visit her website, follow her on Twitter and check out The Dork Forest. It is not your run of the mill podcast.
Enjoy the interview and don’t forget The Best Tweet I Can Find In Five Minutes at the end.
TC: Does being married increase the funny in your life? Double it? Triple it?
JK: It’s great. It’s always nice to have new things to talk about. Oh, I know, being married and in any relationship is covered by everyone, forever and always, but you gotta run your own experience up the flagpole. See who salutes, you know?
TC: You’ve been a touring comic for close to two decades. Is there a room out there that you and/or other comics love that the average comedy fan might not know about?
JK: My favorite clubs in the country huh? Acme (my home club in Minneapolis) is the BEST. Just run the right way and most instrumental in my growth in comedy and supportive of young comics coming up. All of it.
But I love doing so many rooms. People everywhere get the jokes. It helps if the club runs a SHOW (alerts the public that they are watching human beings who can SEE their cell phones as they text, ring or play some game and brings different kinds of comics to the room so the audience isn’t surprised when it’s smart or silly or weird). Great rooms like Cap City (Austin), Helium (Portland, Ore.), Throckmorton (Mill Valley, Calif.) raise expectations and are consistently great and interesting.
I know I’m forgetting great clubs, but a weird one, a weekend room that I really like, is the Princeton, N.J., Catch a Rising Star. It’s in the bar of a Hilton for crying out loud, outside of Princeton. I like that room. The audience isn’t Princeton college people per se, but they’re drinking the same water, so I find them to be regular folks who just GET all the jokes. I genuinely love that room. That is a room that comics and audiences probably do not know enough about.
TC: When did you first get the idea for The Dork Forest and has it worked out as well, or perhaps even better, than you might have liked?
JK: The Dork Forest is based on a joke I did (and still will do, for any number of reasons) about how “deep in the dork forest do you have to go to get to the war reenactment guys.” Pretty deep.
The podcast has been great. I’ve learned a LOT about what people are willing to dork out about for an hour and how that is fascinating even when, going in, I could have given a damn about the topic. I love the episode about perfume, for example. I know NOTHING about perfume. I don’t wear perfume or know anything about it, but the people I talk to? Fantastic. It’s also helped introduce me to a lot of new fans and they’ve come out to see my stand-up and become stand-up fans as well as podcast fans. It’s been great.
TC: Your bit about Los Angeles pet owners is so good and true. How great would it be if you’re at lunch one day and some socialite pulls a little turtle out of her Gucci bag to feed it some lettuce?
JK: I would LOVE to see the Turtle Paris Hilton (and how old does that reference seem now? But the joke still works) live, in a restaurant. That, and I want to see Barbara Streisand bring her own groceries to a restaurant and ask the cooks to make her lunch with the food she brought. (I heard she did that once. I wish to SEE it).
TC: By the time this interview is online, you will have done Conan’s show, your first-ever late night stand-up appearance. First, congratulations. Second, please tell me you’re planning on making some extravagant requests before you go on. A bottle of Dom? Mani-pedi? A hug from Andy Kindler? Anything?
JK: All of those things are ATTAINABLE! The only thing I didn’t get was a haircut. Sigh.
Here it is, The Best Tweet I Can Find In Five Minutes:
Happy Valentine’s Day to the biggest romantics out there: Stalkers. Never give up on love you crazy dreamers!
— Cole Is Laser Bear (@colegamble) February 14, 2013
