She’s been a guest on Conan O’Brien and has been seen on HBO, Netflix and Comedy Central. Her comedy albums have reached number one on Amazon and number three on Billboard. She’s a podcaster (“The Dork Forest”) and a published writer as a contributor to The Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies. Jackie Kashian came a long way from modest roots in South Milwaukee, and she’ll be back in her hometown for a March 6 show at the South Milwaukee Performing Arts Center.
Becoming a comedian was not on her mind while growing up. “I wanted to act—I think. I certainly played a lot of ‘what if Fonzie was on the starship Enterprise’ and acted out all the parts,” she recalls. “I vaguely remember answering that I wanted to be a lawyer or teacher or forest ranger when asked. I went to UW-Madison and there was a comedy club and we went to it, and I went to open mic three weeks after seeing the show and I was hooked! I don’t know how to explain but it felt like I’d been looking for standup forever.”
Specifically, she recalls a night in 1984 when she went to a Madison comedy club, got drunk and heckled the comic. “And he couldn’t shut me up and, sadly, for the rest of the audience, I wasn’t kicked out; the club manager just came over and said ‘open mic is on Sundays. Now will you shut up? And I did. The comic I heckled? Sam Kinison.”
Comedy Road Warrior
Kashian performed around Madison before moving to Minneapolis (a “stand-up encouraging” town, she says). Based now in Los Angeles, she became a comedy road warrior logging up 45 weeks a year on tour before the pandemic. “When we were all in lock-down I was home for the first time in my life for 16 months,” she says. “Since then, I’m back to 40ish weeks a year. My husband comes with me when he can. Also, I try to book towns where he has a game convention [he’s a board game designer] so we travel together sometimes! And I work Thursday-Saturday usually, so I’m home three or four days a week. It is a lot of travel, but I love it so much.”…