James Adomian

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James Adomian is a familiar face to late-night comedy fans thanks to his cheeky appearances as George W. Bush on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and his top ten finish on Last Comic Standing, and he's even more familiar to comedy podcast aficionados who know him from guest spots on Scott Aukerman's Comedy Bang Bang and WTF with Marc Maron. But recently, the 32-year-old standup gained a whole new type of exposure when The New York Times published an article called "Gay Male Comics Await the Spotlight" with the opening question, "Could James Adomian become the first man to break through as an openly gay stand-up star?"

The question is weighty and provocative, but Adomian is the first to acknowledge the multitude of gay comics who've preceded him and work alongside him as colleagues. As a peformer, he's anxious, strident, sympathetic, and -- unless he's playing a wild character like Huell Howser or Jesse Ventura -- undeniably guileless. He's quite candid about his personal life, including his own gayness, and his level of thorough self-reportage is both straightforward and exciting. We caught up with Adomian to discuss his varied comic styles -- which have ranged from playing Dubya in Harold and Kumar: Escape From Guantanamo Bay to a bizarre portrayal of Madonna on Children's Hospital -- being out in the standup world, and encountering homophobia as part of his occupation.

(You can pick up his very funny comedy album Low Hangin' Fruit here.)

AfterElton: It feels like you've hit that stage as a burgeoning star where you've moved from "trying to make opportunities happen" to "seizing as many great opportunities thrown your way as you can." Seems exhausting. Is that all accurate?

James Adomian: Yes. It's all at once! Suddenly the world takes an interest in you. And when I say the world, I mean a handful of nerds. But it's great. I'm working on a lot of things on my own and trying to be involved in other people's projects as much as I can. I'm working from New York and L.A., and it's crazy and a wild pirate's life, but I like it. Maybe I'm finally bicoastal. Not just politically bicoastal, but actually openly, out-of-the-closet bicoastal.

AE: Let's talk about that amazing NYT piece. What did you think when you saw that headline and read that article?

JA: Well, I approve of any of kind of article that is going to be written about me. I like press. It may be a little bit exuberant, but it's a story that's come up a little in the last year or so. Blackbook wrote an article about openly gay male comedians, specifically stand-up comedians, and The New York Times wrote about it too. It's kind of cool that the press seems to have figured out that there's a lot of us. There's a lot of cool, really funny people doing standup, and there's always been gay standups, I think. But I think there's a lot of momentum and critical mass about it now.

AE: I think there's some paranoia about how well gay comedians can prove they "relate" to the typical standup audience, which is straight males. Do you worry about that? Is there a perception that simply being yourself and acknowledging your gayness can be detrimental to your success?

JA: Well, I don't think homophobia has a total lockdown on the way things work. It's a force, it's blowing in the air -- but it's not all powerful. Partly it's part of the progress of history, and it's also a generational thing. I think there are gay-friendly audiences and there are much less gay-friendly audiences, and even occasionally homophobic people come to my shows. I'm sure other performers have experienced that as well. Overall it's really positive, and I think it's a little challenge to present something that may surprise some people in a show. But you can do it with grace and humor and in a fun little surprise. If I'm doing a longer set, I start out silly and talking to the audience, then ten or twenty minutes in, I let them know that I'm gay. I calculated that. It's a way of making sure they already like me by the time they find that out. That's a good way to go into a potentially hostile or indifferent crowd, because it's like, "I am going to talk about life. And you're going to have to sit through it because I've lived through a lifetime of homophobic comments and slights and reactions." And I kind of know how to deal with it now without getting too angry.

But honestly, it doesn't happen that often. Even in conservative parts of the country, people go to a comedy show to have a good time. If you're giving them a good time and you're sharing a night of laughter, people set aside things because you're a room of people together. On the comedy scene, there's a legacy of homophobia in standup, but I think that's really, really washed away, almost completely. Not totally completely, because there are certain pockets of "Huh-hoh! Sissy boy!" but now, you'll hear more sophisticated hetero-normative or homophobic attitudes from other comedians, but very rarely. But I wouldn't have been able to do what I do if I hadn't had the support of a lot of awesome people. It's not just, "I don't care what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom" anymore. It's, "I actually support what you do!" I think people are growing up. They're realizing we can all have a good time together with respect and mutual friendship. It seems like a really modest achievement, but it means a lot, looking at what we've been through and what people are going through around the world.

Adomian (center) with Kal Penn and John Cho in Harold & Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay

AE: Do you have a favorite bygone era of comedy? What styles should make a comeback?

JA: I love the Marx brothers. It's inconceivable that anything like that could work now. That level of improvised insanity? In a movie? Today? No one would put money into it. You approach that a little in the chaotic podcast world of comedy where there's not any rules, and it's loose and crazy. But aw, man, to have a hotel run by lunatic brothers where stuffy people have their upper-crust parties ruined? Man. I was actually looking through Mel Brooks' movies, and there is no way Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein could be pulled off in the same way now. And that wasn't even that long ago. Comedy's constantly evolving and changing, and it's a bizarro reflection of what's going on in the world that creates it. But it's a fun thing to look back at comedy of the past as a fascinating cultural artifact. We're doing comedy today that people will make people say either, "I can't believe they got away with that!" or "Boy, oh boy. What a waste of time!"

Adomian as a very "bizarro, admittedly terrible" Madonna on Children's Hospital.

AE: You have a great nervous energy as a performer. My assumption is it's fun to thrive on that energy onstage, but offstage it can sort of undo you. Does it aid you in your day-to-day life at all?

JA: I'm really nervous before shows. I'm really nervous going onstage. I've been doing comedy for 10 years, and I still get nervous every time I get onstage. It's not a normal thing for people to do! In some ways it's a little easier to perform sketch comedy because there's people onstage with you, but going onstage alone is one of the most terrifying and rewarding things I do. It's risky. A disaster can unfold in mere seconds, but the same series of events can lead to a really great time. But in real life, I talk way less than I do onstage. I'm actually kind of quiet and a listener throughout most of the day. I passively pay attention and file things away, but when I'm put in front of a microphone or an audience or a camera, that's when I report what I've been hearing.

AE: Typically I don't meet many closeted people in L.A., but I've met a number of gay comedians who actively don't mention their sexuality onstage. Do you encounter that a lot? Do you relate to those people at all?

JA: I know these people. Pretty well. There are people like Todd Glass, who, up until very recently, were like that. I guess there are different stages of being in the closet. Some people deny it to themselves, there are people who are bisexual and I guess can't be bothered to have the time to come out? It's not worth the effort, I guess? The bisexual thing is rough; that's not easy. There are people who lead a gay life and don't talk about it in public. It's a really interesting thing. I was always personally out as an adult, but I never had a real opportunity to talk about it as a comic because I was performing just characters for five years. So just my friends knew. But part of the reason I started doing standup was to say, "I want to talk about being gay and my real life" and not just be Gary Busey. I personally feel like in some ways like I'm out of the closet because I like other people to come out of the closet, but in some ways it's not my place to say. Lots of people throughout history have made up their minds about how to live their life, and I'm respectful of that. There a lot more gay people in show business than the wider public realizes, and sometimes they come out and sometimes that's a surprise and sometimes it's not, and sometimes it's well-timed and sometimes it's not. The closeted thing, I think it's slowly going away -- there are so many performers out now who, maybe 20 years ago, wouldn't be out of the closet. There are courageous people from past decades of show business who were out of the closet or were not but were still able to be cultural icons as gay people regardless. But I do think it's getting easier, and that's why you see so many out gay comics now. Luckily there is a really vibrant core of out gay comics who are talking about it in standup. It's nice to not have to be afraid of what people will say.

AE: Speaking of which, who are your favorite comedians?

JA: I was influenced as a kid and as a teenager by Louis C.K. and Paul F. Tompkins. I'd see them on Conan. Patton Oswalt. I've met a large percentage of the people I do comedy with now, and it's one of the best things about my life. I get to hang out with the funniest people in the English-speaking world, or at least the American side, pretty often! As far as gay comedians, we're in a heyday really. They're in New York and L.A. and San Francisco and everywhere in between. Guy Branum is really funny and out of the closet, Drew Droege is a great sketch performer, Brent Sullivan. There's an endless number of gay male standup comedians. It's nice to know them and it's nice to be a part of an artform where people who aren't gay are cool to us.

AE: For years, a big part of your act was your hilarious impression of George W. Bush. Was it satisfying and cathartic to play him? Or was it enervating to play him for such a long time?

JA: Actually, it was both. I hated him and I still wish him the very worst that could happen to a human being, and my goal starting out was to viciously attack him. When that gets filtered through what's able to get through on TV or in the movie I did as Bush, it came across as more playful than I wanted it to be. When I did Bush for live audiences, I took questions from an audience like in a press conference. That doesn't exist anywhere because it's impossible to translate onto television because of the way it works, but it was really fun. Really, really fun. That way, speaking as him in an improvisational way, I got to be not just dumb, but really mean and vicious and illegal. That was part of the fun. But the downside is -- I guess it was Nietzsche who said, "When you stare into an abyss, it stares back at you." I think to some degree that's kind of true for doing an impression of somebody, especially if it's somebody who's an evil wizard like George W. Bush who has such demonic spirts swirling around him at all times. I was doing that act most of the time, so like every other day I was in the mindset of George W. Bush. It was very refreshing to move on to other things after he left office. I usually do impressions of people I don't hate. Most impressions of mine are in some way an homage, even if I'm kind of making fun of them. It's psychologically stressful to do that kind of comedy, to have all guns focused on destroying someone. So I would much rather do an impression of Jesse Ventura or an attorney for American Apparel, people who have their problems but aren't the worst people in the world.

AE: Lastly, here's my favorite interview question: Who's your favorite homosexual entertainer of all time?

JA: I have to say Rufus Wainwright. He is a really, really fantastic singer and musical artist. But I found him when I was 19 or 20, and it changed my life. I was in the closet at the time, and not only was I in the closet, but I was self-hating. I believed the bullshit, you know? His music changed me. I'm eternally grateful to him for that. He's really beautiful, and in some ways he doesn't belong to our time, even. He's both ahead of the times and he exists a couple hundred years ago, all at once. I really, really love Rufus Wainwright. Then I'd say, comedically, I would say Scott Thompson from The Kids in the Hall. He was the first openly gay comedian I saw in my lifetime live on television, on Conan. And then I found Kids in the Hall so gay-friendly, and I loved how free and hilarious and open Scott Thompson was in public. Just effortlessly out of the closet, like it was no big deal. It took me years to figure out that I could live that way myself. I have to give a lot of thanks to him. And many others too. I love what gay people are able to do, and I'm glad we're free to do what we do.