You could say James Austin Johnson’s freshman Saturday Night Live season went unreasonably well.
The stand-up comedian, impressionist and actor grew up in Nashville, where he attended Glengarry Elementary, Meigs Magnet, Davidson Academy and Trevecca Nazarene University. About a decade back he moved to Los Angeles, where he joined the comedy scene and landed small parts in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! and AMC’s Better Call Saul. Not long after Donald Trump took office, Johnson began firing off videos mimicking the president with rambling asides about everything from Scooby Doo to Weird Al Yankovic. The videos exploded on social media, thanks to Johnson’s uncanny ability to replicate not only Trump’s bizarre mannerisms and speech patterns, but also his unhinged, free-style stream-of-consciousness rambling. Johnson joined the SNL cast for the show’s 2021-2022 season, becoming the series’ resident Trump and Biden impressionist and racking up more than 40 minutes of screen time during cold opens alone.
This week, Johnson returns to his hometown for a pair of shows at Zanies. The Scene caught up with the comedian by phone on his 33rd birthday while he was driving from Los Angeles to Pomona, where he’s filming a movie alongside a slew of fellow comedic talents — Nicole Byer, Will Arnett and Rob Riggle among them. We spoke about flying first class (“It fully stems from being so terrified to travel that I just pour everything into making the experience a vacation of the mind for myself”); his distaste for Cool Springs’ layout (“Pack a bag — it’s impossible to find your way to an exit”); attending Christian private school (“I found it an odd experience”); Nashville’s celebrities (“I would love to get a red carpet, and invite Amy Grant and Vince Gill”); and conservative comedians (“It breaks my heart that all these guys who I looked up to so much because they were genuinely funny have become conservative, somber, downbeat cultural critics”). Find excerpts from our conversation below.
On Developing His Comedy as a Teenager
So I was repeating eight minutes of Brad Stine's CD Rebel Without a Curse — because he’s a clean comedian. I was repeating eight minutes of his act as a monologue in middle school monologue competitions, forensics competitions. My dad, who worked at Trevecca Nazarene University, needed to fill time at a singing competition called Trojan Idols, because they were the Trojans. He asked me to do comedy — 10 minutes of comedy to fill the time while they counted the votes for the singers. I didn’t really think much beyond it other than like, “Oh, well, I’ll do 10 minutes of my own stuff.” I think an hour before the show I wrote down my own jokes — I’d never written a joke in my life — and so I just did that. I did a weird dance to “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.” I did some shit like, “Hey, don’t grandmas smell weird?” and all that kind of shit. It went unreasonably well.
And a second time at my … freshman talent show in high school, it went unreasonably well again. And then the next maybe 30 times I did stand-up were abject bombs, like horrendous. Like pretty unwoke, definitely trying to be like Brad Stine, or Robin Williams. Just failing and being like, probably offensive. I’m glad there’s no footage of this dark period, because I don’t know what I was saying up there. I was just repeating things I think I saw on Comedy Central. I mean, it just all went south. By the time I got to college, I didn’t really do anything freshman or sophomore year. I think I was trying to be a poet. And then I found nashvillestandup.com and I got into the open mic scene. I just found out about open mics that didn’t card, and oftentimes I would sneak in through a patio door. I’d just get a Pepsi. You know, I buy a $7 Pepsi and [try not to] annoy everybody. I’m sure — now that Nashville is a bigger town in the last 10 years — I’m sure that it’s policed better. But I got kicked out of Spanky’s. Spanky’s was an open mic at a terrible sports bar behind the Harding Place Walmart. I remember getting kicked out for being under 21 a couple times. It came with its hazards.
On Impressions
Early on I would do Werner Herzog reviewing, like, Ghostbusters. I had a Batman thing where I was Christian Bale’s Batman. I had a joke called “Jay-Z is downstairs,” where it was just me in a Jay-Z voice going like [in a very convincing Jay-Z voice] “Beyoncé! Beyoncé!” I’m shouting upstairs. It really wasn’t until the last five or six years or so I truly started to flesh all that into more of a skill. I think Louis C.K. is the voice that I started doing a lot more. I think it started with doing Louis at shows. Oh, and I would do Rory Scovel. … It’s just a big dumb goof. I had a Rory-style blond wig and a fake beard. Around Halloween they’ll often have shows where comics dress up as other comics and do a bit. And I think that’s where I was doing Rory and Louis C.K. At some point, some other comedian was just like, “Hey, you’re very good at impressions, and you should probably be doing that more onstage than you are, and that’ll just set you apart a little bit.”
I don’t know. I’ve always thought impressions are kind of corny. I stayed away from it because I wanted people to think I was cool. But at this point, I don’t give a fuck. It’s just fun. It’s just fun to do. And not a lot of people do it, you know? So it’s a change of pace for the audience and for me. And now I’m on, like, the Impressions Supreme Court.
On Donald Trump
In 2015 and 2016, I was very distraught about — especially coming from like the Christian side of the Republican world — I was sort of distraught that Trump was this guy who’s plainly not Christian, and just sort of lying about it. I was raised that if you were pretending to be a Christian, that was worse than not being one at all. He just broke every rule of the world I was raised in, and being celebrated for it, and that really boggled my mind. I was extremely depressed and felt like I didn’t even know my own family and know who I was. And then I started doing the impressions of him, and I was getting more used to the idea of him. I just got more used to what America is. I was just like, “No, I mean, this guy won. He was elected, and people wanted this.” And as I got to know where that came from and what that means, I started doing the impression. It made me feel better about him.
I also started paying a lot more attention to the words he said and his speeches, and it just hit me at some point: Oh, he is making it all up as he goes along. He has no plan. It’s fully word association. And then as I got better at the impression, the impression became a little bit less about my anger and a little bit more about being silly. I also saw — how do I put this — I feel like I understand who Trump is, I bet, better than his own family. In the way that Val Kilmer talked about knowing Doc Holliday better than Doc Holliday knew himself. I truly feel like I understand Donald Trump in this way that, like, I don’t know, maybe no one else does. I would just see how I could turn an audience into my zombies as I do that voice — the way that I hold people’s attention when I’m doing it, I’m like, “Oh, this is how he works. He has figured out the funniest way to talk.” I saw him for who he really is — the funniest person alive. I think Donald Trump may be — intentionally and unintentionally at the same time, which is like a double whammy — the funniest person of all time. It made me feel better about things. I don’t know — me and Donald Trump, it’s a weird relationship. I really hope he doesn’t find out what my politics are and sic his goons on my wife and my son. …
I mean, when you look at Donald Trump, you just have to go, “This is America. We are this.” This is the height of our culture — a guy being like, “Ted Cruz’s wife is a dog. … Elizabeth Warren is Pocahontas.” And you see how much his fans freak out, you just gotta go, “This is the height of American culture.” Like it or not, it’s not the Criterion Collection, it’s not Aaron Copland’s [Appalachian Spring], it’s this. It is Donald Trump being like, “Oh man, that chick, she’s not even hot!” And then all of these old TBN watchers flipping the fuck out at how funny it is. The good news is, it is exactly what it looks like. It’s not anything other than what it looks like. And so hopefully more people realize that it’s a grift, and that he’s just bullshitting. I mean, he truly is. He’s like Harold Hill in The Music Man doing “Seventy-Six Trombones.” It’s a grift. That said, I’m more afraid of Ron DeSantis.
