Nate Jackson made his name on viral crowd work, but his comedy is built on much more than that

Los Angeles Times

14 hours ago

There's a reason Nate Jackson's debut Netflix special arrives during barbecue season. Perched on a stool under the spotlight at his shows, the comedian spends most of the evening delivering hospital-worthy third-degree burns to crowd members who want the smoke. If you lock eyes with him in the first five rows, chances are you even paid extra to be his next victim by sitting in 'the roast zone.'
During a recent pair of packed, back-to-back gigs at the Wiltern last month, the Tacoma-bred comic made full use of his flame-throwing abilities to torch his highest-paying L.A. fans over their questionable fashion choices, weird haircuts and bad teeth. As the evening progresses he dives deeper, extracting more information and grilling them about their personal lives and romantic relationships with a camera zoomed in on them, broadcasting their faces on a jumbo screen if they were at a Dodger game. When everything works right, Jackson finds a way to weave the stories of his random burn victims together in a way that makes the whole show feel pre-planned. Meanwhile, even as Jackson is busy making fans the butt of his comedic freestyle, the person laughing the hardest is usually the roastee. It's the mark of good crowd work that's not simply well done but more importantly done well.
This ride of the unpredictable twists and turns is given the same spotlight and attention in his special as his pre-written jokes in a way that keeps the pace engaging while making his audience the stars of the show. It makes his debut 'Nate Jackson: Super Funny' a testament to the style and the brand of comedy he's grown from a weekly comedy night to a brick-and-mortar comedy club and now a Netflix special that bears the same name.
Speaking of names … no, he didn't interview himself for this story. But a journalist and the comedian swapping professions for a day or two could be funny. Whaddaya think, Nate?
Recently Nate Jackson spoke to Nate Jackson about his career coming up in the Tacoma comedy scene, refining his ability to improv on shows like MTV's 'Wild 'N Out' and using his crowd work skills to go viral on TikTok.
Well, well ... Nate Jackson.
Nate Jackson.
I heard about you, man.
When I Google me … we come up. What is the likelihood of that?
It's been my whole career — searching 'our name.'
Then there's a random guy [another Nate Jackson] playing a guitar and then all of the sudden, a third-string Denver Bronco [also named Nate Jackson] wants to write a book about playing football while high, and then he takes over the front three pages of our name.
No worries, us doing this interview together will definitely help us both surge in Google rankings.
So you're Nate Jackson. I'm Nate Jackson Jr., and my dad is [also named] Nate Jackson. So this is a lot of Nate Jackson.
Some Nate-ception going on!
[Laughs] Bars!
Congrats on your latest special, 'Nate Jackson: Super Funny.'
What'd you think?
I thought that it was a great balance of what everyone's seeing on you on their phones [via TikTok] recently, and it also shows people what you spent your entire career doing in comedy before social media. You're able to convey the level of crowd work you do in a live setting really well. I know a lot of people say, 'Oh, crowd work is so easy to do,' but is it actually really hard?
Oh no, it's easy to do. It's hard to do right.
How did it start for you with the crowd work becoming a central part of your act?
It never was a thing I wanted to go to as a central part of my act. I fought against that concept. If you work on a joke for three months, you want that to work more than the thing you just walked out [on stage] and said, 'Look at that light flickering.' But you can't control what is going to hit harder. Organic [humor] wins almost every single time when you're writing material. One of the main challenges is making it so that it's consumable by the masses. You want to write about things that people can relate to. You want to be relatable, right? Well, what's more relatable than, 'It's hot in here, and we can all feel it.'
How did you get started in the Tacoma comedy scene?
I started because I had a room in Tacoma, Washington. I had a lot of rooms in Washington, and I consolidated them into a Thursday night, and it was the 'Super Funny Comedy Show,' which is now the 'Super Funny Comedy Club.' But it was every Thursday, and I was young enough in my career that I was like, I need to produce a show that would pack this place out, and I don't have the skill set to be the [driving force] yet. But I can host; I can add a live band. I need my headliners coming from somewhere else. So that's why we had [big names like] Lil Rel, Tiffany Haddish, Leslie Jones, Deon Cole. So Tacoma was spoiled by the lineups that came and did [my] Thursday night.
In doing that, every week I could write, but I could not keep up with the pacing of having a monologue every Thursday. [I was] a new comic without my voice. So I abandoned that. Sometimes I would make a joke and then say, 'Now I'm just gonna mess with who's in front of me.' And that [crowd work] muscle started to pulsate. Then I added a little improv to it. Then it I said, 'All right, this next [set] I'm gonna go up with [no material]. I'm gonna go up naked and I'm coming off with a 'W.'' It got to where people are like, 'Yo, I kind of like it when you just freestyle.'
So doing improv on stage led to you freestyle roasting people?
It didn't necessarily need to be a roast. I could be [a joke on] something I saw on the news that day. They just want to see me create — to just pick up the newspaper and then go off that. I'm like, 'Guys, that's a slap in the face to when I'm putting three, four hours in at Starbucks, working on the writing and making sure the punch lines are all there.' But it's the same thing I'm doing with the crowd work content. I don't just mess with people for the sake of messing with them. I am getting information to then plug into a setup. Now we're in a comedy structure where it's act out and mix up a set up, a punch line, etc. I want to make it worth slowing down the pacing that I would have if I was the only one talking and dictating the energy.
When I go to somebody, it is now at their pacing. They can take four minutes on the answer, and people are now fidgeting in the crowd. I'm like, 'Come on now, hey, come on.' You got to keep it moving; that's the rule to what's happening onstage. It can go slow, but we need to feel like we're going from point A in a story or an interaction to point B. Sometimes maybe I'm going from point A to point C, and I hit you with some misdirection in there, then, wham to point C and all connects. People are like, 'Wait, so the last 10 minutes was a setup?!' That's what I pride myself on. So you, how do just say, 'Oh, that's crowd work' — is it?
It's definitely more than what people ascribe to it as a part of a show. It turns the fans into the show in a way that they can walk away feeling good about — even if they've been roasted.
And that's on me, because I could just be malicious and leave it bad. But I always, I try to uplift. I'm a 'Que,' a member of Omega Psi Phi [fraternity]. It's one of our principles, 'to uplift.' I don't want you to leave the show being like, 'Man, I'll never watch a show again.' No, it should be like, 'Okay, [he roasted me], but we had fun.' I'm not trying to beat up on people.
I wanted to talk about the role TikTok played in your recent glow-up in comedy over the last few years. How did it help you develop as a comedian?
I just started showing [my skills]. Once you start showing it, you're not a secret anymore. Comics would come to Tacoma — which is off the beaten path — and then be like, 'There's a guy up there that even as a host you need to have, you need to be ready to follow, because he's just — he's literally just up there winging it, and he's on fire.' Everyone in comedy knows the guy or the girl, and that was kind of what the stigma became. I was one of comedy's best-kept secrets. People would come up [to my comedy shows], they would see my razzle-dazzle, they would take little bits of my recipe and add it to their stuff. And so I would watch people years later and be like, 'Really … really?!' Don't come up here and take my sauce and then, because you got more shine than me, use it. It takes a lot to just be the person that can handle that and not develop a chip on the shoulder. But if I'm the creator, if I'm their origin and I'm the source of [my style of comedy], then I have no issue continuing to create.
People were just like, 'You need to get online!' I was like, 'I am! I have every app and I'm tired now. How many things I gotta manage?' And it just got to the point where I was like, 'Alright, let me get on. Let me do TikTok. That's the app where people are following.' I saw friends that were having wild success on there, and I was like, alright, I'll try it. And sure enough, within six or seven clips — the seventh [clip] hit. It wasn't mega viral or anything, but it did more than my average video was doing over on on Instagram. I said, there's something to this. And I stayed on it. And then things kept it [growing]. And so I was watching, and the needle was moving. And so here we are.
How often would you post clips on TikTok when you started using it?
I was posting at least once a day. That is not easy, because you got to get your sound right, your video needs to be quality, and then you got to pull it, edit it, and caption the words that are on the screen. There's AI now, but all of us who were doing this [before AI] would laugh about it and be like,'When do you caption?' We'll watch a movie and literally just be captioning. For a five-minute video, a four-minute video, I'm talking about exhaustion ... Now, you plug that thing in [with AI] and the whole thing is done. Thank God, or thank computer. I don't know who [I] was supposed to thank in that scenario, but it streamlined the process so much more content can come out now. What took me all night long to get one clip out — now we do three a day. Or two a day now, at the very least.
We talk about how AI can be a threat to original entertainment, including comedy. But are there ways AI and social media have changed the art form for the better?
Yes, and we can do so much more. We can now edit a whole podcast in two minutes. You would think it's getting rid of jobs, and in theory it should be, but it should make one person be able to do so much more. Instead of someone losing the job, we have the capacity to put out way more content. So let's keep all of our employees, but let's now do 180% times more work. Also as far as AI goes, I'm okay if we stop right now for two years. Let's just stop right now ... before we legitimately are in a plot of 'Terminator.'
With the type of show you're doing now, where do you see the future of comedy going?
I think that what I'm doing it is the evolution of stand-up. You [can't] go on stage and just do your set the same way — the way you practice it in your mirror — in front of a blinding light, where you can't even see [the crowd]. What's the difference between being in front of seven people or 70,000 people? It feels exactly the same. I think there's a detachment between the person and the people. We've seen the guys that are such glitzy superstars — that just being there to watch it, that's the presence you want to be in. But with human interaction, every show is different. You have to be malleable and loose. You can't do your set, 1-2-3-4-5 — you gotta be able to go 5-3-2-1-4, with different segues on the fly.
What's a better mechanic, the one that does the same 14 diagnostic steps no matter what car comes in, or the one that opens the hood and listens and goes, '[Your car needs a] timing belt, gimme a timing belt'? Let's say you have five jokes — your hot five. Three [jokes] are about your cat, one's about your mom and one is about a motorcycle. And you walk out on stage and there's a motorcycle club in the front four rows. Do you get off of your normal order and establish rapport with the audience by moving your motorcycle joke to the front, or do you set yourself up for failure by talking about your new cat for three jokes to a motorcycle gang? They'll listen to you if they like you. So get what will establish that first — be malleable.
A lot of new fans of yours may not know, but you've had experience with improv years ago in the 'Wild 'N Out' days [on MTV during Season 8, circa 2016]. What's it like taking those skills you learned on TV and moving it to your own specials, podcasts and social media in this new era?
It's all 'yes, and …' We take the current situation and go, 'What else can we add?' We're just building … the real talent, the expertise comes in when they build, and it's also a pivot, like the segue you just did right now to get into this topic. So kudos to 'Wild 'N Out' to being able to procure and find all of us and put us together. But all of us obviously had something, otherwise how do you catch the eye of a network showrunner? Shout out to Nile Evans and everybody that's a part of procuring the talent that ends up being the stars of tomorrow. We can be like, 'Oh, it's a little urban hip-hop show.' Or we can be real about the fact that Katt Williams and Kevin Hart and all these people have come down the halls of that show. I would argue 'Wild 'N Out's' alumni that have hit are as decorated or more than 'In Living Color.'
This special feels like just a big culmination of your career right now. What's something you would want people to take away from it after watching?
Live your life to the fullest. Love hard, play hard. We only got one shot at this. I left it all out on the stage. That's exactly how we should live every day. Bert Kreischer said [my new special] made him miss doing stand-up … that is so powerful. The best comics make you go, 'Why didn't I think of that?' or, 'God, I gotta write!' He didn't watch it and go, 'You know who you remind me of?' I think that's not flattering. He watched and said, 'I gotta get down on my stuff.' I don't know if it's like, 'Oh, this kid's coming,' or if it's just a, 'I respect what you do, I appreciate it, and it made me want to get back on my stuff.' I feel like it's more the latter, but there's going to be some of that 'OK, this kid's coming.' There's going to be nothing you can do because I'm coming, whether you like this special or not.