Featured Conversation: In Conversation with Comedian Jason Klamm

Published on Aug 5, 2025

IHTOV correspondent Owen Brazas interviews comedian and author Jason Klamm

Let’s start at the beginning, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and when you were first bit by the comedy bug?

Like a lot of young comedians I’m pretty sure it was very much, “Oh, a certain combination of words will make this or that person laugh? Let me figure that shit out.” So starting at eight, I tried writing jokes and sat in front of the TV trying to figure out how and why jokes and word choice and inflection did their magic. When I later met Dan, my best friend (of now 35 years), he introduced me to Weird Al’s In 3-D and Cheech and Chong’s Greatest Hit, and I discovered that comedy came in album form. In 1993, we improvised our first tape full of comedy (which I still have) and I’ve rarely worked on something that wasn’t comedic since then.

Were your family into comedy, did they have “funny” records you discovered via them? If not, how did you first lay your hands on some comedy albums? 

My mom and dad both have senses of humor, but my mom introduced me to the majority of comedy that informed my tastes in those first few years. In my teens, she gave me a few of her vinyl comedy records (which I think included some of her mom’s records, too), and no others. I didn’t ask for any other records, either - it was just understood that that was what I needed. Among these were George Carlin’s Class Clown, The Smothers Brothers Live at the Purple Onion, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small.

I love how records invite fans of niches and micro-niches to have a place. Being a comedy album fan can be similar to someone deeply into something as different as experimental drone music. Maybe not the easiest to track down, but the fans are there, and the ones that love it, LOVE it and will support it. What is experience both finding records you love and putting something out there for people?

I’ve found out in recent years that I only really love a handful of these records, but I think that’s going to be the case anyway. You’re just experimenting, right? If someone loves jazz, for instance, sure, they’re going to take all the info in they can, listen to a ton of records, probably get a little buzz from something on any record they find, but they aren’t going to fall back on every single record when pushed to tell you their absolute all-time favorites. They’re going to love - REALLY love - only a handful. And I would bet that half the time, a good chunk of those are the ones that got them interested in jazz in the first place. So picking through records and hoping to find something brilliant is still fun for me, but there are so few record stores with significant comedy record sections in them, at least for my tastes. The big thing is when people would pitch their records to me because of the Comedy on Vinyl podcasts and be kind enough to just send them to me - I discovered a lot of brilliant stuff that way. People who still make comedy records, especially, don’t do it unless they really love it, which takes a chunk of time and money, at the end of which you’re finding a labor of love anyway. Maybe the best thing I’ve ever been sent is called A Gift You Didn’t Ask For From Friends You Never Had by Jared Jeffries and Peyton Brown, which is a fantastic homage to the likes of The Firesign Theatre, and it’s all made with passion and dedication of a true pair of comedy fans who are also thankfully brilliant comedians.

As for putting stuff out there, I’ve been doing that most of my life now because the internet hit just as I had this urgent need to create (and probably to be noticed/seen). I first had a story published (a comedic story, it should be noted - or what passed for comedy when I was fifteen) because of my alternative high school, and that gave me an undying thirst for seeing my stuff out there. It’s not a quantity game, exactly, but there is an element of seeing how many breadcrumbs I can spread to track back to who I really am. My sketch and improv group, Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour, have technically been together since 1993 - basically my best friend Dan Gomiller and I fucking around on audio cassette, then VHS, then CD, and now a podcast - so that meant that we were in our teens/early 20s when a site called mp3.com first appeared. This was a place you could upload your stuff - for us, it was a short album of sketches called Shoestrings - and people (mostly yourself, if you were us) could buy your album on a physical CD as well as digitally. We put out a video in 2001 that went viral (10s of 1000s of videos was pretty good for then) and shut down Dan’s internet server, all because we just wanted to put something out there. No one was making live action videos on the internet in 2001, so this was a novelty, frankly. As with anything I’ve done in the last couple decades, though, these are not money-makers or career launchers, but that’s never fully dissuaded me from making my own stuff, and desperately, desperately, desperately needing to have our material on vinyl. We’re getting close, which is nice.

Can you tell me a little bit about your podcast “Comedy on Vinyl” a loose history and what made you want to start it?

In 2011, podcasts didn’t really need a purpose beyond bullshitting for an hour with someone more famous than yourself. To be honest, as part of my undying need for the hussle of putting comedy-related stuff out there in the hopes it catches on, I figured I would try and make a show with a theme, because I mistakenly thought a podcast had to be about something. So I picked something I loved, knew a smidge about, and wanted to learn about more, in the hopes people would listen. Sure, I hoped it would become a TV show, or a documentary, or something, but for a little over a decade, I became an expert on comedy records (vinyl, acetate, CD, and otherwise) and ended up interviewing most of my heroes about their favorite comedy albums. Toward the end of the show, I also did a mini-series on the show called “Family Albums,” where I interviewed people related to people who created both famous and obscure comedy records, and those ended up being my absolute favorite episodes of the show, pretty much. Don’t listen to the first two episodes, though - we thought we should talk over the albums, and that was… terrible.

Do you still go out of your way to look for old/new comedy records? Any special record stores that you love? 

Hilariously I didn’t get into collecting vinyl for the reasons you’ll often hear - that the vinyl sounds warmer, or whatever - I’m clearly not an audiophile. I got into it because I’m obsessed with comedy and vinyl is the absolute cheapest way to get a lot of comedy in your collection quickly. The double edged sword of that though is wondering if I’m ever going to listen to them all. And I won’t. In 2017, I tried listening to a comedy album a day and failed about three months in. Having a day job and also finding the time to actively listen to comedy burned me out quickly, and made me realize that, like so much art, a lot of it is, shall we say, not going to be for me. A lot of comedy albums suck. Not all of them, and not enough of a chunk to make me not love them with all my heart, but enough that I ended up becoming picky over pessimistic or cynical. I love them even more, now, and if I’m in a record shop I will always check the comedy section for something I don’t have or have never heard, but it’s been a while since I’ve been surprised.

Because of this, though, my collection is still about 700 strong - nothing compared to some people I’ve interviewed, mind you, but it’s a LOT - and I’ve recently agreed to give a majority of the collection, as well as stuff I find because of my love of the medium, to the Detroit Public Library later this year. They’ll have a dedicated vinyl comedy section to go along with their massive collection of music vinyl, and there’s nothing I could be prouder to have my name on. Except, of course, that eventual Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour vinyl LP.

As for special shops, absolutely. My two top record shops are the ones I went to the most when I lived in LA - Atomic Records in Burbank, and Record Surplus on Santa Monica Blvd in LA. Record Surplus has the biggest comedy section of any record store I’ve ever been to, and I’ve discovered some absolute gems there, like one called Mr. Silver Spitzdawson, an independently-released record (the first of two) by these guys called Dawson and Harrell. Not particularly polished, at all, but charming as hell. I interviewed the surviving member of the group on the “Family Albums” mini-series and they reminded me so much of Dan and I improvising as kids, only they had the cash and know how to bang out two insane, rambling LPs in the mid-sixties. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my local shop in Berkley, Michigan: Flipside Records, and then Kalamazoo’s own Satellite Records, which has the second best comedy section I’ve ever seen, which includes some phenomenal Midwest-based comedy acts. My other favorite thing about comedy album collecting is finding regional acts who are or were only famous in that region, and who signed every single record they ever released. It’s a fascinating part of this whole thing for me. 

I would love to know more about the record you have coming out, which will be produced by Stand Up! Records. Tell me all about it, what’s it called, when can we get it?

The record is called Presenting… Dick Davy and comes out September 9 from Stand Up! Records; it’s a limited release of only 300. Back in 2015, comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff came on Comedy on Vinyl to talk about this 60s comedian called Dick Davy, a guy with a hillbilly routine that was all about race, without any of the stuff you might actually assume. He was very aww-shucks, playing the part of the guy who just didn’t understand why racism existed, and used that naivete to find all his punchlines. Kliph, a consummate researcher and writer, couldn’t find any info on him beyond a single interview in a rather important book, Phil Berger’s The Last Laugh. You know how we’re lucky that a million people wrote about the Beats? Well, Berger was writing about the comedy scene happening at the same time, and the birth of American stand-up. After our interview, I was so jacked up I tried my hand at researching Davy, but without knowing his real name or just about anything else about the man, I was stumped after a week of thinking I would be able to help Kliph find him.

Three years later, in desperate need of distraction from the grief I was going through due to the loss of my friend Mike Shaver (another member of Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour), I started “Family Albums,” and eventually, when things got really dark, I dug back into the Dick Davy mystery. It was a welcome distraction, and became what I think is the best episode of Comedy on Vinyl. Even though Davy had passed, I got to speak to his brother Daniel and his niece, Sharon. Sharon later discovered two fragile acetate demos from Davy’s musical comedy days, and one that was selects from a set at The Bitter End. Not long after that, a listener named Marc Skobac pointed me to the only video footage of Dick’s act I’ve ever seen, recorded probably only months before he retired from comedy - also recorded at The Bitter End. I called up my buddy Dan Schlissel at Stand Up! Records and he thankfully agreed that this bookending of a comedian’s career (he released two records through Columbia, making his obscurity even more fascinating) would be a great record. I wrote 6,500 words of liner notes, The Firesign Theatre’s archivist Taylor Jessen digitized the acetates, and Tony Millionaire did the cover art. I am so incredibly proud of how it turned out, and honored Dan at Stand Up! thought enough of the idea to release it. It’s the first time I’ve produced a vinyl comedy album.

Stand Up! Records seem+6 to really understand what makes comedy on vinyl special. From the artwork, cool color vinyl, and knowing records are a way to deep listen to something. How did they come into the picture? 

Dan at Stand Up! found out about my podcast, probably through word of mouth. He quickly offered to support the show, and he did that by setting me up with actual professional mics (until then I was recording on a tiny recorder I’d been long-term borrowing from my producer Mike Worden). He has always been generous sending me new releases to check out, and has become a really great friend. I’d actually been waiting to send Dan anything until I had a sketch album to pitch to him, and in the interim continued to pitch him ideas I had nothing to do with - stuff I wanted to see exist. I connected him with The Firesign Theatre through Taylor Jessen, which resulted in Firesign’s first vinyl record in decades, Dope Humor of the Seventies. Dan continued to listen to my show as a fan, so when the Davy acetates came around, there was no question who I’d pitch to. I know people at most of the actually good comedy vinyl producers (the ones who are in the quality game, rather than sheer quantity), but Dan is the guy I pitch to, specifically because of his attention to detail. He understands the experience of holding a record, the excitement of finding some ephemera in the jacket, and the sheer pleasure of having a playable piece of art you can touch. Comedy is not immune to the visceral part of vinyl collecting experience.

I have been told that the liner notes of the record goes long and deep. Another aspect of getting a cool record (especially in the olde days), these liner notes and photos gave you more (and in some cases the only) insight into these comics and artists. A deep or personal connection can happen this way. Is this sort of thing something you had in mind, a personal touch for fans and yourself? 

Getting to write actual liner notes for the first time really brought me back to that feeling of getting to dig deeper into the context of what I was listening to. I absolutely wanted people to feel how I felt searching for Davy, and how important I think his story is to the history of stand up. I also think the history of comedy is generally important, and gets ignored in favor of other art forms. My hope is to elevate the importance of humor to culture; it’s a survival tool and a kind of existential buoy. That’s the pretentious way of saying “it’s so damn cool my words are in a big square book inside a record.”

Since about halfway through Comedy on Vinyl’s run, I’ve been pitching around a book on the history of recorded comedy based on the podcast. Interestingly, this has resulted in me writing comedy history books about everything but vinyl (my book We’re Not Worthy is about 90s TV sketch comedy and I’m now writing the oral history of a very popular 80s comedy movie), but I know what that book needs to look and feel like. In brief: it needs to feel like a shit-ton of liner notes, album art, and ephemera. Writing the Presenting… Dick Davy liner notes has definitely prepped me for that.

What feels different about putting out a record vs. putting out something on a streaming site? 

For me, that feeling is very specific. I’ve wanted to release a vinyl comedy album since I was a kid, then lived through a period where vinyl was “dead,” then started a podcast just as vinyl was coming back. That’s why this feels so incredibly surreal - I’m literally getting to live one of my biggest dreams. There’s this great feeling of knowing you’re part of something that is potentially permanent, too. I won’t pretend I’m not kind of obsessed with comedy legacies (including my own), and the idea of having something out there that I helped usher into the world is thrilling. There’s this great song called “Magnetic Pulse” by Our Debut Album, a project started by my favorite podcasters, Dave Shumka and Graham Clark, which ends with these lyrics: “And if all the songs on Earth | Are wiped out by a magnetic pulse | The only thing that’s ever final | Is the music pressed on vinyl.” I once interviewed an archaeologist who specializes in recent history, and he managed to recover audio from a melted record, so that permanence is really beautiful to me.

With the Dick Davy record, part of the beauty is putting out something that is part of Davy’s overall history, filling in all the blanks we currently can; I’m sure we’ll find other stuff from him in the future, but these are the perfect tracks for this record. For my own work, like the LP Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour has been working on for way too long (thanks COVID and a million other things!), that will just feel like an evolution from the days of mp3.com and CDs. Digital stuff is fine, but there’s simply nothing to hold; I personally don’t give the music or comedy the attention it deserves unless I have a physical record. Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour is also releasing a limited-edition (only 7) phonograph cylinder this fall, called The Inquisitive Florist, probably the only sketch released on cylinder in decades. It was recorded by “our great-grandfathers” and it comes with a 45-page chapbook of fake history of the group, going back centuries.

For younger folks starting to get into comedy what would your advice be to them? 

That’s a hard one - I’m better equipped to tell someone “just see if you can luck into writing nonfiction for a living” than I am to tell them how to make it in comedy. I spent 18 years in LA trying to make it as a filmmaker and actor, and while I found some success specifically in comedy-related stuff (I made three indie features and self-published a few books), I didn’t sign a book deal until six months after I moved to Detroit. I can say that - for an artist in my position, anyway - the idea of having a day job is not some sort of cop out. I still have one, because it’s a necessity. I’ve heard a million stories of people who had to push and give themselves a certain amount of time to “make it” before they quit the business, during which they did absolutely nothing else, not even waiting tables or whatever. What you never hear in those stories is A) this person had savings or other support and B) “making it” is nebulous. Success in comedy (or anything) is not like microwaving a friggin’ bag of popcorn. I’ve had to take the patience route, and there are worse ways to spend your time - making stuff you love and you hope will make others laugh is pretty satisfying, especially as you see yourself get better the more you do it.

Jason Klamm is an author, actor, and sketch comedian. He’s been one half of sketch and improv group Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour (danandjay.com) since 1993, and he wrote 2023’s We’re Not Worthy, the history of 90s TV sketch comedy. He hosted the long-running Comedy on Vinyl podcast and runs the ComedyPodcast.cloud Network (comedypodcast.cloud). He is currently working on Dan and Jay’s next LP, and writing his second pop culture oral history for 1984 Publishing (1984publishing.com).

danandjay.com

jasonklamm.com

celerysoundrecords.com (I somehow neglected to mention my own TINY-TINY-TINY record label, ha)