Interview with Josh Johnson
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Josh Johnson
Stand-up comedian and Daily Show correspondent who spent years writing for The Daily Show. He posts full topical stand-up sets on YouTube.
Source: Mike Birbiglia on YouTube
These answers are taken from Josh Johnson | Reinventing The Modern Comedy Special | Mike Birbiglia's Working It Out Podcast on Mike Birbiglia's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with comedy?
I think everything I do on YouTube is what I used to do to my mom. I would just go on and on and on. This is before I ever really thought about comedy in that way, necessarily. I liked making my mom laugh. But as gracious as she is and was at the time to this little kid who could just go on and on forever, I would see the dip. I'd see where I started bombing with my mom. Sometimes I would be talking with my mom and she'd be like, oh yeah, right. And once you get one of those, it's like, all right, there needs to be a turn. You've got to pick it up. There's got to be a surprise. Where's the twist? Where's the punch line? You've got to bring it home now.
How did your career as a comedian unfold?
I had always been writing a lot, and then a good friend of mine said, you should do topical stuff, since you already write so much. He had seen me eight or 10 times in a couple of months and he hadn't seen me do the same set. Applying it to topical was the first time I was like, oh yeah, there will finally be a place for all this stuff to go. Before I started posting online, I was just doing a joke for a week or a month and then moving on, outside of my opener and closer.
So I was going up at the Cellar, and the Cellar's kind enough to tape the set and give it to you. The only real pressure was that I really had to get it in one. I had started doing this during the writers' strike, so I wasn't working at The Daily Show at the time, and I wasn't on the road as much. When I finally started getting some bookings, I was like, let's try to keep to that thing. Can we get it in one? Sometimes you had two or three shows in a night, so it's three chances, and you're like, okay, I think the middle one went best, and you put it up that way.
What advice do you have for new comedians?
I've seen people who are incredible painters, incredible at whatever their art is, and they lose a little bit of their time with second-guessing themselves and trying to make it perfect. But in a world of noise, I don't think anybody is going to be particularly critical of your chatter to the point that you shouldn't put it out there. Job number one is making the people who came to the show part of an experience and making sure they had a good time. If you did job number one, everything else is this extra blessing. So you just put stuff out and you get better, and you put stuff out and you get better.
Anyone who's been doing standup for more than four or five years knows that no one should know what your first year of comedy looked like at all. Get focused on what it is you want to make and what brings you joy about making it.
Trevor Noah told me that no matter what it is, the act out or the point you're making, always still bring that energy and that level of fun. In between jokes, you still have to remind people that they're at a show.
The best advice I've used: be as patient as you are persistent.
Has your career as a comedian progressed the way you expected?
When it came to the Comedy Central half hour, I felt like I was ready for it the year before I got it, and I was understandably kind of upset. Back then there were only so many opportunities. But I watched everyone who got the half hour that year, and there wasn't a single one where I felt like my set was stronger than theirs. It was the first time I really accepted for myself this thing that people always tell you when you start out: how subjective everything is, that you can't take things personally, and you can't expect people to get you when you feel ready. Everything happens in its time.
Then when I did get it, the next year, I felt like, oh man, this is it. It went out, and I got messaged by people saying it was their favorite one. That's a lesson I've taken with me ever since, including about being on camera at The Daily Show, where I was a writer for about seven years. When you rush things, you can put yourself in a position that's not necessarily for you to shine, as much as doing things at the right time.
Describe your style.
I've always written a lot, and I've always tried to write it out quickly. I think it's a product of being a little bit annoying, that I have a lot of feelings and thoughts on everything, and I finally found a way to channel it that is not annoying in real time. Now I don't have to burden my girlfriend and my friends with this long series of things that I think are funny about something. Uploading to YouTube gives my girlfriend some relief from me just talking all the time.
There's always a grass is greener aspect to doing comedy. I see someone who's just so sharp and punchy, and sometimes I'm like, I wonder if I should do more of that. And then you come back to yourself and you're like, all right, I enjoy the way that I think. I like doing comedy the way that I do it, because it's how I process things. Getting it in one became what felt like the real free-flowing, conscious joke to joke to story to joke.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
There was a time where I ran into a guy at a party who was also named Josh Johnson, and he was gorgeous, and he was much taller than me. At one point at the party, I'm pretty sure unprovoked, this dude was talking about some scientific theory while spinning a basketball. And I was like, I've never wanted anyone dead the way I want this dude dead. It was Shakespearean, the level that I hated this dude. He was jacked as well, but not in a gross way. He was draped just enough within his clothes that you knew he was jacked, like a nice Oxford shirt he's kind of busting out of. And I was just like, why couldn't your name be Derek? I need one of these things to not be happening.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
These are all my most selfish, all ego things. I want to have the best catalog ever. I want to be remembered as the best writer ever. And then I want to be able to look back and be like, I made all of this art with all these different people as well. I have plans for music to come out. I have plans for all these other things that I want to be doing. So I think it's really just the ability to create, and I want to have more of it free-flowing as well, which means I need more capital or more collaborators.
It's something you can only get for yourself, because anything that someone else has to give me, I'll be chasing for the rest of my life, even after I get it. If I say I want a Grammy for best comedy album, there's no practical way to chase that within art. Whereas if you keep making stuff where you could comfortably say, when I look at who's in the category, I think this is as good as what's in there, and you just know that to yourself quietly, that chasing greatness is such a personal aspiration that you know on your deathbed if you did it or not.
Josh Johnson's Full Biography
Josh Johnson is known for The Daily Show (1996), The Daily Show's The Yearly Show 2017 (2017) and Genies (2018).