WATCHING JAY JOHNSTON

The comedic possibilities of a Mr. Show cast member as J6'er

When I first watched Mr. Show with Bob and David, the HBO sketch comedy program that ran from 1995-1998, I felt seen in the same generational way I’ve read that ‘hip’ people reacted to Saturday Night Live in 1975. The show’s humor was similar to how I and my pals joked in the 1990s, mocking conservatives and lefties alike, yet fully capable of differentiating the two sides. My introduction to the show was a great long bit from the first season in which a howling caricature of a performance artist tries and fails to shit on an American flag. After he takes the flag to court for endangering his livelihood, the sketch morphs into a flashback with the founding fathers each trying and failing to shit on the flag.

Like Monty Python before it, Mr. Show used scalpel-precise political jokes as Easter Eggs. In 1979’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian, there is a brief, minor gag about the chronic fracturing of leftist infighting. Comedian Alexei Sayle (of TheYoung Ones, the Python/Mr. Show of its decade), a youthful communist, once described feeling both seen and shamed the first time he heard members of the People’s Front of Judea shout ‘splitter!’ at the one-man Popular Front of Judea. It’s a very specific joke.

A friend of mine once tried to sell his conservative roommate on Mr. Show. He did this by re-enacting the plot of the flag-shitting sketch in great detail. The conservative roommate frowned. “No!” my friend persisted. “Don’t you get it? They’re making fun of people who shit on the flag!”

My favorite Mr. Show player wasn’t in the flag sketch. Jay Johnston was a utility player in a cast small enough that every member shone. Gangly and limber, with a rich timbre he could squash or stretch at will, Johnston made full characters out of one-sentence jokes, like ‘Choo-Choo the Herky-Jerky Dancer,’ who only appeared onscreen for five wordless seconds. I’d always hoped he’d have a career like Mr. Show colleagues Bob Odenkirk or Tom Kinney (later to play Spongebob). For a little while it seemed he might have carved out a living on The Sarah Silverman Show, in which he played a hapless policeman who barked things like, “I will shoot you and plant a gun on your body and that will be that!” It didn’t seem like a character a conservative would play. It wasn’t a role that respected cops.

The day after Trump’s second inauguration, Jay Johnston received a presidential pardon for his role in the January 6 attack on the US capitol. In the nearly four-year gap between his first online identification and news of the pardon, Johnston’s (rather benign) role in the attack befuddled Mr. Show fans. There’d been no clues to his politics in any of his work, no clues in anything he’d ever done publicly. Just last fall, a Redditor commented God I hope the next time we see him he has hella aryan nation face tattoos. But the pardon came before the start of his year-and-a-day sentence.

Four days after the pardon, Johnston appeared on YouTube’s The Jimmy Dore Show. Dore didn’t give him much time to talk in between all the other bits, January 6 as ‘psy-op,’ the bitter digs at Fauci and ‘the Biden Crime Family,’ the clips of angry, self-serious men like Tucker Carlson and Russell Brand and congressman Clay Higgins. There are so many grievances and so little time. At one point, the semi-cancelled comedian Kurt Metzger chimed in by Zoom, but he sputtered, too indignant at the state of America to even land a joke.

Ten years ago, Metzger did a great standup bit called Use Your Holes The Right Way. He got big laughs describing God in his infinite and unfathomable majesty, using a jeweler’s loupe to make sure no one on Earth used their buttholes for sodomy. Metzger played the bit with the performative obliviousness of a conservative-Christian, a joke where being conservative was itself the punchline. Sodomy “takes God’s protection from America,” he said, straight-faced, to laughter. It’s funny because what kind of a person would actually say such a thing?

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Two days after Dore’s show, Jay Johnston appeared on Chrissie Mayr’s video show, whose intro, to hot rock guitar licks, itself seems like a Mr. Show sketch. He wore a Defund The Media baseball hat (which feels polite in 2025), and appeared with his fiancé, Sara Radovanovitch, who sells prints of an original painting of Donald Trump titled Unbreakable. Like Jimmy Dore, Mayr had to squeeze in a lot of red meat, which left scant time for Johnston.

For people so up in arms over pronouns, Johnston’s new allies sure do lean into one; “they.” The news THEY don’t want you to hear! It reads like a bunch of people too cowardly to say ‘Jews’ on camera. It’s like how vice president Spiro Agnew used dog whistles about ‘a little group of men that control the media,’ sparking a fresh wave of antisemitism in the late 1960s, the same way every Kanye West Nazi stunt results in fresh ripples of antisemitic violence today.

How did Jay get from there to here? He gives few clues. On Dawn Stensland’s podcast, she introduced him as a “freed hostage,” which he didn’t correct. On SiriusXMPatriot, Jay described one final, bitter call with Bob Odenkirk, who he describes as ‘captured.’ On Steve Burguiere’s show, Johnston cited the 2011 birth of his daughter as the point when he ‘broadened his horizons.’ But his main political motivation, the shunning of his Hollywood colleagues after his arrest, is retroactive. The story plays well with white people drunk on grievance. When Jay revealed he now does neighborhood handyman work for a living, his hosts groused about blacklists.

It’s ridiculous, of course. He could have a hugely lucrative career ahead if he wants it. Dennis Miller and Rob Schneider have carved out livings as political hacks. Johnston is a genuinely funny comedian, with a history of sketch improv. He’s a ‘J6er,’ almost definitely the funniest of the 1600-person group. There’s an opportunity here to do something unique: conservative comedy that is actually funny. What would that look like?