James Austin Johnson is having a great summer. The Nashville native is home from New York City, on break from Saturday Night Live — the cultural institution where he’s a writer and cast member. He’s also on screens everywhere, lending his voice to Inside Out 2, the biggest movie of the year and animation studio Pixar’s highest-grossing film of all time. On the weekends he’s touring the country with SNL co-stars Devon Walker and Andrew Dismukes. Ahead of his three-night stand at Zanies this weekend, Johnson takes the Scene on a deep dive into the journey that took him from “Christian dork” to an actor inching ever closer to being ready for prime time.
But first, the important stuff.
“I bought a truck yesterday, and I’m doing the first round of recycling that I promised I would do as soon as I got a truck,” Johnson tells the Scene. “Because not having a truck was the excuse for not hauling anything, which was a good excuse to not haul anything.”
The truck is his fourth Ranger, a replacement for the one he sold as he left L.A. in 2021 to join SNL’s 47th season in New York City. Johnson was raised in the middle-class suburbs of Davidson County, and so his current trappings of success — a car so sensible they’ll never make them again, a special-edition Nintendo 64 he really wanted as a kid — are a reflection of the same bright-eyed open-mic regular the Scene met a dozen years ago, in a smoky bar named Spanky’s behind the Walmart on Nolensville Road.
Even when Johnson was a college kid, it was clear he loved the work — the process of creating comedy, the grind and the churn that polished jokes. He’s got that always on quality that makes even the most mundane comments feel like the seeds of a bit. Like a drummer tapping out rudiments on his leg or songwriter half-humming an unfinished melody, Johnson is constantly tinkering at the technical minutiae of his craft. To be fair, it was a weird trait then, but it makes total sense now.
When he moved to L.A. and started landing film roles like “Studio Assistant at Action Western” in the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar! those who knew him in Nashville were not surprised. He was always pleasant to share a stage with, a good hang in those awkward anxious moments before showtime and a supportive audience member when the mic wasn’t his. He was a cool co-worker even if we were all just working for a can of Fresca (the top prize at Spanky’s weekly show). He was totally the dude you want around during the hurry-up-and-wait moments.
“I bought a house out near my parents as soon as I had two nickels to rub together,” he says. “Because my wife loves Nashville and I love Nashville. And now that we live in New York, it’s kind of so easy to get to Nashville from New York.”
Johnson went viral at the height of the pandemic with a series of gleefully absurd impressions of then-President Donald Trump, recorded on break from a gig folding T-shirts in an L.A. warehouse. Johnson’s hyper-citational pop-culture logorrhea would connect with fans on both sides of the aisle, eventually landing him in front of SNL creator Lorne Michaels — and then on TVs everywhere.
It is an impression with pathos, an impression that finds silliness in a strange and sinister character. Johnson artfully deconstructs narratives around Trump, both conservative and liberal, and rebuilds them as goofy stream-of-consciousness diatribes, finding the center by going all the way out there. The humor is steeped in the weird cultural milieu that comes from being from a blue city in a red state, a blue kid in a red community.
“I’m a Davidson County girl,” Johnson explains. “I was born at Baptist Hospital, and I was raised five minutes from downtown. I grew up acting in Baptist propaganda for Lifeway Christian Resources, for the Southern Baptist Convention. … I acted in [Lifeway videos] as a child and as a teenager. And then I was in some indie Christian films in my early 20s as well.”
It’s an odd start for a Hollywood success story, but it goes a long way in illustrating Johnson’s artistic drive from a young age. He might have had Hollywood dreams, but he had only Nashville resources, and in those days Nashville’s film industry resources were scant. But those were the make-your-own-fun years in Music City, and the dearth of mainstream productions would prove no hindrance to the creative and motivated.
It’s the second week of July, and Johnson is back in Nashville after a weekend performing in Chicago — four shows in two days. He was at The Basem*nt East the night after, opening for fellow SNL cast member Sarah Sherman. In true Nashville style, he’s home at the beginning of the week, playing shows on the weekend and cramming as much dad stuff — doctor’s appointments, grandparent visits — as he can into the time he’s got before returning to New York and Saturday Night Live’s 50th season.
“I’m at home,” Johnson tells the Scene. “I am loving life. … I mean, it’s a cool town full of cool people, and I just love getting to thread that needle, because it [puts] me as a comedian in a sweet spot where I think about my background as a super-conservative Christian kid and then who I am today, which is an artist who’s out there in the big city.”
“When I was coming up, it just didn’t feel like there was a path,” he says. “This was pre-podcasting, and so many of the lanes in stand-up felt just kind of frozen in time. I knew I wasn’t going to be [Southern comedian and regional legend] Killer Beaz, and I knew I wasn’t going to be a guitar comic or something like that. So I looked around, and I just kind of felt like I was a little bit impatient about what my path could be.”
That path, which started with his parents driving him to classes and auditions, would span nearly two decades and countless miles of travel across the Midstate. The path would include time with the pioneering local comedy crew Corporate Juggernaut, who brought in then-up-and-coming comics like Pete Holmes and Kyle Kinane and made Nashville a stop on the alt-comedy circuit.
The path would eventually include TV commercials and animation, unfruitful development deals and temp jobs. The path would take him some distance — both physical and philosophical — from the conservative educational mecca of Murfreesboro Pike where he grew up.
“My dad still works at Trevecca [Nazarene University],” Johnson tells the Scene. “My grandpa was president of Trevecca. My dad and mom met at orientation at Trevecca. My oldest brother went to Trevecca. My middle brother went to Trevecca. Both of them met their wives at Trevecca. I spent every afternoon and evening running around under the bleachers at Trevecca basketball games because my mom worked in the concession stand, my dad did the P.A. And then I went to Trevecca.
“So God bless my parents,” he continues. “They’ve always supported me, even though they may not have seen what I saw. They may not have had the vision that I had, but my sweet dad, he drove me out to L.A. for my final semester of college, and I’ll always be fully indebted to them for the support that they could give.”
But before L.A., Johnson met his first agent, took his first acting classes and made his earliest short films thanks to church friend Daniel Page. Page’s father Greg Page was co-creator of Snowbird, Nashville’s legendary WSMV cartoon avatar of snow day dreams. (If you’re new here, ask a local.) Through Page, Johnson met Janet Ivey, children’s acting advocate and star of NPT’s Janet’s Planet series, at Franklin’s Boiler Room Theatre. Johnson performed his earliest stand-up set at Ivey’s kids’ comedy night. From there he signed with his first agent, entering the world of inspirational cinema and the Erwin brothers, Vacation Bible School’s answer to the Safdies. The film, 2012’s October Baby, would open to terrible reviews and kickstart a new era of Christ-sploitation cinema.
“And I don’t harbor any ill will toward any of the people that I was in Christian entertainment or conservative entertainment with, it’s not my mission in life,” explains Johnson. “I was like, ‘You know what? I respect these people too much to continue to halfheartedly be a part of what they’re trying to accomplish.’ I don’t really make stuff like that anymore, but to be 21 and be in a theatrically released movie that opened number 8 in the country, that’s not an experience that a lot of Nashville actors really get to have.
“I mean, every Nashville audition was, ‘We need a hot, ripped, 6’5”, all-American stud to sweep Miranda Lambert off her feet,’” he continues. “And I was never going to be that guy.”
Johnson — who describes his political views as “liberal, commie, whatever bad thing an evangelical firebrand wants to call me” and who will sprinkle conversations with little nuggets of pro-worker, pro-diversity sentiments — is quick to admit that he’s “very lucky” he had that “Christian fear of everything baked into me, because it did kind of keep me from doing stupid stuff from time to time.” It’s a personal history that provided him with ample material, relatable and renewable, a wellspring of people and practices that could use a gentle ribbing.
Take for instance “Lake Beach,” Johnson’s SNL music video with Bridgestone-headliner-slash-Nashville homie Nate Bargatze and omnipresent dad-rocker Dave Grohl. The idea started as a 10-minute bit of absurdist bro-country about telling Johnson’s uncle about Howard Zinn at a lake beach — but it worked its way through the gauntlet of writers and performers to become a taut sociological study of a uniquely landlocked social scene.
“Lake Beach” is a tableau that will be familiar to anybody who’s ever spent an afternoon knee-deep in brown water, beer in hand. And in true Music City fashion, if you can attend a freshwater social event without getting the hook from “Lake Beach” stuck in your head, you probably haven’t heard the song. It’s the sort of song that couldn’t be made by anyone but a dyed-in-the-wool local. It’s the sort of creative collaboration this town was built on, only this time it’s live from New York rather than an office on the Row.
“I was at Be Your Own Pet shows in high school,” says Johnson. “Just thinking, ‘What if I was a cool Nashville person? What if I was someone who cool people wanted to come see?’ And I was like, ‘Oh man, that’ll never happen. I’m too much of a Christian dork.’”
The Scene catches up with Johnson again a little later in July. This time he’s on a quick run to the West Coast — two nights in San Francisco, a night in Portland, a night in Seattle and a night in L.A. It’s a Wednesday afternoon and Johnson, whose demeanor and visual aesthetic could definitely land him the role as “Young Kurt Wagner” in Lambchop, the Band: The Movie, is out there thrifting.
“We’re in Seattle today and just kind of bopping around to thrift stores while we gear up for the show,” says Johnson. “This tour with Devon and Andrew was all about the hangs. It was all about hanging out and less about whatever [booking] was the most profitable.”
Johnson may have found coastal success, but his approach to handling it is rooted very much in Middle Tennessee. He admits that his spending decisions are still influenced by “Dave Ramsey Christian financial management tapes” and that he has “gotten really hardcore into late-period Bob Dylan.” He loves buying merch from restaurants and stores, clothes with names and logos. His vibe is more dad in the Kumon parking lot than late-night TV star. It’s a style that’s as studied as it is effortless.
“The Nashville that I experienced — from the ground up — was the culture of players, the culture of the people in the band,” Johnson explains. “I knew people whose dads were touring musicians or session musicians or engineers or songwriters, and these were silent family people. These were moms and dads, and they were just shredders and you didn’t know it.
“That’s something that I really love about [Nashville],” he continues. “It is as accepted as sunrise and sunset that a pudgy dad that you’ve shared three words with could also sit down and just demolish [Vince Gill’s] ‘Oklahoma Borderline.’”
Johnson’s drive and Nashville’s ever-persistent compulsion to put on a show would keep him busy — and his parents driving — from his first improv class forward. He was writing plays in middle school drama club, performing five shows a year through high school. He did regional theater. He did community theater. But opportunities for comedy were scarce and seemingly unattainable without leaving Trevecca-approved spaces.
“There were lots of things to fear about my college environment related to stand-up, so I really didn’t tell people that I was doing stand-up,” he says. “I didn’t tell my parents, I didn’t tell my friends. I would just kind of disappear. There were bars where I learned how to sneak in the back door and hope not to get carded. I did that a lot. I did a lot of sneaking in through the patio, ordering a Pepsi and just hoping not to get kicked out before my set.
“What a turbulent little time sneaking around just trying to do literally the stupidest one-liners of all time and be accepted as a stand-up comedian,” he continues. “It took me time to learn how to perform at a place, it took living life, it took moving away, and it took having loved, having lost love, et cetera.”
These days Johnson gets to walk in the front door. He probably doesn’t even get asked for ID. He’s been accepted and celebrated, critiqued and analyzed, taking all the jabs and pokes and high-fives that come from performing with one of mass media’s most recognizable organizations. He’s a target of right-wing ire and left-wing consternation, but also embraced and appreciated by both camps. He is aiming for a very silly center, and he seems to be hitting the bull’s-eye. That’s the gig, after all.
“Half my act is talking about how weird the culture I come from looks to me,” says Johnson, who has a young son. “You have children, and then you just look at your own life differently, and you look at how you were raised differently, your relationship to your grandparents, your parents, your great-grandparents, it all changes because you think about the good things that you got from a place that maybe you spent your whole adolescence resenting. Your relationship to all that changes.”
Johnson is an artist who loves the process, the moving targets and the constant change that keep the work engaging. As we talk about what the future holds, his excitement for the work comes to the fore. The challenge of writing for an entire country, of finding the common thread that makes people laugh across cultural and political lines, is what keeps his creative fire stoked.
“I’m just trying to be someone who is a vessel of love, as corny as that f*cking is. I’m trying to make people laugh. I’m trying to help people fall asleep. That’s my job as a late-night sketch comedian. I’m trying to help you fall asleep in a spicy world.”
