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Jordan Casner appears onstage as a somewhat average guy. His standard build, well-trimmed mustache, and classic “T-shirt, baseball cap, jeans” getup wouldn’t feel entirely out of place at your dad’s backyard barbecue. It’s this visual quality—combined with his dry, yet relatable humor—that allows him to disarm his audiences. He doesn’t have a set type of crowd, and he is not afraid to take advantage of that.
“I’ll have a show where I have a joke about skateboarding and about playing football, and it does feel like sportsy ‘guy’s guy’ stuff,” he says. “But then my favorite bit right now is about my nonbinary partner and competing with their ex-lesbian lovers.”
That very joke may have helped him clinch victory at Helium Comedy Club last year when he won the club’s annual Portland’s Funniest Comedian contest.
“I’m actually one of the first men that they’ve been in a relationship with,” Casner told the crowd. “Which means that when it comes to, like, holidays, birthdays, just general thoughtfulness, I’m competing with lesbians, and I hate it.”
Casner, 35, admits he hasn’t always knocked it out of the comedy park. His early years onstage, sometimes spent in basketball shorts, were an enjoyable though unserious effort with little direction. He once scored an audition to host at Helium, but bombed it with an ill-fitting musical comedy act.
“I went out there, I did musical comedy, and I ate shit for 10 straight minutes to just silence,” he says. “I walked back into the green room, and Christian Rickets, this dude who did weird charactery stuff, is dressed as a cowboy and he’s got a pull-string talk doll. He’s next to me and goes, ‘We’re not supposed to be here,’ and then he just walks onstage and also ate shit for 10 minutes.”
After a two-year stint in Minneapolis following a car sale-turned-cross country love affair, Casner made his fateful return to Portland in 2018 with a renewed sense of determination.
“I felt like I took it for granted,” Casner says. “All the stuff I wanted to happen in six years started to happen in six months because I was so much more professional about it, treating comedy more like a job but still having fun with it. I finally started to do more of the local shows and do the stuff I could have done six years ago had I been a little more serious.”
Casner’s reputation at Helium has taken quite the turn. He’s now a regular host and performed his first hourlong set in Helium’s basement venue earlier this month.
“I’ve been doing standup for 13, 14 years,” he says, “but in my head I still feel like I’ve been really doing it for like six or seven—because that’s when I started only wearing pants onstage.”
What’s the funniest thing Jordan Casner has seen in Portland?
“Yesterday, I was in a parking lot at a Natural Grocers, and this person pulling in next to me hit one of those parking lot signs. They hit it, knocked it over, and instead of getting out to look at anything, just backed out and left the whole parking lot. They were like, ‘No, not today,’ and they probably just went home. I related to that girl. I would’ve just gone home. I would’ve been like, ‘I don’t need food.’”
