Spoiler alert: Tonight, comedian James Adomian will return to Jimmy Kimmel Live! as the election-denying conspiracy theorist and pillow pitchman Mike Lindell. Four years after making his JKL debut, Adomian is still mining mirth as the manic, mustachioed MAGA madman from Minnesota with his myriad misfortunes and malaprops.
Adomian’s most recent appearance came last month after Lindell found himself in the news courtesy of a nine million dollar lawsuit being brought against his company by Federal Express for unpaid shipping fees. Naturally, Adomian’s Lindell thought he was being sued by Panda Express.
He also addressed the host as “Gypsy Kindle,” joining an ever-growing list alongside “Jimby Crumble,“ “Jiminy Kringle” and “Jenny Campbell.”
Clearly Kimmel is a fan, who told LateNighter of Adomian’s portrayal, “He’s funny every time. He studied the MyPillow man and created a cartoon Fargo version that I can no longer distinguish from the real Mike Lindell.”
For Adomian, his long tenure as a fixture on Kimmel’s show comes after two decades as one of comedy’s premiere political impressionists, first rising to prominence with a savage skewering of George W. Bush in the early 2000s.
“It was this dark time when Bush had been re-elected and comedy was sort of like in this post-9/11 reaction,” Adomian recalls. “Television was really forgiving of George W. Bush… But everyone that I knew in my real life hated him. It was this weird shadow of what we’re going through right now.”
It was around that time that Adomian began performing his Bush impression in a live Los Angeles sketch show called “The Deviants,” which ultimately led to his late-night TV debut on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.
“I was so young that the first time I did it on camera, they did it as a flashback to when George W. Bush was young. ‘Cause I was really young and skinny and I did not look like a middle-aged guy.”
Adomian’s inaugural performance with Ferguson was made even more memorable by a brush with a comedy icon. “I’ll never forget this. So I walk off from my first TV appearance and Don Rickles is there. I grew up loving Don Rickles. And he was like, (Rickles impression) ‘You’re hilarious! I was dying laughing! I was rolling on the ground! Who are you?’ And I go, ‘Oh, I’m James.’ (Rickles impression) ‘James what?!’ And I go, ‘James Adomian.’ And he fake punches me in the face and says, ‘You’ll change it, kid.’ “They had me back like every week.”
Shortly afterwards, Adomian began developing an impression of Jesse Ventura, who had recently left office as the governor of Minnesota. “I loved how antagonistic and confrontational he was in every press interview. And deliberately contrarian,” Adomian recalls.
“I started doing him on some of the podcasts like with the Sklar Brothers. They loved that I would always disagree with everything they said. Even if it was complimentary. ‘Now Jesse, you’re a renowned political figure.’ (Jesse Ventura impression) ‘I’m gonna stop you right there. What do you mean renowned? Why do I have to submit to your idea of renown? What if I’m a re-verb?’”
With the 2016 presidential election approaching, Adomian joined forces with his friend Anthony Atamanuik to create one of his most ambitious live political comedy shows, “Trump vs. Bernie.”
Adomian recalls meeting Atamanuik in New York years earlier. “When I first saw him, he was doing John McCain. And I was doing John McCain at the same time. I think we both knew that there was a shelf life to a John McCain impression. Everybody knew he was going to lose the election but we were like, ‘Well, might as well shoot your shot and do your John McCain impression.’ He did John McCain having just been released from the POW camp and I had been doing him as the current day John McCain with (sketch comedy and drag performer) Drew Droege as Cindy McCain.”
By 2015, Adomian was performing his Bernie Sanders impression in L.A. when he heard that Anthony Atamanuik was doing Trump in New York. It was only a matter of time before the two joined forces.
“We did a 20 minute debate at UCB and then we turned it into like a headlining show where we would go sometimes up to two hours. It was just us two and a debate moderator. We would pull one of our friends in New York or L.A. or on the road we would find some local comedy person or a journalist. In London, we had Mark Hamill as our moderator.”
As for their process creating the show, Adomian explains, “Most of what I do is improvised or written on stage. For stand up I have my method of writing things down in my notes as I go through life. And I do that for characters too. And so there was a list that I kept on my computer of like, ‘Oh what if Bernie said this, what if Bernie said this.’ Like I do that for a lot of characters. And then I mix those notes together with whatever comes up improvised in the room. We never wrote out ‘Trump vs. Bernie.’ We had notes.”
Trump vs. Bernie had a long tail for both performers. For Atamanuik, it led to him starring as the newly elected Trump on the Comedy Central series The President Show in 2017, on which Adomian naturally guested as Bernie. But perhaps the most surreal extension of Adomian’s impression came to fruition in 2019 when the real Senator Sanders sat down on camera with his expectorating doppelgänger on Adomian’s Underculture podcast.
According to Adomian, Sanders tried to back out at the last minute. “They told me, ‘Bernie wants to call you’ right before we were ready to go with the interview. I’m getting my make-up put on and I get the call, ‘The Senator is on the line.’ And then there’s this tremendous sound of throat clearing. (Does Bernie making a loud, phlegmy noise.) ‘Yeah, is this James?’ And I was like, ‘Yes Senator Sanders.’ (Bernie impression) ’OK, what are we doing?’ And my joke was, ‘Well Senator, I know you’re nervous. This is a very big moment in your career.’”
It all came together in the end. “He went along with it but I think his team liked it more than he did. Bernie was being Bernie. (Bernie impression) ‘Look, I’m grumpy. I have tremendous empathy at a distance for human beings. One-on-one, I’m a grump.’ But his wife was dying, trying not to laugh, holding her mouth. I kept glancing over at her while we were doing it and I was like, OK, it doesn’t matter if the guy himself likes the impression. The fact that his wife likes it, that’s funny.”
One of the distinguishing and defining characteristics of Adomian’s caricatures of these hyper-straight, alpha-males is that they are being filtered through and portrayed by a gay performer.
When asked if he feels that this aspect of gender identity is an ingredient of his creative interpretation, either consciously or unconsciously, Adomian replies, “I’ve had a couple of gay friends over the years sort of roast me and say like, ‘Hey James, you’re like a drag queen that just does it the wrong way.’ It’s partly that I just think certain characters are funny that have like a masculine blind spot. The latest one I’m obsessed with is Elon Musk. There’s something very funny to me about hyper-masculine men. And that’s not always UFC, MMA hyper-masculinity. Most of the targets of my political impressions are straight guys with a blind spot where they don’t realize how funny and ridiculous they are. The same way a college professor might not realize it. Or a football coach. If someone took the distilled essence of all the college professors in America and boiled it down to one person, that’s Bernie Sanders. And when I was a teenager, I did impressions of all the coaches for my football team. And Jesse Ventura is like a football coach.”
Which brings us back to Mike Lindell. Adomian admits to having a particular fondness for the Minnesota dialect. He first explored it with his Al Franken impression, quickly followed by Jesse Ventura. But the minute he became aware of Lindell, he was intrigued. Adomian explains, “I had wanted to do the MyPillow guy. This happens to me sometimes, where I have an impression that I’ll do live and it works and then no one lets me do it on TV. This was even before he was a political figure. I was doing him right after ‘Trump vs. Bernie’ at live shows in my stand up set. Then on my podcast in 2019. And I played him on the animated show Our Cartoon President. But I was really begging to do it on camera somewhere.”
“This is pandemic time,” Adomian recalls, “when Trump lost the election and then Lindell became the election denier and the biggest supporter of Trump. That’s when I was trying to make the big push. But the industry was still broken from Covid lockdowns. I was kind of pestering my reps about it. Like, ‘Hey guys, there’s gotta be somewhere on TV that will let me just do this once.’ And the answer was, “No. There’s not.’ And I was disappointed and sad and I gave up on it and then like a week later a friend of mine, Bryan Cook, a hilarious comedian who writes on Jimmy Kimmel, messaged me out of nowhere going like, ‘Hey, could you do a Mike Lindell impression?’ (Laughs) I was like, ‘You have no idea.’ This was 2021. I had done a small voice over thing for Jimmy Kimmel many years ago, but it was my first time appearing on camera and it was my first time meeting Jimmy.”
Jimmy Kimmel Live! is very much a family operation. From the folks you see on camera to everyone behind the scenes, it is rare for people from the outside to be brought into that inner circle. Adomian was a rare exception. As Kimmel explains, “I’d seen him do various characters online and thought he was funny. When we decided we needed a Mike Lindell, Bryan suggested James and we loved him immediately.”
JKL brought Adomian back right away.“There was a moment where we were doing it, like, basically every week,” he recalls.
To hear Adomian tell it, his high energy sketches come together without much preparation on his part. “We rehearse it twice with Jimmy each time I do it and then we do it live. And he’s always like, ‘If you think of something, just throw it in.’ He’s always been like that from the very beginning, which I really appreciate.”
Adomian is quick to point out that they endeavor to nail everything down. “There’s a slight mix of little mistakes I make and me improvising a little bit. But it’s very tightly scripted and it’s very well scripted. They’re all written by Bryan Cook and Jesse Joyce, who are hilarious stand ups and also great comedy writers. I’ll pitch them a joke here and there and they seem to like it when I do my own thing too. But what you see is 95% scripted.”
Over the years, Adomian has become a great admirer of Kimmel. “He’s the greatest leader of a show-biz enterprise I’ve ever worked with. Everyone loves working with him. He’s a model of what a boss should be like, you know? There’s a vibe at Jimmy Kimmel Live where it’s a fun place to work and everybody is respectful and positive. And it comes from him. You pick up on that very quickly.”
On February 1, 2023, Adomian faced an even more absurd collision than his encounter with Bernie Sanders. The real Mike Lindell had agreed to appear on JKL… from inside an arcade claw machine. And as wacky as that may sound, it was even weirder.
Following his introduction by Kimmel, Lindell adopted the bizarro Adomian version of his persona, calling out, “Jimmy Crumble is that you?” By the time Adomian entered as Lindell to interrupt the segment, it’s not really fair to say it went off the rails. Because it was never on the rails.
Adomian didn’t meet Lindell prior to going on camera with him. He recalls, “I think we didn’t rehearse it with him. I think he just showed up right before the taping.” When asked for his assessment of him afterwards, Adomian joked, “Here’s the thing. There’s not just a screw loose. There’s a whole side of the automobile loose with Mike Lindell.”
Kimmel’s take on what motivated Lindell to commit to the appearance is colored by a healthy helping of his trademark humanity. “As nutty as he may be, the real Mike Lindell is a good sport. Unlike most of the MAGA charlatans, he believes in what he says. He genuinely believes the election was stolen by machines. I think he was and still is so eager to get his message out, he’ll do anything. In his mind, he was climbing into that claw machine to save democracy.”
Adomian concurs. “I was prepared for him to be hostile,” he explains. “But when I met him, he was like some bashful church dad that was like, (Lindell impression) ‘Oh wow, you really got me. Oh boy, they really write you up in the papers in Minneapolis, let me tell ya.’”
“By contrast, Donald Trump is not a good sport,” adds Adomian. And the least good sport I’m aware of in public life today is Elon Musk. Elon Musk has a deep wish that he was a funny person. But it’s one of the few things he can’t purchase. He’s my next target that I’m really ripping into lately.”
Although few in 2021 would have predicted that the MyPillow guy would it make it past a small handful of news cycles, Adomian offers this bemused reflection of his four-year term as Lindell. “So far, we’ve followed a very bad but comically crazy guy over a cliff. And like a comedic scene from The Simpsons or something, he’s still falling down the cliff. It’s like you’d think oh, anybody else would have hit the bottom by now. Not Mike Lindell!”
When asked why Adomian’s Lindell has lasted on JKL for this long, Kimmel replies simply, “More than anything, because it still makes me laugh. There really is no criteria other than that.”
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