How ‘Daily Show’ Correspondent Josh Johnson Is Reinventing Comedy

J
osh Johnson can’t remember all of the details about this one particular bank robbery gone wrong. It happened in the Seventies, or maybe it was the Eighties. The amount of money stolen is hazy. But he can recall the parts that matter — the funny ones. “He ran up in there, robbed the place, didn’t wear a mask,” the comedian says. “They eventually catch up with him, and he’s so shocked that he’s been arrested.” With an exasperated flair, the Louisiana native echoes one phrase the culprit repeated during questioning: “I was wearing the juice!” What did he mean? “This dude, because lemon juice is an ingredient in invisible ink, he thought rubbing lemon juice on himself would make him not appear on the camera.”

Johnson tells the story from our table at a pizza shop near his old Brooklyn apartment. “Part of me hopes it’s not real — to be fair, I didn’t read it in a newspaper clipping,” he admits. “It’s from a rabbit hole of botched heists that I went down. But I was like, ‘I was wearing the juice’ is incredible.” 

This very real robbery happened in Pittsburgh in 1995. If only the lemon-covered bandit would have waited 30 years, his failure might have made it into one of Johnson’s viral long-form stand-up sets. Bizarre news stories, social media spectacles, and culture-defining moments — like Drake warring with Ken­drick Lamar, Trump’s return to office, or the hysteria swelling around Luigi Mangione — are foundational to the 35-year-old’s comedy.

“I’m hopefully showing enough range, and building enough trust with the audience over time, that I can talk about anything, even if I don’t get to everything,” Johnson says. One look at his schedule and it’s clear that he at least attempts to get to most things. Friday through Sunday, he performs his topical material on the road, currently as part of his Flowers Tour, which is scheduled for more than 90 dates this year. On Tuesdays, he uploads a timely new set on YouTube, where he has 1.5 million subscribers. Mondays are for recording The Josh Johnson Show, the lifestyle podcast he co-hosts with Logan Nielsen. And Monday through Thursday are spent at his day job: The Daily Show.

Johnson started as a writer on the show in 2017, during Trevor Noah’s reign, before becoming a correspondent in 2024. Everyone there, he says, has “really been rooting for me.” In 2019, he joined Noah on tour as an opener. They’d end up spending three years on the road together, time that taught him, through Noah’s example, how to balance an already grueling day job with stand-up. “His mentorship has really helped me in navigating the moment that I’m in and the moment that I’m expecting,” Johnson says.

Not that Johnson views this moment as a breakout, even as the rooms get bigger and his millions of followers have come to include people like Sharon Stone and Erykah Badu. “A breakout is what George Carlin did when he went from ‘Hippy Dippy Weatherman’ to George Carlin,” he says. “A breakout is when Richard Pryor ditched the suit and tie and the fresh cut and Tonight Show act.” He’s had small milestones of his own — touring with Noah, joining The Daily Show and The Tonight Show before it, booking his first half-hour Comedy Central set — but “a breakout has to be deeply personal,” he explains. “It has to be you knowing for yourself that there’s a limit that was a ceiling and is now a floor.”

With his own Flowers Tour, which combines comedy with community building, Johnson is aiming for “bigger and more spectacle-like” shows, the kind that will send people home thinking, “I had never seen somebody do this before.” More than anything, he wants to leave the cities he visits better than they were when he got there. “I’m trying to build comedy that’s based on mutual-aid communities and reaching a further understanding of each other,” Johnson says. That means he partners with local organizations in each city to raise awareness, funding, and volunteer bases for shelters and outreach programs. During a recent stop in Cincinnati, $5,000 from ticket sales was donated to a nearby animal shelter.

In another testament to the theme, Johnson often encourages fans to bring flowers to the shows as a friendship offering to one another. Sometimes he’ll hire people to pass them out, too. “Flowers are like us,” he says. “They’re temporary, they’re beautiful. You keep planting seeds, they keep growing. They’re incredibly resilient, and I think that they’re a reminder of how much time we have and what we do with that time.”

A Beautiful Mind

When Johnson was around six years old, an inspired rant about something he can’t recall now sent his grandmother into a fit of laughter. “I could tell this was not the type of laughing that adults do that’s, like, placating you,” he says. “That was one of the first times I felt funny.” He was never particularly extroverted, more the kind of person who could make his friends laugh without ever ascending to class clown status. “When I started comedy, people who knew me growing up were surprised,” he adds. The pieces click into place when considering Johnson’s preference for dissecting cultural moments and tumbling down niche rabbit holes rather than rattling off punch-line-packed jokes. 

“My grandma and my mom, being a teacher and being a librarian, instilled some of that in me,” he says, “to go find out anything that I was curious about and find a way to express myself that was productive.” There’s a trust Johnson has in his voice that developed while growing up with no siblings and only a sparse group of friends. He was usually his own audience. “When you’re an only child, you end up spending so much time alone that you could be introspective in a way where you’re very certain how you feel about things,” he says. “It’s why I think the way I think — that much time alone, that much time reading by yourself, or wishing you had somebody to talk to.” 

It translates well to comedy, where he doesn’t feel like he’s in much competition with anyone else. “I don’t want anything that anyone else has, so I don’t think I can compete,” he says. After a beat, he adds, “Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m messy. So if there ever are two people that feel that way about each other… It would be funny to one day have a Drake and Kendrick of comedy like that.”

The Daily Show lets Johnson get messy for the bit. In viral segments, he’s roasted Mark Zuckerberg (“He look like if Napoleon Dynamite grew up in Detroit”) and called Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster “a little blue bitch” for complaining about shrinkflation. When Johnson’s correspondent duties send him out for man-on-the-street interviews, the great people of New York bring the mess to him. He’s challenged passersby to describe Black-history stories without using DEI terms, leading one participant to ask, “Can I say seat?” and another to declare: “It was Tupac who learned the most out of Frederick Douglass.” His bewildered facial expressions are a form of comedy on their own.

“What I enjoy about doing Daily Show is that collaborative aspect,” Johnson says. “In stand-up, you get to see my most raw feelings on a subject. In Daily Show, you get to see my efforts contributed to the larger effort of everyone that works there, in front of and behind the camera.” He admits both can be “sort of scary,” but he has people to lean on at work. With his own shows, there’s no way to know if he’s meeting the moment until he’s up there taking his best shot at it. 

He feels the weight of his responsibility as an entertainer when he comes face-to-face with the audience he’s trying to reach. “You see these numbers, but when you meet the people, that’s a very different thing,” he says. “I met someone who was saying that she watches while she does her chemotherapy. I’ll never forget that. I hope that she’s never watching me like, ‘That one wasn’t worth it.’ That’d be terrible. It’s like, now you have to triple down on the work that you put in.”

Johnson isn’t naive to think he’ll never miss the mark. “Eventually, I’m gonna say something that makes you roll your eyes at me,” he says. He doesn’t believe his charity-comedy hybrid is necessarily world-changing, either. But he sees a desperate need for community everywhere he goes. “I’ve traveled to many parts of the country and seen all these different facets of people, whether they’re racist, they’re homophobic, they’re gay, they’re whatever,” he says. “I’ve seen too many of these people to be convinced they are so massively different that some form of change can’t occur.” Maybe that change will come from an encounter in his audience, a meet and greet after his set, or the outreach organizers there. It all counts. 

“I don’t know if my efforts will be futile,” Johnson says. “But this is the best way that I know how to help. That’s my earnest attempt. Anything else would be dishonest.”