By Odin Rasco
Aaron Foster’s shows don’t start like a typical comedy act, and he wouldn’t have it any other way: It happens night after night – the stage lights go up, the walk-on music starts, and the audience realizes they’ve signed up for something different. The song playing isn’t something up-tempo to get the people excited. It’s not some tune that’s topping the pop charts either. It’s Leonard Cohen’s bedrock-deep and gravelly voice twisting through the shadows of “You Want it Darker.”
Maybe some audience members looked up this comedian before, and know to expect dark humor. But maybe others only Googled enough to know Foster as a former HGTV host. In those cases, they’re in for a surprise.
“I’ll tell you straight up that I’ve recently been diagnosed with clinical depression, and uh, I’m not super happy about it,” Foster quips as he settles in for his set and an evening of jokes that find heart and humor in the dimmest of places.
After a performance at the Hollywood Fringe Festival that was met with rave reviews in 2024, as well as a night that earned him “Best Solo Show” at the Tucson Fringe Festival in 2025, Foster is bringing his new special “Mostly Jokes” on tour with a scheduled stop at the Blue Room Theatre in Chico on Saturday, June 28.
“Mostly Jokes” has been finding new fans for Foster at every stop of the tour as critics applaud his honest approach to topics including mental health, the struggles of a Hollywood actor and a myriad of mid-life crises.
“Foster effortlessly leads the audience through his life story, the ups, the downs, the good and the bad, all with a wry sense of humor,” writes Erik Larson, who saw his show at the Hollywood Fringe. “You come away not feeling like you’ve watched a show; more like you have spent an hour with a new friend at the corner bar as he pours his heart and deepest secrets out.”
Hitting the road with a self-planned tour and meticulously crafted show as Foster is, some might be surprised to find that his stint as a comedian is a relatively recent development in his broad resume. Foster has been a wholesale home furnishings entrepreneur, a television host and actor, an artist, a restauranteur and more. At the age of 50, he stepped away from his last job and decided to commit to comedy and a return to acting.
“I started writing in 2023 with this writing group that I’m a part of and we did our show at the end of the session,” Foster recalled. “My whole set was all about depression and anxiety and I wasn’t really sure how it was going to go over. It really worked well and the very first joke hit in a way that, in that moment, I was like ‘okay, yeah, this feels like the right thing to do.’”
Two years later, Foster has found ways to tackle topics that some might not expect to see at a comedy show, though sometimes it comes from a process of trial and error.
“It took me a long time to figure out how to navigate it,” Foster explained. “I mean, doing five minutes on depression is one thing, because I think that’s pretty universal and that part of my material is a little dark, but it’s not that dark. But doing 10 minutes on my father dying in hospice? Doing 20 minutes on my brother committing suicide? That’s a whole different thing. And that took me a long time to figure out how to do it. I will tell you, the first time I told a couple of jokes about my brother committing suicide, it didn’t go well.”
Though some audiences have been caught off guard by his occasionally bleak candor — Foster shared an anecdote about a private party he performed at where the promoter had focused on his prior time as a host on HGTV and failed to mention he was doing dark comedy — many have celebrated the chance to laugh in the face of darkness.
“There’s so much more honesty in my work now than when I was performing in 2009, and it gets received well,” Foster said. “It’s very encouraging. After that very first show, I remember I had a couple people that came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for talking about this.’ Every once in a while, people come up to me and talk like ‘I didn’t know I could even laugh about that.’ I get that here and there now after shows I think because everybody’s been through this stuff on some level, whether it’s them or somebody they know or love.”
Aaron Foster’s “Mostly Jokes” show is Saturday, June 28 at the Blue Room Theatre at 1005 W. 1st Street in Chico. Doors open at 7:30 p.m., show begins at 8 p.m. and runs about 80 minutes. Tickets are available for $15 here.
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