The Deeper Dig is a weekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom. This is our 100th episode! Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Comedian James Adomian started performing an impression of Sen. Bernie Sanders before the senator launched his first presidential run in 2015. It didn’t land.
“It was the kind of thing where two people in the audience laugh, and then nobody else knows what you’re talking about,” he says.
Early in the senator’s first run, Adomian did bits about how impossible a Sanders presidency would be. But once Sanders started winning primaries, Adomian had to change his angle.
Today, his impression is an outrageous stream of consciousness. Adomian’s Sanders is somewhere between 80 and 150 years old. He wants to douse the White House in patchouli, provide free psilocybin mushrooms to college students, and seems to exist in multiple sci-fi universes.
Adomian brought the character to a hit comedy tour and album during the 2016 primaries, Trump vs. Bernie, where he debated Donald Trump impersonator Anthony Atamanuik. Neither comic believed that five years after the first tour, Sanders and Trump would plausibly become primary foes.
“It became a lot of my life in 2015, 2016,” Adomian says. “And now here we are ramping up again.”
Adomian’s Bernie impression is a key piece of his new podcast, The Underculture, which is built around impersonations of public figures. Adomian’s Sanders has extended conversations with comics playing Cardi B, Elizabeth Warren, Mikhail Gorbachev and, of course, Donald Trump.
Adomian says Sanders — with his exaggerated accent and his “rhetorical obsession” with statistics — is a naturally funny character.
“He’s kind of like if someone took all of the funniest professors from every liberal arts college around the country and sort of simmered and boiled them down into one caricature,” he says.
“Everybody loves to do a Bernie voice.”
On this week’s podcast, James Adomian talks about being Bernie — and takes a few questions for the senator.
—Podcast transcript—
From Vermont Digger, I’m Mike Dougherty. This is the Deeper Dig. This week marks our 100th episode of this podcast. Kind of a big deal. And to celebrate, we wanted to do something a little different. We thought maybe this would be an opportunity to do a nice, long in-depth interview with our senator, Bernie Sanders, who’s all over the national media with his presidential race. But, he’s a pretty hard guy to get ahold of.
So we went to Plan B.
James Adomian [as Bernie Sanders]: Hello.
Senator, thanks for taking the time to talk.
Sanders/Adomian: Sure. This is Bernie Sanders. Is this the Vermont Digger?
Yes, this is Mike from Vermont Digger.
Sanders/Adomian: What, are you trying to ask me more questions about the houses? You guys won’t let it go.
Well, our readers want us to ask the tough questions, you know.
Sanders/Adomian: I know, I get it, I understand. The Fourth Estate. Go, shoot, ask your questions. You caught me in the middle of my arm waving exercises.
Well, it can be really hard to get an interview with you. You don’t often take calls from the Vermont press.
Sanders/Adomian: What do you mean? You know exactly where I am. I’m a very hard figure to not see walking around the streets of Burlington. There’s always a crowd. I am always hunched over, and I’m always pointing into the air.
If you haven’t figured it out, this is not Bernie Sanders. This is James Adomian. He’s a comedian based in Los Angeles. And he’s been playing Bernie Sanders since before the 2016 presidential race.
Sanders/Adomian [at a 2018 Kennedy Center performance]: Donald Trump. How can I say this? Donald Trump reminds me of Chucky from Child’s Play. He’s a redheaded little bastard, and we thought he was cute and everything, and then he’s climbing up America’s leg trying to stab everybody.
Since 2015, James has played Bernie on stage, on podcasts on TV. He’s also part of a live show and comedy album called Trump vs. Bernie, where he and Anthony Atamanuik, who plays Donald Trump, hold a 90-minute debate that goes pretty far off the rails.
Sanders/Adomian [in Trump vs. Bernie]: My brothers and sisters, I was inspired by President John F. Kennedy, when I was a middle-aged man…that this great nation would again be able to elect as president a person with the craziest accent possible for his time.
This summer, James has a new podcast called The Under Culture that revolves around found audio clips that are actually impressions by him and other comics.
Sanders/Adomian [on “The Underculture”]: A debate over policies is important for us to come together. And whenever I say come together, I move my hands together gently as if I’m pushing dough together in a bowl, getting ready to make some kind of pancakes.
So far, a lot of the main characters on this show happen to be running for president. I asked James why.
Adomian: We didn’t initially start out with the design that it would be an election podcast. But that’s what’s in the news right now largely, so it’s kind of turned into a one-third or 50%, celebration of the circus that we’re entering. Which I don’t mind because I like a good circus.
But it’s absolutely very funny. There’s a lot that’s disturbing and scary and awful and seriously concerning. And I think that’s exactly what people want to laugh about. They want to release tension about what’s happening in the news. There’s a lot of emotions, there’s a lot of passion in a positive sense. And there’s a lot of, you know, high feelings of anger. And I think there’s a need for people to laugh, and sometimes that’s a conscious need, where people are like, boy oh boy, I’m really loving this. And sometimes people find it and they don’t realize that it was what they thought was going to be.
I think there’s a lot of delightful absurdity in everything that’s evil and wrong and challenging. And there’s also some very fun things to laugh about that are lighter sides of the news, and maybe even hopeful and inspiring. When you’re doing political satire, you can just kind of have fun laughing about everything.
The impressions on that show are so detailed that it makes me think that you must read a lot of news. It really makes it seem like you’re a news guy.
Adomian: Well, I used to be. I actually kind of intentionally stepped back from obsessively following the news as much as I can, because I have work to do. But big news has a way of, you know, forcing your attention. So when I’m not unplugged, I am seeing a lot of news still, like everybody else is — I think maybe more than most people that aren’t professional comedians, I’m paying attention to it both on one level as a citizen, and a person living through this part of history, and also I’m paying attention to it as a comedian and looking for moments that make me laugh. Which then makes me think, well, if I’m laughing at this, then it’s something that can be made fun of for a bigger audience.
I just wanted to ask, you’re still very much a front runner in the primary here. But there’s a lot of competition from Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren…
Sanders/Adomian: Well, says you.
…all the other folks we saw on the debate stage last weekend. What are you going to do to pull ahead of those people before the primaries?
Sanders/Adomian: Well, I think that’s a very good question. In my view, and when I say ‘in my view,’ what I mean is, that’s the way it is. And I’m going to say so. In my view, Joe Biden, every time he opens his mouth, is going to lose five percentage points in the polls. So all we’ve got to do is sit back and let Joe Biden undo Joe Biden.
Elizabeth Warren is a great friend of mine. She’s a senator, we are very close friends, and among senators, when you refer to someone as a very close friend, what that means is you are intense rivals. Senator Warren is a very close friend of mine and also a New Englander. And so I anticipate having a rigorous debate on the ideas. And when I say that, what I mean is reciting numbers and statistics with such rhetorical obstinancy, that they are hammered into the heads of young people across the country to support a democratic revolution.
And what I mean when I say the percentages is, you know, you’ve heard this before, repeat after me. But when the top 1% of the top 10% of the top 1% of the top 10% of the top 1% controls more wealth than the bottom 90% combined, when the top two-thirds of one person controls more financial power than 400 million people in this country, I don’t think that’s fair.
Senator, if you do win the primary, what do you then do to defeat President Donald Trump?
Sanders/Adomian: That’s easy. The hard part is winning the primary. That’s the hard part. Because that’s where there’s all the disappointing candidates running for president. Some of them are these generic white guys that all look the same, half of them are from Colorado.
When you get to the general election, Donald Trump has a ceiling of support in this country of 25, maybe 30% of possible voters. That’s his ceiling. There are 120 million plus nonvoters from the last election, that all they require to participate in our democracy is someone speaking to their issues. And their issues are that they want a massive, massive redistribution of percentages from the top 1% of the top 10% of the top 1% to all the smaller holders of percentages at the bottom of the barrel.
People often have trouble getting those folks out to vote. How do you get them to the polls?
Sanders/Adomian: I wave my arms. I wave my arms like there is an invisible orchestra of democratic socialists from centuries past in front of me. I wave my arms, and I bring people together. Hold on a second, somebody is on the line.
I want to take it back to Bernie Sanders. I mean, you started doing an impression of Bernie Sanders long before he was a household name. What was it that jumped out to you about Bernie as someone to do an impression of?
Adomian: Oh, I knew about Bernie before he was even a senator. And I’ve never lived in Vermont, I’ve lived in California most of my life, but Bernie was always someone that you would see in C-SPAN clips as the lone congressman from Vermont: wow, I love this guy. And then, you know, I guess I was 26 when he won the Senate race, and he was one of the people that I was hoping for, and he got through it. I was like, yes, Bernie Sanders is going to be a senator!
And then he just leveled up. And then it was Bernie filibustering by himself, key moments of him in the spotlight. I’ve always largely agreed with Bernie Sanders. I’ve always liked him. And then also from very early on, many years ago, I thought, wow, what a funny guy. He’s kind of like someone took all of the funniest professors from every liberal arts college around the country, and sort of simmered and boiled them down into one caricature.
Anybody who’s a class clown, or comes up doing impressions, knows how fun it is to make fun of the teachers when you’re a kid. And Bernie is just like, on the grand scale, the most fun teacher to make fun of, as far as his personality. And at the same time, I love him very much.
Is that ever awkward, to be making fun of someone who you have a lot of respect for?
Adomian: No, I do it all the time. I make fun of people who I really, really admire, and I make fun of people who I really, really disrespect. It’s a little matter of switching gears. You can kind of tell. I’m not the only person that does this. I think generally, if you’re listening to an impression, and it’s coming off pretty affectionately, that means that the comedian probably likes that person. And if you’re listening to an impression, and they’re kind of going for the jugular and drawing blood and making them sound like a monster, then that’s probably you’re doing an impression of someone you hate, like, in my case, Sebastian Gorka or George W. Bush.
But I think I generally am attracted to do impressions of people that make a big impression on me, whether it’s positive or negative, in the extreme, and also if I just find their voice to be unique, and their worldview beyond whether I think they’re right or wrong, if they’re just an interesting character. And Bernie checks off all those boxes. And he’s one of the impressions I do in the category of, I like this guy a lot.
Sanders/Adomian: No one in this country supports these elitist top-down policies. If you have someone in the race who is challenging this right wing populism with a left wing populism that is equally loud, but coming from a place of good, then it’s almost like you’ve got a good wizard going up against the bad wizard. Imagine if you will, Gandalf going up against Saruman. That’s what it’s going to look like when it is Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump.
Adomian: I had tried briefly to do an impression of Bernie Sanders in my stand up, I think, before he ran for president, and it was the kind of thing where two people in the audience laugh, and then nobody else knows what you’re talking about. But then, the moment in 2015 when he announced he was running for president, I jumped on it. I was like, absolutely, I’ve been waiting for this chance. Because it’s the funniest guy. This thick, Brooklyn accent that’s from an older time period. And this rhetorical obsession with statistics and numbers and percentages. [As Sanders:] “The top 1% of the top 10% controls more percentages than the bottom 90% of 50% of 100%. That’s too many percentages and too small a part gets control.”
When he announced he was running for president, I was like, absolutely, I’m in, I’m doing it. I started showing up at live shows around Los Angeles as Bernie Sanders. I started going on every podcast I could as Bernie Sanders. And early on, a lot of people didn’t know who he was. If you listen to some of the early podcast appearances where I come on as Bernie Sanders, sometimes the host doesn’t know who he is. And I’m introducing Bernie Sanders to the host of the podcast. And that happened a lot in those early days, where people were like, hearing my impression and seeing how funny it was and then looking up, like, who is this Bernie Sanders guy?
It helped me a lot too that on his own, he was like wildfire. He really caught on among young people, which is the vast majority of the audience for any comedy, whether it’s live or recorded. And so Bernie, in his own right, becoming a sensation among young people, which I guess in the world of news and polling, is anyone under 45 — young people very quickly started thinking of him as “Daddy Bernie,” as Cardi B put it, and it just worked very well.
It became a lot of my life in 2015 and 2016. And now here we are ramping up again.
Did you think at the time that he was going to go this far? Like, did you feel at that time like he was going to become a viable presidential candidate?
Adomian: At the very beginning? No. I thought what everybody kind of thought, which was that it was going to be a Dennis Kucinich-style protest run in 2016.
Early on, my joke about Bernie Sanders was, I would make jokes about how impossible and futile it was for him to be running for president, even though he was very right about the issues. And then within weeks, I had to change the angle a little bit because he was blowing up. He was getting these 20,000 person crowds in Los Angeles and other places like that very early on, and I was like, OK, wow, this is like a this is a populist phenomenon like we haven’t seen in this country in quite a long time.
It was like, in some ways, I was pushing him and trying to get people aware of what he was saying, because I liked it. And then I was also getting laughs because I thought he’s a very funny person, whether he — and I think he does know it a little bit, but everybody loves to do a Bernie voice. There’s people that do impressions of my impression of him. Everybody’s got a Bernie impression. He’s a funny guy. And I like it when he embraces it.
Senator, if you don’t win next year, what are your plans? What do you do then?
Sanders/Adomian: Well, I do the same thing. If I do not win the election next year, there is no reason for me not to remain in the United States Senate. I will then run for re-election in the United States Senate in the year 2024, as I simultaneously, again, run for president in 2024. I intend to be running for re-election as president in the year 2024 and/or running for the Senate seat in Vermont.
That sounds like a lot of work.
Sanders/Adomian: I’m well into my 80s. I’m a very healthy person. I’m fit, I play basketball and Skee-Ball. I do arm waving exercises that I mentioned, I put little weights on my wrists as I wave my arms rhetorically. I’m very fit. I speak for three hours at a podium every day in front of, at minimum, 5,000 people. That’s real exercise, there’s a way to burn calories.
Look, there is life after a presidential run. I don’t intend to be in the Senate forever. I don’t intend to live forever. But I do intend to be alive for 30 to 50 more years. There is plenty of time for me to return to Vermont, and run for governor of Vermont. There is plenty of time for me to write a book, run for Congress. I could even once again run for mayor of Burlington, Vermont, when I am 92 years old. I don’t think there’s a problem with that. I would even put my name forward as a possible nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States. I think I could be serving in the Supreme Court well into my hundred-and-teens.
I did want to ask about Trump vs. Bernie because you guys are doing it again. It seems like this time around, it’s actually way more plausible that there could actually be a real life Trump versus Bernie debate. Does it change the dynamic at all?
Adomian: We’re very well aware that there could be a real Trump versus Bernie election. We will know in about a year. Even less than a year, I think. I think we have what will probably end up being a brokered convention that will be decided on the second or third ballot in July of 2020. I think it’s a very plausible situation where Bernie Sanders could enter the convention ahead, leading the pack with like, 35% of the delegates or something. And there’s gonna be a very interesting situation where the Democratic party and the voters have to come together and decide what to do in a situation like that, where there’s a plurality front runner going into the convention. And then there’s also a possibility that he or somebody else runs away with it, you know, we’ll know month to month, we’ll definitely know in a year.
But it does look like the ultimate implausibility in 2015, when we started Trump vs. Bernie, is a very real possibility. We’re very aware of that, and we’ve got butterflies in our stomachs. We think it would be so fun if the specials we recorded back in 2016, if the album we put out for that election, if that all comes back and has another life and other relevance. Because there’s so much that we said, on that concert album, Trump vs. Bernie Live in Brooklyn, and in the specials we did for Comedy Central and Fusion, that remains relevant today as a satire and critique of Donald Trump, and as more celebratory satire of Bernie Sanders.
Both Anthony and I are very excited to see how it goes. We’re bringing back some of the tour dates in the fall. We haven’t finalized them yet, so that hasn’t been announced. But we will put those out on our new website when that goes up. Then we’re going to take a look and see how the primaries unfold, and we’ll probably do another round of touring the live debates at the primaries. Those are always fun because in a live crowd, there’s just the electric energy — it’s like doing a two-person wrestling match for an hour and a half.
Well, I hope you guys can make it back to Vermont.
Adomian: We absolutely will. There’s no way we won’t go to Vermont. It’s right there next to New Hampshire, as I’m sure you all know. And it’s an easy drive. We did get almost snowed out of New Hampshire four years ago. We made it to Manchester but didn’t make it to Portsmouth. We got stuck in the blizzard. Now I know that there’s blizzards to worry about, so to always allow a day between each city up there.
Yeah, at that time of year it’s a good policy.
Well, Senator, I appreciate you taking the time with us. Is there anything else you want to add about the campaign before we take off?
Sanders/Adomian: Let me say this, and when I say that, what I mean is I’m going to say something. I appreciate the hard hitting journalism down at the Vermont Digger. I appreciate what you do. I understand that you are sometimes very complimentary of what I’m attempting to do, and sometimes, you know, you put the screws on me, like real jerks.
But let me ask you this. If you could please send a copy that’s wrapped in plastic. For far too long, the copies of the Vermont Digger that I like to have at my office in Burlington, at one of my homes around Vermont, it shows up, but it gets soaked by rain or snow melt. If you could wrap it inside of plastic, that might help me — especially since I’m on the road so much, when I come back, I like to catch up with 14 or 15-plus issues of the Vermont Digger. I ask you this as a reader and a subscriber.
Well, I appreciate that. I think maybe one of your aides is just printing out articles from our website, because we’re we’re an online-only paper. I think that might be your problem there.
Sanders/Adomian: Oh my god. Who’s printing out the Vermont Digger and leaving it on my front doorstep? Jane?
I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I might need an investigative article to help me find out who did this.
We’ll do our best.
