Comedian and actress Jana Schmieding kicks off the Free State Festival this Tuesday

Jana Schmieding. // photo courtesy CAA

Comedian, writer, and actor Jana Schmieding is rapidly becoming a force with which to be reckoned.

Starting with her podcast Women of Size, moving on to working as a writer and star of the excellent and sadly-cancelled Peacock series Rutherford Falls, along with roles on the FX series Reservation Dogs and Disney+’s Echo,  Schmieding’s involvement in a project has rapidly become hallmark of something which you need to check out.

Jana Schmieding performs as part of Lawrence’s Free State Festival this Tuesday, June 25, and we spoke with her via Zoom about her past work and upcoming projects.

The Pitch: How many white people start conversations with you with, “Aho!”

Jana Schmieding: Only my white dad. My white dad loves “Aho!”

Both you and the folks in the 1491s came out of making online content. Can speak to how that got your career started?

Well, I think it’s pretty normal for comedy folks to have day jobs and to study and put out comedy in a very indie grassroots way. In my young adulthood, web series were the thing, and it was the beginning of the YouTube scene. It was just yet another way to perform, and performances are meant to be watched, they’re meant to be seen. Aside from doing a lot of live comedy myself, my friends and I made a ton of web series and just a lot of stupid, silly video content and put it on YouTube and Vimeo and stuff.

I had the fortunate opportunity because I lived in New York City, where I grew up. I went to a state school, the University of Oregon, and I did sketch comedy and improv comedy school with other theater nerds that I was studying theater with. Then I moved directly to New York City and became enveloped in the sketch/improv/stand-up community in New York City.

I think that in the Native community–because I genuinely believe and I wish I had statistics to back this up because it’d be a very interesting thing to understand–I think Native folks who are living on the rez or living in not one of these sort of major comedy meccas, which would be like New York, Chicago, L.A. There are other live comedy venues that spring up in any major city, but native folks are, we are largely a very rural population so access to venues with an entire curriculum dedicated to studying comedy isn’t there.

Native people are very inventive with their comedy. We find unique ways to perform comedy for our communities. And I think for the 1491s, that was just part of their journey. They were putting stuff up online but also touring around to different reservations and putting up shows in community centers and cafeterias.

Their grind was a little bit different than mine, but also very similar in that I was putting up shows in comedy venues and whatever little theater space we could afford to rent and practicing our first loves in our spare time when we weren’t working so yeah, we speak a similar language.

You’re coming to Lawrence as part of the Free State Festival to do standup. As your acting career has taken off, have you continued working in standup or is this something that you’re returning to?

I came to standup later in my comedy career. I was doing a lot of solo performances in New York City, solo sketch comedy. I had a couple of solo shows that I put up that were comedic but a little more theatrical. So standup, while it feels natural now that I’ve been doing it a little bit more, I didn’t really start doing it until I moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 2016. And that’s primarily because of two reasons.

One, when I moved to Los Angeles, I didn’t necessarily have a comedy community that I could just jump right into and hurl myself into. I was sort of starting over from scratch and two, I was really working on developing my own comedic voice. There’s a difference between doing standup and doing collaborative comedy, and I think I wanted to really develop my own comedic voice so that I could write for myself and develop my own unique perspective about the world.

I mean, I guess continue to develop it, but that is what standup is really all about: giving your own take on what’s happening in your own world and doing it in a funny way that is uniquely funny to the individual. It’s been part of what I do, but it’s also very challenging. Developing a standup set is no easy task. It takes a lot of practice, and you have to take it out and give it a lot of rehearsal in front of a live audience, and you have to be very comfortable performing in front of a live audience, which I am.

Did working on standup and your own voice help you when it came to writing on Rutherford Falls in that the character of Reagan is based a lot on your own life?

Well it’s a lot of Sierra [Teller Ornelas]’s life, who is a showrunner. Reagan’s personality is very close to my own. Of course, you get to embed your own comedic voice into a character. But absolutely, absolutely. That was a big reason that I started doing standup when I moved to Los Angeles was because I was simultaneously teaching myself how to write TV pilots so that I could become a TV writer.

I would say 97% of the things I write are for me. I’m always writing projects that endeavor to put me in the starring role and standup does exactly that. It really helped me shape my own degree of sarcasm, earnestness, and cynicism, which totally came to life when writing for Reagan. It also helped the room in Rutherford Falls write for me, because I was in the room with them and pitching my own jokes helps the other writers know who I am as a personality and how to write jokes for me more efficiently.

When you spoke out earlier last month about Taylor Sheridan, I was reminded of the Adirondack episode of Rutherford Falls. The whole thing felt like life imitating art imitating life.

I got a bone to pick with Taylor. I simply hate the shit he’s putting out, but I also I wrote that episode. I co-wrote that episode. That is my one Rutherford Falls writing credit. I wanted to take a stab at something that I think annoys a lot of Natives which is the fact that these fake cowboys love to try to put us as props in their Western fantasies.

Last I heard, you were working on developing a pilot for a show and I’m curious as to how work is going on Bonnie.

It’s going well. They’re reviewing it as we speak and coming to some conclusions. They’re not going to be developing the pilot this year, but we’re waiting to hear if they will produce the pilot at CBS next year in 2025, knock on wood.I it’s a very challenging time in our industry right now. We’re coming off of the pandemic and we’re coming off of two strikes and I think that studios and networks are recovering from all of those things, and so are creatives, but that being said, I have a lot of hope I have, I have faith in Sierra and my ability to make a really funny TV show. The pilot is so funny and it’s in our voice in such a real way.

It would be the first Native multicam taped in front of a live studio audience and the possibility of being able to execute that, it would be so monumental, not only for me as a comedian, but it would be so monumental for us to be able to carve out space for ourselves in that mainstream comedy network environment.

Speaking of mainstream, you are a part of the MCU now.

In a very small way.

The thing I loved about Hawkeye was that Zahn McClarnon is part of the MCU now and then watching Echo, there’s Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal and all these actors I absolutely love. I’m just like, “They’re getting some things right, at least.”

Yes, they are, and that’s, that’s really due to the work of Sydney Freeland, who was the director and showrunner of Echo and her bringing Native excellence into the fold.

What other projects do you have in the works that you can discuss?

Right now, it’s really a lot of focus on Bonnie and my first feature film, which I wrote and will be directed by Tazbah Chavez, who was a writer/producer on Reservation Dogs and a writer/director on Rutherford Falls. She and I have collaborated a lot. She directed the aunties episode of Rez Dogs [“Wide Net”].

I wrote a feature called Auntie Chuck, which is sort of a play on Uncle Buck. It’s sort of an Uncle Buck-esque rezzy comedy about an auntie who brings in her niblings for spring break and has to struggle through raising two kids who are going through their own shit.

Jana Schmieding performs at the Lawrence Arts Center on Tuesday, June 25, as part of the Free State Festival. Details and tickets are available developing a pilot.