Next week, when Greg Warren appears on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, he won’t be the only St. Louis comedian making a splash at 30 Rock—or even the only comedian from his St. Louis high school. Fellow Kirkwood High graduate Nikki Glaser is on tap to host Saturday Night Live that weekend, days after Warren’s November 4 spotlight. They’ll be two St. Louisans riding the same elevator, getting ready to charm giant national audiences.
Warren, like Glaser, moved back to St. Louis after years in Los Angeles and New York (he made his move home in 2016; she showed up in the midst of the pandemic four years later). Now 57, he has been working as a comedian for a long time, but acknowledges that the Fallon gig is a major milestone. “It used to be sort of the only thing, and there’s a million ways that people can find you now,” he acknowledges. “But for me, it’s still really special, just because it is The Tonight Show.”
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It was more than a year ago that Warren submitted his set for The Tonight Show and got some feedback from the producers. He’d made it to a similar point with Late Night with David Letterman back in the day, and that never happened, so he tried not to get ahead of himself. Then, three weeks ago, he got the call.
Naturally, it was for a day when he already had a corporate gig booked in Columbia, Missouri. But he wasn’t about to let that stop him. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he says. “And, you know, I found them a replacement.”
It’s a rare night when Warren isn’t working. He estimates he’s on the road 300 nights a year; his November 6–9 shows at The Funny Bone in Westport Plaza are the kind of thing he generally only does once a year.
“I try not to overexpose the market,” he says. “You don’t want to go anywhere, really, more than every 12 months, and then, ideally it’s probably 15 and 18.” The only major exceptions are unannounced appearances, like the open mic nights he’ll slip into at The Funny Bone just to try out new material.
But St. Louis, he’s learned, makes a great home base. He can get to New York in a few hours, L.A. in a few hours. Even more importantly these days, it’s a super quick flight to Nashville, where Nate Bargatze is based. Warren has been opening for Bargatze quite a bit. He co-hosts a podcast (with fellow St. Louisan Tim Convy), The Consumers, on Bargatze’s Nateland comedy network and also released his special, The Champ, through Nateland. It’s notched more than a half-million views and rapturous comments (sample: “Unlike so many comedians, Greg’s work keeps getting even funnier. Great to see him finally get some of the recognition he deserves”).
Says Warren, “The internet—really, clips and YouTube specials—really changed things. I probably didn’t expect things to turn around like this, this late in my career. I thought I would be working on a cruise ship or something.”
And the association with Bargatze has been a game-changer. About 10 years ago, Warren made the decision to go clean. “I was never filthy,” he notes. But he credits Jack Vaughn, the senior vice president of comedy for Sirius XM, for encouraging him to go all the way.
“He said, ‘In my opinion, you’re way too clean already to not be all the way clean,’” Warren recalls. “I enjoy a lot of profane comics, but it just works better for me to be clean.” And that switch put him into Bargatze’s orbit just as he was blowing up. “My brand fit with his a little bit,” Warren says. He’s since become a regular on the Nateland podcast.
“Sometimes we’ll be on tour, and he’ll be like, ‘Hey man, can you do the podcast Monday?’ So I’ll fly with him to Nashville, stay at his house, go do the podcast that afternoon, and then go do a couple sets at the Comedy Club in Nashville, and maybe hang around for a couple days and do some more sets,” he says.
Warren swears that Bargatze is the same guy off stage as on. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard Nate swear,” he says. “I mean, I’ve never seen Nate stub his toe or something, but even then, I bet he’s not gonna swear. I will. But he won’t.”
Warren also has a great relationship with that other rising star comedian, Glaser. She was one of the first people he texted with his Tonight Show news (she texted him a day later about SNL, and he suspects she just waited a day so as not to steal his thunder—a good friend). Last week, he joined her set at The Funny Bone in St. Charles to try out his Tonight Show material one last time before his trip to 30 Rock. Just two St. Louisans, making people laugh.
Says Warren, “I always joke that I’m having, like, the most successful period of my career in the last couple of years, but I’m not even the most successful comedian that came out of my high school.”
