NEDERLAND -- This week, we’re switching up the format of our regular column, Music of the Mountains, and covering a non-musical performance coming into the area. As such, we’re using a different moniker this week: Performing in the Peaks.
Aaron Foster didn’t see himself pursuing comedy as his primary track while living in Los Angeles. Performing his first stand-up show in 2009, he spent around five years in LA working to pursue acting.
“I had a little bit of success in that world, but not, kind of, what I had hoped for,” Foster reflects. “News flash, I did not become an A-list, Oscar-winning actor.”
While he enjoyed performing stand-up, he ultimately only performed for around half a year before moving on from it, realizing how much work and time it would take to establish himself. However, he found a new perspective on comedy during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“One of the ways I got through that was through a ton of social media, doing all these silly movie scene recreations and talking to my phone every day to make sure people knew I was still there,” says Foster. “It made me fall back in love with writing and performing and comedy.”
Foster had opened a restaurant in Reno, Nevada, shortly before the lockdown, and at the end of 2021, by the time the lockdown was over, he sold the restaurant to pursue writing and performing stand-up again. He’s worked as full-time as possible in stand-up for the last three years and toured around the country on his own for the last year and a half.
“Comedians, for me as a kid, were someone to identify with and feel a little less alone, like, ‘Oh, someone else thinks like I do about these things, and I didn’t realize that,” says Foster on why comedy resonates with him.
Foster cites current comedic inspirations such as Maria Bamford, Mike Birbiglia, Neal Brennan, Gary Gulman, Mark Maron, and Taylor Tomlinson, who have talked about issues such as mental health, depression, and anxiety in their routines.
Having struggled with mental health issues his whole life, along with members of his family, this gave him even more inspiration to come back to writing comedy with his own perspective.
“That was another thing, like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you could talk about that out loud and make jokes about it and make people laugh and make people feel better about their own situation,” says Foster. “I hate to say ‘my comedy is my therapy,’ but it is to an extent, and it’s just been a way for me to talk about this stuff in a little bit of a different way.”
Aaron Foster will bring his touring stand-up routine, Mostly Jokes, to the Backdoor Theater, located in the Nederland Community Center at 750 CO-72 in Nederland, on Thursday, May 14, 2026. Doors open at 6:00 p.m., and the show starts at 7 p.m.
