An Interview with Whitmer Thomas

Talking to the actor/comedian/musician about 'Weapons,' doing sincerity online, and the comedic influence of blink-182.

Sep 04, 2025

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On Whitmer Thomas’s 2019 stand-up special, The Golden One, he did a segment about a list he keeps of his greatest hopes and dreams. Among them were: getting his iPhone screen fixed and becoming a big movie star. When he met me for coffee last week, his iPhone looked to be in pretty good shape (and has a blink-182 sticker on its case) and he had recently added a couple of big movie roles to his resumé.

Thomas stars as the father in this summer’s hit horror movie, Weapons, and contributes to one of the film’s most visceral scenes. A child watches in horror as his possessed parents repeatedly stab themselves in the face with forks. “While we were doing it, it felt kind of silly,” he says of the filming. “It was a rubber fork, and it was actually hard to do because we had to know exactly where our elbows were so we could hit our faces without bending the rubber fork so it would work on camera. Because if the forks were bending all floppy, then it would look fake.” He also scored a spot in another big movie released this year, appearing alongside Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson in A24’s dark comedy, Friendship.

And somewhere in between, he’s continued to perform stand-up comedy and release music through indie stalwart label, Saddle Creek Records. This week, he’s dropping a new EP, Tilt, and while his songs have historically masked deep vulnerability with a quirky joke or two, Tilt showcases his most straightforward batch of songs to date. “I don’t think I’m going to do comedy songs ever again,” he says. And he seems serious about it too. That said, the cover of the EP features an overflowing toilet and the video for one of its songs, “On a Roll,” sees him doing a three-minute Jack Nicholson impression.

I talked to Thomas about riding the line between irony and sincerity, moving from Alabama to Los Angeles to pursue acting, and the virtues of the greatest comedy album of all time, The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show.

It seems like from an outside perspective you’re having a pretty successful year. Does it seem like that from where you’re standing?

Whitmer Thomas: It seems like my friends are having a successful year and letting me be a part of it, which is so sick. My buddy Andrew DeYoung, who I've been friends with for a decade and who made Friendship, was like, “Oh, I’ll put you in Friendship.” I think a lot of comedians, they either pop when they’re young, or it’s a Steve Carell-situation, where he had a ton of friends and spent his whole career popping in and out of things, and then Judd Apatow gets his big break and brings Steve Carell along. I think that’s really what’s happening, not on as big of a scale as 40-Year-Old Virgin, but all of my friends are starting to have these killer moments and hopefully I’ll be able to pop in that kind of way too. They’ve just been nice enough to include me.

With Weapons, I was friends with all the other Whitest Kids [U Know] guys, and somehow never met Zach [Cregger]. He saw a movie me and my friend Clay [Tatum] made called The Civil Dead. A few years ago, I ran into him in a movie theater lobby and he was like, “I think I have something for you.” And then we just were friends for over a year. Then he was like, “Here's the script, check it out.” We were filming that movie, and it was awesome. There’s not a lot of people in it, so it was great. It’s a big thing, but it kind of didn’t feel that way. I don’t know if anybody had any idea that that Weapons was going to be as massive as it is. But yeah, it’s more just that my buddies are killing it, and I'm lucky enough to get to be a part of it.

You’ve been doing comedy and music for a while, but now it feels like acting is becoming a larger part of your career. Was that always the plan? Did you always want to act?

Yeah. When I first moved out here, I was so burnt out on music, because that was what I was doing my whole life since... probably since Take Off Your Pants and Jacket came out. That was when me and all my buddies started to go down that rabbit hole.

I love that you mile-mark your life by the years that blink-182 albums came out.

Well, I remember with Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, my friend Chase showing me tabs on TabCrawler, learning “Adam’s Song,” and my friend Brock, who’s older, showing me how to play “Carousel.” And my brother showed me Cheshire Cat. So all my buddies were on the same page with learning all the blink songs and “Bro Hymn” and all that kind of shit. And then we started writing our own songs.

We were in the same band our whole childhood, but we had different names and different genres that we would evolve into. And then by the time things seemed like they could potentially work out for our kind of screamo-y hardcore band, we were just like, “Fuck, this sucks, I don’t want to do this.” There was a potential offer from a really indie label to put out a record. But my friend Clay had discovered Pavement. I had discovered Bright Eyes and Elliott Smith and Rilo Kiley, the Saddle Creek Records world. So we just had no interest in playing that kind of music anymore.

But we loved movies, so I thought I could try to move to LA and be an actor. I was in Alabama. My dad’s best friend’s ex-wife’s sister’s ex-husband worked at a special effects company in LA. I met him, and he said, “If you ever come out to LA, I’ll give you a job as a PA.” And I planned my whole life in that moment. I was like, I’m going to LA.

How old were you then?

I was 17.

Wow.

So I convinced my dad to let me go to LA, thinking I’d secured a job. I get there and the dude never answered a single phone call and just completely ghosted me. I started working at a skate shop. It was better anyway that that happened. Who knows what I’d be doing if I started out as a PA. So I was doing that, I did UCB classes, and started PA’ing for them and interning at UCB and that’s eventually what led me to start doing comedy.

If you had to cut away everything else and focus on one aspect of your career, what would you focus on?

It would be stand-up. Stand-up is instant gratification. And comedians are better people in general. Musicians are cool, but they’re flaky. The joke I always make is: musicians are flaky and don’t respond to text messages and they always act like they want to kill themselves. But comedians will have the best night with you, they’re eager to please you, and you will laugh all night long, and then they’ll go home and kill themselves. I prefer that. Also, TikTok and Spotify streams and all that stuff has fucked the music industry more than it has the comedy world. I think people look at numbers more in music, which I think is lame.

I’ve heard a lot of record label people tell me that they’ll have an artist who is big on TikTok so they put them on tour. And then they go on tour and nobody shows up because it’s just a thing on people’s phones and they don’t actually care to engage with it in real life. Is it like that in comedy?

No, people show up. I don’t have a big presence on social media. I don’t post stand-up clips, but people show up.

What about all those popular comedy podcast guys? Does that convert to actual attendance?

Yeah, I think it does. Because people have a relationship with podcasters. And then there’s all the grifter podcaster-types and they have big fanbases because there’s a lot of those people in the world. I just can’t do a podcast because I already talk so much about my personal life in my stand-up. If I do a podcast, I’ll start hating myself a lot more.

It seems like it’s all crowd work, too.

The crowd work thing is awful. It started out okay with some comics doing it, and now it is the bane of my existence. I haven’t done a big international tour in a while, but my last one, people would have their birthday party and then go to my show and they would be talking to me throughout the whole show. Then afterwards they’d be like,”Why didn’t you rip on us? We wanted you to rip on us!” I don’t do that. I’ve had to write jokes into my set to deal with that when it comes up. There’s people who are incredible at it. Todd Barry is one of the best people to ever do crowd work. But it’s different. Most crowd work is making shit up that isn’t actually real or funny, and just saying it in a way that gets people to think you made a clever joke. And that has fucked stand-up a lot.

You occupy such an interesting space with the combination of indie rock and comedy. But what is the downside of that? Do you ever feel dismissed as a musician because you have funny elements to your music?

I think it's more of a musician’s issue with me than a comedian’s issue. The downside, I think, is more in the music world, of people thinking it’s corny that I do stand-up. Stand-up is really corny, but music is pretty corny too. Musicians are so desperate to be mysterious, at least in the indie rock world, and to me, that’s pretty corny. But I’d say it’s harder, music-wise, to make things happen professionally and in the showbiz part of music than it is comedy-wise. Music will always have an elitist thing to it.

It’s funny you say that and are on Saddle Creek. Not that they’re elitists, but when I was a kid that label had the coolest bands so I always thought of them as a bit elite. That must be validating as a musician to be on their roster.

Oh yeah. It’s very cool.

Were you a Bright Eyes guy growing up?

Oh yeah. Still. I just saw them two nights ago.

How was that?

It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. The last two times I’ve seen them, it’s been one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s so cool that the last time I saw blink, too, it was easily the best they’ve ever sounded live to me. And Bright Eyes, too, have never been tighter. And it’s really emotional. It’s just a beautiful show. But, yeah, blink and Bright Eyes are my bands.

I just went back and read that interview that you and Mark [Hoppus] did, and you said that The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show was an incredibly influential album on your comedy. I had never really thought of that as a comedy album, but it certainly is.

It’s my favorite comedy album. A lot of comedians say that, too.

Really?

Oh yeah. I would listen to it, and then you go to the end, and there’d just be the jokes part of it. It’s not even jokes. It’s just them saying they want to suck each other’s dicks.

Do you remember getting that album?

Yeah, I think my mom got it for me when she went to the mall in Florida or something. My favorite blink album, for sure. The album that comes out with my new special is ripping that, where we added new jokes that were cut and there’s all the live songs, some of which I’ve already released, but there’s new versions. And then a new song at the very end, just like “Man Overboard.”

You should call it The Whitmer, Whitmer, and Whitmer Show.

That’s a really good one.

Take it.

I’m going to just have my animated head on their heads.

I saw you one time do a joke at Stories that I have not seen you do since. And it was, if I had to guess, probably because I was the only person who laughed at it, but I laughed hysterically. The one where you said that your grandma judged you for listening to blink.

Oh, yeah, dude. Nobody would laugh at that! I’d say, “My grandma was such a classic southern elitist. She’d be like, ‘Ugh, what is this, blink-182? At least listen to Descendents!’”

It’s a good joke.

Thank you.

It just needs the right audience.

It needs, like, ten people who get it.

Does the comedic side of what you do ever prohibit your songwriting in any way? For example, do you ever write a song that you think is good but then think, ah, but it’s not funny enough?

I go way back and forth where I’ll write the most earnest songs for a year, and then my next batch of songs, I’ll go, I wrote too many super sad songs, let me try to John Prine these a little bit and add two funny lines. I think I just try to have two funny lines.

Your new EP is, I think, the most straightforward material you’ve ever written.

Yeah. There’s funny lines, I guess, but you’re not going to laugh at it. I’ll maybe have one funny song from here on out. It’s just so hard to write funny songs.

It seems like it’s hard to do it in a way that’s clever and not a gimmick song. It’s not like an old school Adam Sandler song where the whole song is the joke. You’re trying to express sincere emotion with a funny line or two peppered in.

I’m always going to be chasing Adam Sandler’s “Growing Old With You” song from The Wedding Singer. He did it on one of his specials too. It’s very sweet, a little funny. That’s kind of always going to be the thing I want to do. Also, it’s really hard to make somebody laugh throughout a whole song. My goal is that you’ll never laugh at a song unless you really listen to what I’m saying. It’s like David Berman from the Silver Jews. Purple Mountains is my favorite. It makes me laugh more than anything recently, music-wise, and it’s so sad but it’s so funny to me.

You project this image of sort of a slacker skater, but to do what you’ve accomplished requires a good amount of ambition. Is it hard to balance those two things?

I don’t even think about the image. I mean, the image is: I just am a skater, so I just dress like one, I guess. But I will say that there was a period of time where I was hyper-earnest and wrote long captions on social media posts. Then one time I was posting about something exciting I was announcing, and I wrote “It’s a dream come true!” I showed it to Clay, my main collaborator and best friend, like, “What do you think of this?” And he goes, “You sure do say ‘it’s a dream come true’ a lot.” I realized that I should let the stuff I make do the talking. Because there’s always earnest moments in my work and more sensitive stuff, so if I’m online, I can sleep better at night if I post, like, “Here’s some bullshit,” and then have a picture of a kid that says “my nuts itch.”

Tell me about My Nuts Itch because I see it on everything you post, but I actually don’t know why you started doing it.

I also don’t know why I started doing it. That meme makes me laugh so hard. I wish I knew who made it. I wish I knew who that kid is. And I don’t even know where I found it, but it kills me. I think what happened was, after I initially posted it, I then went to post something else and I didn’t remember that I had already posted that. And I just kept doing it after that. And then people would comment, “Explain the nuts itch thing.” And I’m like, absolutely not. I’ve even had meetings with some companies about movies and stuff that we’re trying to get made, and the people will be like, “Listen, having the nuts itch kid is a problem. It’s not a good look.” Recently, I collaborated on an Instagram post with someone, but I didn’t post the original thing, so people were like, “Where’s Nuts Itch?” I wanted to respond and be like, “This isn’t my post!”

What you’re talking about right now feels like a product of our generation, where you can’t just be fucking proud of something. You can’t just show off how hard you worked at something. You have to undercut it. Being sincere is looked down upon. Trying hard is looked down upon. It drives me nuts because trying hard is fucking cool!

Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. With my onstage stuff, nothing I make is ironic, because my whole heart is in it and you know me so well after it and it’s sometimes embarrassing. My last special, for example, I talked so much about my childhood and all that stuff. If that was to come out now, it would make me feel ill to be sincere online about it.

I know you skate with Kevin [Spanky Long] a lot, and I think he is just truly an artist on a skateboard.

My girlfriend calls him a ballerina.

He is! A true artist on wheels. But he’ll post a video of the craziest trick you’ve ever seen, and then his head comes off and he flies away into the sky.

Yeah, that’s the perfect example. It’s so clear with his skating that it’s so well thought out and purposeful, but sometimes he’ll undercut an earnest thing with his head falling off. [Laughs]

In your first special, you talked a lot about growing up in Alabama, and now you’re in these bigger movies. What’s been the effect on your friends and family back home? Do they think it’s cool?

No. My hometown has no interest in movies or any of that stuff. I thought when I made The Golden One, which was shot down there, that people that I went to high school with might come, but it was people from the big cities surrounding the area [in attendance]. I’ve never once had a single person I grew up with in high school, who isn’t still a close friend, say anything to me about anything I’ve done. My family is stoked for me.

But they don’t engage with it?

No, they do. My dad is the first one at opening night for Weapons, stayed through the credits. I based my character on my dad, actually. That’s how my dad sounds. My dad called me Alex growing up because it’s my middle name. My dad’s name is also Whitmer and it just saved a lot of the confusion. And my dad called me Ax Man growing up and that’s what my whole family called me. So that’s what I call my son in Weapons.

That’s very sweet.

He’s so happy for me. My brother is a part of everything I make. He’s in my last special, he’s in my new one. So there’s that. It’s just that my hometown just isn’t a movie town. The only thing that they probably see, stand-up-wise, are people doing crowd work clips. And Rogan, just because that’s the stuff that’s sent to them over social media.

You gotta get on Rogan then!

Oh my god. No, never. But yeah, to be honest, I’ve had people be like, “Why isn’t the local paper writing about how you filmed a special in your hometown?” It’s just not on their radar, I don’t know. As embarrassing as it might sound, I will always be seeking the validation of my hometown.

Do you have any career goals that you haven’t checked off yet?

I want to make a new movie with Clay, and I want to keep making specials. I want to just keep doing what I’m doing, but on a scale where it doesn’t feel as impossible. I guess I want to be able to keep doing what I’m doing and just have it be ten percent easier to get things across the finish line.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All photos by me. My nuts itch.