SANTA CRUZ — Aaron Foster is not one to shy away from topics that might be seen as too grim for standup comedy: clinical depression, abuse, suicide and so on. These are all things the Los Angeles comedian has experienced firsthand, and he has parlayed those traumatic experiences into his standup comedy tour, “Mostly Jokes,” which he will be bringing to the Santa Cruz Actors’ Theatre Wednesday.
Foster said the show is like therapy to him, as it allows him to address mental health issues he has faced his entire life but in a way that is funny and relatable to the audience. Among the topics he talks about are his own issues with chronic depression, which he has had his entire adult life, and growing up in a family that included an abusive father with bipolar disorder and a brother with schizophrenia who died by suicide in 2007.
With such heavy subject matter, Foster cautioned that the show will not be for everybody but it has gone over well with audiences.
“Not your typical comedy fare, but what I found is that people who like my stuff really like it,” he said.
Foster has been a fan of standup comedy since the ’80s when he would watch every episode of “An Evening at the Improv” on the A&E Network. To this day, he is a big fan of comedians such as Marc Maron, Maria Bamford, Mike Birbiglia, Taylor Tomlinson and Gary Gulman, who are also very open about mental health issues.
“They do it in a way that, to me at least, is relatable, it’s very funny,” he said, emphasizing that they talk about subject matter he did not think comedians could talk about and “gave me permission to do the same.”
However, when moving to LA in 2005, Foster was not looking to become a standup comedian but rather an actor, mostly working in short and independent films. His most visible profile during this time was as the host of the HGTV show “Freestyle,” where interior decorators gave homeowners’ houses a new look at no cost. Foster said the experience was exciting at first but ended up being “the worst contract in the history of entertainment.”
“It was challenging,” he said. “I lived in Los Angeles, it was shot in Minneapolis, so I spent every other week going back and forth for almost a year.”
Foster also found he was less interested in the design aspect of the show than the human element of interacting with the homeowners.
“They were almost always people that had never been on camera before, and we’re in their home and they’re nervous,” he said. “It became more of an exercise in trying to make them feel comfortable and have a good time because that would always translate on camera.”
Foster began doing standup comedy shows in 2009 but went on to pursue other ventures, including opening his own restaurant in the LA area in February 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit a month later, he began posting daily videos to social media about owning a restaurant during a pandemic. Upon selling his restaurant as the restrictions winded down, Foster got back into writing and performing.
“I didn’t know it would lead into this full-on show,” he said. “I just decided I’ll do standup again, and the more I was writing and writing and writing, it felt like everything did go together. It had a throughline and an arc to everything I was writing. It kind of fit together, so it made sense to try and put it all together.”
Foster said the show also became a way to address the issues he had ignored for most of his adult life, which did little to alleviate the trauma. His therapist suggested writing about topics like his brother’s death, and she was taken aback by the comedic manner in which he approached those subjects.
“I said, ‘Well, this is what I’ve got,'” he said. “It’s a way to have that conversation and hopefully remove some of the stigma about talking about some of this stuff because most people have experience with some version of this in their family and their life.”
In addition to his family and personal issues, Foster also tackles his acting career, including mistakes he has made, how he has learned from them and how he has changed personally.
“Mostly Jokes” premiered in June 2024 at the Hollywood Fringe Festival and was named the Best Solo Show at this year’s Tucson Fringe Festival. Foster said the response has been positive but acknowledged that the material is not always what audiences are in the mood for.
“It’s been a real challenge, and it’s been a real process to try and figure out how to make it funny, how to let the audience know that it’s OK, it’s OK to laugh at, that I’m OK,” he said. “It’s been a really long process, but it’s also been a form of therapy for me.”
Foster is also amused at some of the ways the show has been promoted, such as a venue in Arkansas which proclaimed, “Former HGTV host who now does standup comes to make you laugh.”
“I was like, ‘Oh is that how you promoted the show? That’s probably not gonna go well for anybody,'” he said. “It was OK, but it was definitely noticeable in the room that people were not approving of talking about some of the stuff that I do.”
Despite the often heavy subject matter, Foster hopes audiences will laugh.
“I talk about things that we all go through in some capacity at some point in their life,” he said. “I think if we could find a way to ideally take them a little less seriously, but at a bare minimum just talk about them more, that would be the goal.”
The show is 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Santa Cruz Actors’ Theatre, 1001 Center St. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at MostlyJokes.com.