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Nice guys finished first at Helium Comedy Club’s competition for Portland’s Funniest Person 2025, with judges awarding JORDAN CASNER the coveted title and $3,000 in prize money on Sunday night. The stand-up’s winning set explored gift competition with past romantic rivals and what heights Luigi Mangione may have gone on to had he not allegedly shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. After all, in a comedy contest all that is serious becomes fair game and everything relatable skews profane.
The multi-round series—held annually since 2011—tested the mettle of 250 local comics, judging them on timing, stage presence, original material, and audience response, eventually narrowing the jokers to just eight: Zachary Clark, Brett Sisun, Brenden Creecy, Julia Corral, Brent Lowery, Virginia Jones, Jordan Casner, and Jeremiah Coughlan.
Casner performed second to last, and cleverly began his eight-minutes with a bid for sympathy, saying he wished he wasn’t the “first male comedian after Virginia.” He meant VIRGINIA JONES who had just practically singed the stage with her devastating read of male comics, which also cinched her place as first runner-up.
If anyone could survive and thrive on the heat from Jones’ wake, Casner was the comic to do it; he opened with a respectful, glowing description of his nonbinary partner being too hot for gender.
Casner’s rise has been long but steady, possibly interrupted by the time he spent outside Portland, refining his style in other scenes. In 2023, Casner regularly described himself a “soft-handed cowboy,” but has since trimmed his handlebar mustache back to Ned Flanders proportions. He won the honors wearing a down-to-earth baseball cap bearing the logo of a paint company in Forest Grove.
A sizable portion of the audience seemed to think Jones was a new Portland comedian, but she actually just moved back to the scene recently, after over a decade in LA. She performed the most put-together set of the evening, drawing from her extensive touring to riff about disgusting British proclivities that we don’t even have a name for in the US.
BRENT LOWERY grabbed second runner-up with a very funny routine about his grandmother turning 101, and what felt like an abbreviated version of his standard messy room goof, where he pretends someone broke in and left plastic bottles full of piss laying around.
Grandmothers and Mangione were common threads in the night’s routines, making it more diverse in material than is typical for the PFP competition, which is generally 100 percent wife- and girlfriend-inspired. We would have liked to see Casner touch on Mangione’s UI contributions to strategy video game Civilization VI.
Host and 2024’s Funniest Person Ben Harkins was in top form during the evening’s stalling-for-time set, which traditionally unfolds while the judges tally their votes. Harkins is truly the master of irritated deadpan crowd work, demanding at one point that the audience clap if they thought Thomas Matthew Crooks’ attempted assassination of the President was staged. This evolved into a hilarious rant about how Harkins would simply have “handled it,” an unclear claim about diffusing the assassination attempt, based on being “200 pounds and fork-lift certified.”
Harkins has seemingly broadened his stage persona wheelhouse, slipping into the hushed tones of a quiz show host to deliver ideas so disturbing they received an unbidden “Jesus Christ” from someone in the audience. We can only hope for similar successes for Casner, now taking up the mantle of Portland’s Funniest Person.
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Suzette Smith
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