Published on Show Me Mizzou Aug. 28, 2026
Story by Justin Heckert, BJ ’02
Peanut butter isn’t inherently funny, except that it sticks to the roof of your mouth. Anyone who eats it knows this. That it ossifies the tongue and entraps the pterygoids, that it refuses to be scraped from where it cements itself, that even the dishwasher can’t totally remove it from a spoon.
But peanut butter also makes everything better. Hamburgers and banana sandwiches, apples, bacon and ice cream. And it has no bigger advocate than Greg Warren, standup comic, who sold Jif peanut butter for a decade after he graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism. He drove around Texas with a trunk full of jars in his company car and extolled its creamy virtues. While working for Procter & Gamble, he even had a hand in launching “Simply Jif,” a lower-sugar option marketed to diabetics (he wanted to call it “Type-II Peanut Goo”). Warren, BJ ’90, seems like the kind of guy who might fight you in a restaurant if you went up to him and whispered, “Peter Pan is better.”
Warren has a joke about this he uses onstage. About how, at P&G, Warren sold 18 oz. cans of Jif for just 99 cents in Kroger grocery stores throughout Ohio, which was such a rare price point that it propelled the state’s peanut-butter buyers to switch brand loyalty for the brief duration of the sale. “I did that!” he boasts to the audience at the beginning of The Salesman, the 2024 comedy special that catapulted his standup career. The special was produced by Nate Bargatze, maybe the most famous comic in America and a huge fan of the Kirkwood, Mo., native.
Bargatze invited Warren to open for him on The Big Dumb Eyes tour and features him at other comedy shows, plus on his website and podcast, all under the Nateland umbrella. Warren’s favorite “peanut goo” is the throughline of The Salesman: “I was a big deal in the peanut butter game!” Warren tells the crowd. He boasts that 99-cent jars “will never happen again. Even the unchoosy moms bought Jif that week.”
“‘Mama, this peanut butter tastes better!’” he says, imitating a kid trying Jif for the first time, and then replying as Mama, “‘Well, don’t get used to it, boy … I ain’t givin’ up cigarettes, and I ain’t givin’ up Red Bull. I wasn’t choosey about your daddy, and I’m not choosey about peanut butter!’”
Warren, 58, has an auricular hematoma — cauliflower ear — and a middle-aged consternation as a comedian. He often dons black and gold while taping his podcast, The Consumers, a weekly deep dive from a former salesman’s point of view into the story of random products such as Taco Bell burritos or Jolly Ranchers. He’s on top of the comedy world right now, propelled into the mainstream after 25 years grinding on the road as a mostly clean comic. (“I wasn’t clean my first ten years,” he says.)
From the start, Warren kept his material mostly PG, and then a comedy friend who admired his work suggested Warren was “much too clean to not be all the way clean. You should do that. I think it would work in your favor.” So he switched to what he now calls “Nateland clean,” which is entirely family friendly. Warren’s the cohost of Bargatze’s primetime ABC game show The Greatest Average American, is headlining his own Impulse Buy tour and selling out theaters (including an April gig at the Missouri Theatre). This fall in Pittsburgh, he’ll record a yet-to-be announced special for a major streaming service.
“I think Greg found something that nobody else was talking about,” Bargatze, currently the world’s highest-earning comic, says via email. “Most comedians are telling stories about their family or growing up, and Greg’s talking about peanut butter and Pringles. You hear that and think, ‘Well, this shouldn’t work.’ Then somehow it’s the funniest thing you’ve heard all night.”
The story of how Warren, an advertising major, moved from Mizzou to peanut butter to a Jimmy Fallon appearance to a primetime ABC game show is kind of a weird one that involves singlets (one-piece wrestling tights), the now shuttered Déjà Vu nightclub on Cherry Street and even his ear.
• • •
If you listen to his standup, you know Warren likes to talk about that ear. Which is really a way to talk about Mizzou.
From the seats, it’s hard to see that the ear is pinkish and swollen unless it catches your eye under the stage light. He uses this morsel: Early in the set, Warren points out that it’s his right ear, sometimes blocked from display as he walks with his left side turned specifically toward the crowd. He might pick an audience member close to the stage and say, “I have a cauliflower ear. Don’t stare at it! I got this from wrestling. I wrestled in college. I wrestled for the University of Missouri. It’s hard. I figured that out quick.”
Warren presents material about his former sport as though he were terrible at it. During his 2025 special The Champ, he riffs on a coach who forced him to watch videos of himself getting totally dominated at Northern Iowa, with the coach saying, “Look at ya, Warren. I’d put it on pause but I don’t need to ’cause you’re not movin…” and about how weddings make him nervous now because he can picture the coach somehow popping up from the crowd and, “When it gets quiet and they say ‘Speak now or forever hold your peace,’ I can hear coach bellow, ‘Warren laid down at Northern Iowa! Don’t marry him!’” In his comedy, he makes his old coach sound insane. But the truth is, Warren was a four-year letterman, all-Big 8 and, in his final season, an All-American competing at 158 pounds.
“Greg was a serious student-athlete,” says the wrestling coach in that joke, Mizzou great Wes Roper, BS Ed ’81, who offered Warren a wrestling scholarship. Warren was a two-time high school state champ who attended West Point for a year. “He had a great work ethic,” Roper says, “and didn’t come across to me as a guy you pictured being a comedian. He was a guy who kept grinding. He got better. His junior year he won two or three matches at nationals and then had a great finish to his career. He was very strong. He had a tendency on top position of gaining control of his opponent.”
Warren was kind of a comedian wrestler, though. He had antics. Which entailed him being the guy trying to lighten the mood for his fellow teammates because Roper, a young coach back then who still took to the mat with members of the team, held brutal practices. Warren tried to make his teammates laugh by doing random bits influenced by Eddie Murphy and Bob Newhart tapes about “the misery we were about to go through.” He also did stuff like sneak out of the gym, order a pizza and have it delivered to one of the heavyweights — during practice.
Warren had his caulifower ear drained and casted at MU Health several times but, he says, “you’re wrestling so much you can’t keep up with draining it. Your ear hardens up. I think it’s cartilage; I don’t know. Wrestling taught me that in order to get better you have to put the work in. It’s not going to get better on its own.” He draws this correlation between wrestling and stand-up: “Every now and then, especially in high school, you learn a new technique.”
When he was a senior at Mizzou, the Columbia Missourian quoted Warren pondering his future. In an accompanying photo, he’s wearing his singlet and posed like he’s about to strike. “I feel so strongly about comedy now,” he says in the story, “that I think I’m going to have to give it a shot.” He was 22. In the picture he has a totally cherubic face, his arms and legs made muscly by competition.
By that point Warren had done stand-up a few times at Déjà Vu and had even won the interest of the club’s owner, Freddie DeMarco, who turned out to be Warren’s earliest comedy guide, lifelong friend and someone he still weaves into his act. At Déjà Vu, Warren worked the door, bartended, showed an unpolished knack in front of the mic and met traveling comics who provided sustenance for his ambition. But when he graduated, after moving to Chicago for only a few weeks and with DeMarco’s confidence that he actually could be good, Warren chickened out.
• • •
“I was sort of in shock at that time,” Warren says now, speaking one recent afternoon from his home in Kirkwood, Mo., before heading to a show in Chicago. Warren has never been married. He jokes about it a lot, though, that he looks haggard from a bad marriage but has never had one. He lives close to his father in Kirkwood; the two attend Cardinals games and Mizzou matches and even travel to watch high school wrestling.
“A girl had broken up with me,” Warren says of that time in 1990s. “I was not wrestling for the first time in my life, and I was lost. I went from having all this structure in my life to having zero. I think about that a lot. I stayed with a friend in Chicago. I left after a couple weeks. I didn’t love it.”
He settled for what turned out to be a cushy sales job, a normal person’s job, a much safer job, a car of his own, a 401k, stores of his own, then a sales region of his own, and a proclivity for peanut butter. He was part of a team at P&G and liked the job and company but wasn’t inspired. The whole time, in his 20s into his 30s, his sense of humor and interest in writing nagged at him. So with the urging of friends including comic Mark Gross, he decided to quit and give it a real go.
“We both wrestled, we sorta connected on that,” says Gross, who now lives in LA and is an executive producer of the Chuck Lorre-created Netflix show Leanne. “He was still working for P&G, and I’d be like, ‘You need to quit your job and just go all in.’ He was one of a handful of people I would’ve said that to way back in the day. I could just tell, this guy has got it. He’s one of the people that I felt like should make this their life, you know?”
Warren did get something valuable from the salesman life: a decade’s worth of salaried employment fodder for his current line of work. “I tried to write about my experiences at P&G, but I never really cracked the code until I did The Salesman, the first project for Nate,” he says. “I sort of adopted the character of a peanut butter loyalist, which is definitely partially true. I was loyal to my products and believed in my products. I was a company man. I exaggerate the qualities a little bit. It really resonated with audiences. That’s when things started changing.”
Wrestling, too, is both part of his act and informs how he conducts it. Not only does Warren donate to Mizzou wrestling, but also when he and his dad have road-tripped to watch the Tigers in action, Warren’s given talks to the team. Not even to offer advice, but to just say funny stuff about the sport to take their minds off the grind, like in February when he was in Columbia for Bargatze’s Big Dumb Eyes tour at Mizzou Arena.
Before the show, Warren offered Bargatze and his fellow comics a tour of the Mizzou wrestling facilities at the Hearnes Center so that, Bargatze says, they could “see his name on the All-American wall. It was pretty cool because everybody there was proud of what he’s accomplished. You could tell they respected what he did as a wrestler, but they were just as excited about what he’s doing in comedy.”
At the facility, Bargatze added, “He also started wrestling us and throwing us around to show he’s still got it even though he graduated in 1937. (Just kidding, Greg.)”
The comedic writing exercises Warren undertakes — recording his own material and playing it back ad nauseum while folding laundry to hear his own words and phrases and try and refine them — is just a modern iteration of grappling. Most days he sits down to a blank page and, using three full notebook pages, writes aimlessly to employ continuity and spark his brain, which he describes as freewriting. Other comics he knows have adopted it. “When you do it on a regular basis,” he says, “When you check in with your thoughts, every now and then you’ll get an idea. In the shower or 11:30 at night. You think it comes out of nowhere, but I believe it happens if you do that work (in the notebook).
Journalism school helped him express his thoughts as a salesman, he says. “In sales you need to go interrupt this grocery manager, and he’s got a truckload of stuff, and you have 45 seconds to try and convince him to put up a Pringles display or buy the new item. You have to communicate very concisely. Standup comedy is very much the same. You need to probably have a pretty good idea about exactly which word or which piece of punctuation are people going to laugh at. J-School was a big part of that.”
“He’s so deserving of all of this,” says Colleen Quinn, the general managing partner of the Omaha Funny Bone comedy club, where Warren got one of his first breaks after leaving Proctor & Gamble. Déjà Vu’s DeMarco called her and vouched for Warren’s talent. “He put in the legwork,” she says, “Nate just helped boost where Greg should’ve been, in my estimation, 10 years ago.”
“He’s in a spot right now where I can tell you he is selling out tickets everywhere we go,” says Sean O’Brien, fellow standup and one of the cohosts of The Consumers. A few weeks before, O’Brien had been with Warren in Eerie, Pennsylvania, opening for him during two sold-out shows. “Every single person was there to pay money to see Greg Warren,” he says. “Greg is at the level where you could throw a dart at the US, hit a venue, and he’ll get people to come out to see him, and they’ll know him from the gameshow, opening for Nate, which is astronomical.”
• • •
Warren jokes a lot about Déjà Vu, which is a way to joke about himself. About getting up and bombing, quitting, trying again. He employs a version of DeMarco’s voice, kind of a New York mafioso thing, DeMarco sounding skeptical about anything Warren does, and it’ll be a part of his sets forever.
In The Salesman, peanut butter runs the whole show, and DeMarco is an important character. Warren tells stories about himself through “Freddie” being both smitten with the idea of his future success and then shocked when he left for P&G. Warren recently returned to Columbia to attend a memorial service for DeMarco, who died on Jan. 3. Quinn and other comics and former Mizzou wrestlers were there, too.
Instead of eulogizing his late mentor, Warren just did the bit at the end of The Salesman. In it, after he’s told DeMarco he’s quitting his job in his 30s to try standup again, after a decade of success in the rat race, a company man through and through, Warren channels Freddie, loudly: “People don’t need comedy, Greg, they need peanut butter.”
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