No Topic Off Limits • A Candid Conversation with Comedian John Crist

As it currently stands, John Crist is one of today’s fastest-rising stand-up comedians, earning more than one billion video views, more than seven million fans on social media and sold-out shows from coast to coast. 

Ending 2023 as one of Pollstar’s Top 10 Global Touring Comedians, last year John released his special “John Crist: Would Like to Release a Statement” on YouTube, garnering more than 2.8 million views, with more than 200 million views on social clips alone.   In 2022, Crist also independently released his “What Are We Doing?” special, and that compilation has more than 100 million views across platforms.

John has sold out the majority of his current 2024 U.S. tour dates and continues to add multiple shows in select cities, which brings him to Saginaw this Sunday, October 6^th, for a 7:00 PM performance at Saginaw’s Temple Theater.

A couple days ago The REVIEW was able to obtain a last minute interview with John in advance of his Sunday performance that gives rather illuminating insight into his unique gifts for comedy along with the courage it takes to be a success in a politically incorrect world seemingly obsessed with cancelling culture.

REVIEW:   At what point did you realize you had a gift for humor and comedic reflection and decide to pursue this professionally through stand-up comedy, videos, and social media outlets?

JOHN CRIST: I think I was always funny. My father was a Pastor at a church and  I grew up at home and was home-schooled, one of eight kids born right in the middle, so everyone would always come to me when something funny happened at church, or my parents or siblings did something funny in the neighborhood, I would always be chiming in and climbing all over it.

I don’t know if that bridges into any commercial popularity, but for me that happened in my 20’s.  I went to Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, which was a small liberal arts school down there. I was always roasting the frat brothers or making jokes on the tennis teams and somebody at college said I should try stand-up comedy, which took me about four years to overcome that fear when I went to my first Open Mic night in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Laughing Skull Lounge, which is where I started. 

REVIEW: Stylistically comedy is so broad, ranging from The Three Stooges variety of slapstick to gutter philosophers like Andrew Dice Clay to comics like George Carlin & Steven Wright, who employ circular logic where laws of physics bend to create new perspectives upon a particular topic. How would you define your own type or style of comedy?

CRIST:  Gutter philosophers - that is a wild term!  I’ve never heard that expression before. I would classify my comedy as being experiential and observational. All my comedy is clean in the sense I just talk about my family, religion a little bit, get into my parents who just celebrated 50 years of marriage, so when my siblings went home to celebrate there were so many crazy things happening, I have lots of material to work with.

I feel in many ways comedy is a game of high risks and high rewards. If you make a joke about someone’s Mom it’s got to be the best. If the city council decides to plant azaleas in the roundabout there’s not much emotional investment involved with that topic, whereas meeting my girlfriend’s Dad for the first time involves a tremendous amount of emotional investment. Consequently, everybody in the audience can touch upon that and relate to it.

REVIEW:  They say timing is everything in comedy, as well as life, so do you feel your talent is natural and intuitive, or did it take practice & experimentation in front of live audiences to hone your abilities?

CRIST: I think anybody watching a good comedy show realizes it comes down to verbalizing, which is about conversation and timing.  I’m the only one talking, but the conversation is between the comedian and the crowd. I listen to the crowd and let the theater breathe and the audience enjoy the pleasure of the joke.  When the audience isn’t laughing, you listen to that too, so you can change the topic if you go too far, because it is a conversation.

When I’m at the airport and people ask what I do and I tell them I’m a comedian, everybody always brings up how they went to see a certain comic perform back in college, or a particular show they saw on Netflix, and everybody knows about comedy and has pleasant feelings with somebody they found to be funny, so comedy is subjective - you want to share your favorite comic’s videos with your friends, and tell people, ‘You gotta see this!”

REVIEW:  Who were your favorite and most influential comics growing up?

CRIST: When I first started it was Brian Regan, Tim Hawkins, and Chris Rock when I was coming up. When I was in college is was Cedric the Entertainer in King’s of Comedy.

REVIEW: Given your impressive success with standup comedy I’m curious about your failures  - have you ever ‘bombed’ in front of a live audience, or experienced an audience that you couldn’t connect with?

CRIST: I have bombed many, many times. I mean, you try all variety of things. One time I did an entire set completely in Spanish.  One time I was talking about helicopter parenting and brought out a paper plate with orange slices to pass out to the audience like halftime during a soccer game, which I thought was funny but the audience didn’t find funny at all.

To become a great comedian you need to give a great show when people are paying sixty or seventy bucks for a ticket, you want to deliver the best that you can.  But then again, if you just do your hits that’s not going to work either because people want to hear something new. What’s great about this show is that I was in Saginaw two years, but now this show on Sunday is brand new - the audience haven’t heard these jokes - so it’s a double-edged sword you need to balance between doing the hits that work and trying new material, which may or may not work.

REVIEW:  In terms of your stand-up show, or any of your podcasts and ancillary projects, are there any topics that you feel are ‘off limits'  when it comes to topical material for your comedy?

CRIST: No, I don’t feel any topic is off limits and I’m a clean comic so that may sound surprising for someone like me to say.  But if you go to church you might hear the Pastor talking about drinking, gambling, pre-marital sex, only not in a manner to glorify them but to tell people not to do it.  These are also topics other comedians discuss, so I don’t think any topic should be off limits. The crowd will tell you if they think you’re going too far. You just need to listen to them - it’s like instant karma in that sense.  As a comedian I wouldn’t want to be in a green room where the general manger came in and told me a topic I shouldn’t talk about, because it would want to talk about it immediately.

REVIEW:  As one who believes a huge component of successful comedy centers upon how well it helps us understand the insanity around us, what are three things about contemporary culture that drive you the most insane, or that you find disturbing?

CRIST: I think the same as everybody nowadays that the topic of politics drives everybody insane, and that’s true on both sides of the fence. I think what also drives people insane is hypocrisy, which I’m guilty of myself. You see this person online or this celebrity who’s a weight loss guru and somebody catches them in line at a McDonald’s; or even better, we’re giving all this money to a hurricane relief fund that all went to staff salaries with nothing sent to help the people.  Topics that carry .a lot of emotional weight is what drive people insane - like religion where some people are deep into it and others are atheists.  That’s why when you sit at dinner your mother says, ‘Don’t talk about money, sex, politics, or religion’.  Yet, those are the fun topics. What I’m saying is come to my show because I’m the instigator that stirs the pot on this stuff.

REVIEW:   What do you feel is the biggest challenge involved with doing stand-up comedy professionally?

CRIST:  A lot of people think it must be tough with this entire ‘Cancel Culture’ movement and speech being censored, but I don’t think that at all.  The monitoring of speech has made comedy so much easier because to be controversial or cross the line you don’t need to say much nowadays to be inflammatory.

You just need to say this or that politician is lying and that’s inflammatory now, so what the culture has done with speech - getting people demonetized on YouTube, or especially during COVID where if you mentioned the reasons why you weren’t going to get vaccinated could get you de-platformed - has actually helped comedy because it’s the one venue left that is unfiltered.

If everybody coming to a show tweets or likes the wrong tweet on their social media they can be fired from their job. If you repost something on social media and somebody says they don’t feel safe around you, you can lose your job.  In the history of the human race that’s something I’ve never experienced since I’ve been alive, so comedy is the only place left you can say these things, which is why comedians are more popular today than ever before.

The biggest limitation in life is fear - fear of not going on, going off, or giving up on a specific topic.  Every comedian wants to be liked, but at the end of the day the key - as in life - is overcoming that fear and being honest.

John Crist’s ‘Jokes for Human’s show is happening at the Temple Theater, on Sunday, October 6^th at 7 PM. Tickets start at $30.00 and can be purchased by visiting  templetheatre.com.