Georgia native John Crist built a comedy career focused mostly on Christian audiences that landed him a headlining show in April 2019 at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre.
Seven months later, his career hit a bump in the road when five women accused him of various sins including “sexting multiple women during the same time period, initiating sexual relationships with married women and women in committed relationships, offering show tickets in exchange for sexual favors and repeatedly calling these women late at night while drunk,” according to an investigation by Charisma News at the time.
Crist entered rehab and canceled the rest of his tour in 2019. A pending Netflix special was put on hold.
He briefly considered leaving comedy but instead worked diligently to keep his core base and find new fans. He returns to the Fox Theatre on Saturday, Oct. 14. (Tickets available at www.foxtheatre.org.)
“I took it hard publicly on the Internet but I got a tremendous amount of forgiveness, too,” said Crist in a Zoom interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month. “The shows are bigger than they were before.”
His most recent YouTube special shot in Dallas and released four months ago touches on Lady Antebellum trying to “solve racism” by changing its name, the difficulties people had boycotting Chick fil-A and politically correct mascots.
Near the end of the special, he was joking about how State Farm had changed its spokesman from white to Black but kept the same name, Jake. He then mused that he didn’t know any Black folks named Jake.
Someone in the audience, who happened to be Black, said his name was Jake. A sheepish Crist cracked: “Just as I was uncanceled, back to rehab!”
Crist grew up in church, and his dad was a preacher at Atlanta Vineyard Church in Brookhaven and a former mayor of Lilburn. Crist and his seven siblings were homeschooled.
“A lot of rules, a lot of order, a lot of religion, a lot of keeping up with appearances,” Crist said, comparing it a bit to the Duggar family on TLC. “A lot of putting on a presentation of what the idyllic Southern family was all about. If you grow up like that, I think it’s ripe for comedy!”
His first job was at a Chick fil-A off Lawrenceville Highway. “My parents wouldn’t let me work at any other fast-food restaurant,” he said. “You live in that bubble. Of course, you get out of it and realize how much material you can get out of it.”
His jokes aren’t a condemnation of how he grew up. Rather, his jokes are made, he said, with understanding and love.
Credit: Nora Canfield
Credit: Nora Canfield
“I’m still a pastor’s son,” he said. “I’m still a Christian.”
Crist said he didn’t think of being a stand-up comic until college. While studying broadcast journalism at Baptist school Samford University in Homewood, Alabama, “I didn’t want to just read off the teleprompter. I wish they’d give us the bullet points and then I can make it up. I was told, ‘You can’t riff off the news!’ That’s when a friend suggested I be a stand-up comic. I was 21. It took me four years to get the courage to get on stage.”
His debut performance was just a few blocks from the Fox Theatre at the Laughing Skull Lounge in Midtown, a new comedy club that had just opened in 2009.
Crist remembered signing up in advance and the date is embossed in his brain: Tuesday, June 29. “I didn’t sleep the whole month before,” he said. “I had a hard time eating. I was sweating, getting nervous, having anxiety whenever I thought of it. I remember being backstage and a kid asked, ‘Is this your first time?’ I said, ‘Yah.’ And he said, ‘Well, they can’t kill you and they can’t put you in jail. So what are you worried about?’ I never forgot that.”
He remembered his very first joke: “My skin gets dark in the summer and people ask what race I am and I say, ‘I’m not white. I’m more wheat.’ Well, my dad is white and my mom is nine grain.”
Crist said that admittedly leaden joke and several others garnered almost zero laughs. But that didn’t matter. His thought getting off stage was, “I’m going to do this the rest of my life.”
Fortunately, he got positive feedback from Laughing Skull Lounge owner Marshall Chiles, who Crist said “was the first person who ever thought my comedy was any good.”
Chiles, in an interview, said he was not aware of his influence on Crist. “What I saw was a guy that was naturally funny,” Chiles said. “He had good energy and he could write a joke. That is just a foundation. He has since done the hard work to get where he is.”
Fellow Atlanta comic Ian Aber, who booked Crist at Laughing Skull during his formative early years, said he likes how Crist is “a great mix of funny and relatable. He pokes fun at conventions but is also very light hearted and his base likes how he kind of holds a mirror to them. Off stage, he’s very friendly and encouraging of other comedians, which isn’t always a given with someone with his popularity.”
Crist said about a decade ago, an old-school Hollywood agent told him the only way for him to break it big was to go to Los Angeles and get a sitcom so he could sell 2,500 tickets in Omaha, Nebraska. “I was thinking, ‘A sitcom? What year is this?’” he said.
He ended up moving to Los Angeles for a couple of years but not finding much luck there. “I remember being told to stay off the road in January and February for TV pilot season in hopes to get an audition,” he said. “This was crazy so I started blazing my own path.”
This meant posting sketches on social media in between snippets of stand-up. “Honest football coach. Every parent at Disney World. Sponsor a Millennial,” he said. “All these goofy sketches that people shared widely. Once you get them to watch one video, they’re hooked into your sphere.”
In 2019, when Crist was already headlining theaters, he left Los Angeles and migrated to Nashville, Tennessee, where he still resides. “I am a tour bus ride away to 75% of the American population,” he said. “And I sell more tickets in Clear Lake, Iowa, than Minneapolis.”
Crist has posted his last two hour-long specials for free on YouTube over the past year, generating 5.5 million views and helping fuel ticket sales. “If there’s any barrier between you and the content, they won’t go there,” he said.
IF YOU GO
John Crist
7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14. $33.75-$63.75. Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. foxtheatre.org
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