‘I’m funnier since I converted’: an interview with comedian Jeremy McLellan
Could you have made Jesus laugh? “I think so,” says Jeremy McLellan. “I think God thinks I’m funny.”
And what about Muhammad? “I don’t know,” he replies. “It says in the Koran that he would laugh and people could see the back of his teeth. So I assume he had a good sense of humour. I think he would have come to my shows.”
McLellan, 34, is among the rising stars of American stand-up: he has more than 600,000 Facebook followers and in 2017 was named as one of the “New Faces of Comedy” by Just For Laughs, the world’s biggest comedy festival.
A year later, he was received into the Catholic faith.
Catholicism is at the heart of all he does, including his routines. The fusion of faith and fun is evident even from his choice of Genesius as his confirmation name, in honour of the Roman martyr and patron saint of comedians – but not without a few reservations. “He got killed for the room,” McLellan deadpans. “It’s not what you want as a comedian.”
Behind the quick-fire wit is a deeply serious and intelligent individual whose journey into the Catholic Church has been several years in the making.
Raised in a conservative Presbyterian household in Charleston, South Carolina, he became intellectually convinced of the truth of Catholicism after reading about the Church while at college.
On graduating, he worked for three years with adults with learning disabilities at a L’Arche Catholic community in Chicago, and toyed with the idea of conversion; but it was only when he went home and began to do stand-up that he took the leap of faith.
The catalyst was his growing Muslim fan base, which threw up questions that caused him to think more deeply about life. Yet the decisive factor was a hunger for the Eucharist. “When I felt that urgency and I reflected that Catholicism wasn’t a theory of the Eucharist, it was the Eucharist, I thought, ‘Oh, I need that,’” he recalls.
At the same time, his experiences in L’Arche were shaping him as a comic. The “gift” of working with disabled people and learning to “enter into their world” prepared him for the stage, he says, by teaching him to “make peace with uncertainty”.
