JT Kelley (@eatingbootytakingnames) is a comedian who grew up as a fundamentalist Christian.

This was an intriguing podcast. I first met my comedian friend JT while working at Juiceland in Austin. The intention surrounding this dialogue was to discuss JT’s comedy, but things took a fascinating turn after JT brought up that his educational upbringing was in fundamentalist Christian schooling. After listening to our conversation, I wish I would have dove into this story more deeply as well as some of these other heated topics (socialism, communism, fundamentalist Christianity) but it was nice to hear about his comedy life too!

I was ignorant that such schooling programs existed and I’m curious to learn more about programs like Abeka Books and Bob Jones University. If you know more about this, I’d love to hear from you. It sounds strange to me that anyone is teaching kids under the umbrella of religion and politics and aren’t being taught to think for themselves.

*Although much of the discussion revolves around comedy and JT’s Christian upbringing, I wanted to include one quick fact check about incarceration rates: JT briefly mentioned that 20% of the total US population is incarcerated. The research I found states otherwise, that about 2.3M people in the US are incarcerated as of 2018, which is an incarceration rate of less than 1%. That being said, he could have been referring to the US prison population as a percent of the world’s prison population (~20%).

*https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html

All that being said, JT is one of the funniest comedians I’ve ever seen perform (not an understatement) and the conversation was kept pleasant. So, without further adieu, please welcome to the podcast my hilarious friend, JT Kelley!

Love,

David

Show Notes:

• Follow JT on Instagram, and Twitter
• Here’s a hilarious JT stand-up video!

EPISODE #19 – JT KELLEY (JESUS CAMP & COMEDY)

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