“… he threatened to sue me out in Honolulu, and I looked out the window—it was rainy, it was cold, and I said, ‘Please! Please!’”
CNN Interview
The Benefits of Humor at the Office
As a preacher/comic, she’s a slash and a hyphenate. As someone who uses her skills as a lawyer in her current career… she leads what Penelope Trunk calls a “braided career.”
Serving the Lord, With Humor, and Legal Advice By MARCI ALBOHER
New York Times Blog March 20, 2008, 12:22 am
Susan Sparks sits at the intersection of a bevy of career trends. First, she needs a rather long string of words to describe what she does, usually beginning with something like “I’m a lawyer-turned-Baptist preacher who moonlights as a stand-up comic.” As a preacher/comic, she’s a slash and a hyphenate. As someone who uses her skills as a lawyer in her current career — her church relies on her for the occasional legal perspective on everything from property to contracts — she leads what Penelope Trunk calls a “braided career.”
She’s also part of a growing number of people who are trading money for meaning (she now earns about 40 percent of what she made as a lawyer), and another crowd who enter the ministry as a second career.
I saw her perform at a fund-raiser a few weeks ago in a group show where three comedians used religion as a springboard to try to break down barriers and defy stereotypes. Her jokes tend toward the “We Southern Baptists don’t talk about sex. It could lead to dancing” variety. The other two comics were Bob Alper, a rabbi/comic and Azhar Usman, a Muslim comic, who have been traveling together around the country on a Jewish-Muslim friendship tour of sorts.
Actually, I think she’s part of another trend. I just got a pitch from Dan Naiman (recently profiled in the Times), who bills himself as a “clean comic.” Did I mention that he is Indian/Japanese?
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A comic, a musician and an actor walk into a bar…and holy crap, they turn out to be a minister, a rabbi and a priest.
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Secret Lives —As told to Billie Cohen
Time Out New York / Issue 649 : Mar 5–11, 2008
Rev. Susan Sparks
Baptist minister and stand-up comedian
I do a lot of humor in the pulpit, and I try to do what I call “conscious comedy” in my show—just to make people think. I’ve done Carolines and Stand-Up NY. I had an interesting show recently, with a stand-up rabbi and an Islamic comedian. I did the opener as the Christian chick. [It used to be that] in the clubs, people would find out I’m a minister and they’d just go, “Eww.” So in the beginning, I would not let them introduce me as a minister, because the audiences—you would lose them. Now, I’ve kind of come full circle and am talking about it up front, but doing it from a very raw and honest perspective, which is about the conflict and personal journey of being a minister and a real human being.
“Worshippers want to laugh... Comedy club patrons want to think. Why not satisfy all the customers?”
Preacher Aims for the Funny Bone
By Ken Garfield
So who wouldn’t want to meet a lawyer-turned-preacher and standup comic who’s been called a cross between Matlock, Billy Graham and Ellen DeGeneres?
Pour yourself another cup of coffee and let me introduce you to a Charlotte native who has found her home in a Manhattan pulpit on Sunday morning. And in smoky comedy clubs on Saturday night.
