Brad Stine, conservative Christian comedian, discovered his niche onstage in a club thanks to a message from God he believes he received from a lesbian.
It was Minneapolis, 1999. Stine’s stand-up career was middling at best, his dreams of Hollywood and sitcom stardom as distant as the Gideon Bible in his hotel room.
That night, a female comedian he was sharing a bill with at a comedy club announced she was a lesbian and started cracking jokes about it.
Stine took the cue. He decided to “come out” himself.
“I’m a born-again Christian!” he shouted. He usually wouldn’t call himself that. He prefers just “Christian.” But it was the most confrontational term Stine could think of.
At set’s end, the lesbian comic turned to Stine and said, “You know, you should have a sitcom and be the Christian guy. Here’s your hook.” What she was really saying, Stine believed, was this: Be true to yourself, and let the rest take care of itself.
“To me it, it was God saying, ‘I can acknowledge these signs through anybody,”‘ Stine, 45, said in a telephone interview from his home in a Nashville, Tenn., suburb. “You expect to hear that from a pastor. It showed me that because we had this conversation and mutual respect as comics, you can disagree but still laugh, still interact and not hate each other. That’s what my faith teaches, anyway. I wanted to be that guy.”
Adding an edge to Promise Keepers
Stine’s faith had always influenced his stand-up work; he never used profanity or sexually explicit language. He found his niche – became, as his website puts it, Brad Stine America’s Conservative Comic – by bringing it all together. He openly proclaims his identity and delivers clean jokes that skewer liberals and conservatives alike in an aggressive, in-your-face style honed over years of performing at smoky nightclubs.
Stine’s act comes to Denver’s Pepsi Center this weekend as part of Promise Keepers’ 21-city tour. His relationship with the Denver-based evangelical Christian men’s ministry, now in its third year, has been mutually beneficial: Stine gets an audience in the thousands and an opportunity to sell merchandise, Promise Keepers gets a fresh, edgy performer to pump life into a conference format that had grown tired.
“Brad really pushes the envelope and provokes a response from the guys,” says Tom Fortson, president of Promise Keepers. “Over the years, we have been very serious in proclaiming the message for guys to get out into the marketplace and have right relationships with their families. Brad brings laughter, and laughter is good medicine.”
What Stine has not been able to bring is a full-fledged Promise Keepers revival. More than a decade removed from filling football stadiums, the group has seen revenues decline four consecutive years and in 2004 ran a $1.5 million deficit, according to its federal tax forms.
Fortson, who succeeds former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, is attempting to remake the group’s image from one focused solely on teaching men to be fathers and husbands from a conservative Christian perspective, to being a voice on cutting social issues of the day, from gay marriage to immigration.
Stine’s routine touches on those kinds of issues and more, and he tries to keep current. He’s working on new material exploring the debate over evolution and intelligent design, the belief put forth by evangelical Christian thinkers that aspects of life are too complex to have evolved.
“Dangerous and clean”
Stine grew up in Indiana, the son of a homemaker and an auto-body repairman who had a band that covered Andy Williams and Frank Sinatra. A young Stine started with sleight-of-
hand magic and progressed to doing straight stand-up.
Upon giving up the Hollywood dream, Stine took an offer to appear on a TV show for a small Christian network, then started to work the church circuit.
“People didn’t know you could be dangerous and clean,” Stine said. “They didn’t know you could be an iconoclast and still be embraced by Christians. They didn’t know it was possible, and neither did I. It was as if God had been saying, ‘I have been waiting for you to give this away so I could trust you with the plans I had for you.”‘
Stine looks at other comedians and sees few people like him. He disdains the way Bill Maher, an atheist, talks about people of faith like they’re idiots, he says. He has grudging admiration for Jon Stewart, who, while politically liberal, doesn’t hesitate to ridicule John Kerry or anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan when he thinks they deserve it.
“If I make fun of or attack a liberal, I always find a place to make fun of a conservative,” Stine said. “If I go after an atheist – and I do – I find a place to say, ‘Here’s how Christians look stupid.’ On my second album, I make a joke on gay marriage. Then I spend twice as much time chastising heterosexual divorce, which I think is much more damaging to marriage in America.”
Stine recalls being asked once by an interviewer on NBC whether he is a preacher or a comedian. Stine fired back. “How come I get asked that, but Chris Rock is a ‘social commentator?’ Everybody preaches. Everybody has something they believe is true and they want you to agree with. When Bruce Springsteen writes a song, he says, ‘Be a liberal, be against the war, be a Democrat.’ He’s preaching. If people buy it, you win. It’s democracy. Welcome to America.”
Make no mistake, however: Stine’s audience is overwhelmingly conservative. In January, the comic performed at a Republican House and Senate retreat in West Virginia. He had his picture taken with Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum and Rudy Giuliani. Stine insists he will make fun of conservatives who lie, cheat or steal. He said he is beholden to no party, only his belief system.
Does Stine have a joke in the works about DeLay, the Republican House whip under indictment for alleged campaign finance abuses? Stine said he’ll give DeLay, whom the comedian calls a great guy, the benefit of the doubt for now.
Goal: sitcom stardom
Now that he has succeeded in the evangelical Christian market, Stine is looking to crack the mainstream. Of course, Stine would argue he is the mainstream: a churchgoing conservative middle American who rarely sees himself depicted in pop culture except as a buffoon.
Stine could be on his way. He has a book contract with Penguin and a record deal with Warner Bros. He is represented by the William Morris Agency.
Maybe, just maybe, this is the path Stine needed to take to someday achieve that coveted sitcom.
He has a good idea of what it would be. He would be the star, of course. But he would be surrounded by a supporting cast with “a bunch of liberal characters:” a gay guy, a black guy, an Asian person. He would set it in the heartland, the characters would all get along, and they would all be funny.
He would call the show “Middle America Man.”
Heck, Stine might even look up that lesbian comedian who helped convince him way back when that being the Christian guy was his hook.
“I’d give her a chance,” Stine said. “She could come in and read like everybody else. Casting a sitcom? I’d love the opportunity.”
Staff writer Eric Gorski can be reached at 303-820-1698 or egorski@denverpost.com.
“The Awakening”
Promise Keepers
15th-annual conference
When: 6:30 p.m.-10 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Pepsi Center
Cost: $69 fee covers both days, lunch Saturday
Featuring: Christian rock by the Newboys, comedian Brad Stine, Vietnam veteran Dave Roever, youth speaker Phil Chapin, Marcos Witt of Houston’s Lakewood Church, Bishop Larry Jackson, NASCAR chaplain Dan Seaborn, author Steve Farrar
Information: 800-888-7595 or promisekeepers.org
