![]() ![]() Kevin James Thornton is coming back home to Indiana, appearing at Helium Comedy Club in downtown Indianapolis on Sunday, June 11. I'm having the time of my life, and it's the most unexpected second chance at a dream I didn't see coming." I was not making a lot of money, staying in cheap hotel rooms. Then I hit the road again, and back then it was a struggle. When that ended, I moved to Los Angeles to begin pursuing standup comedy. "I played in a band many years that traveled the country. "I have spent most of my life on the road," Thornton said. When live standup comedy shows returned from the pandemic shutdown, Kevin was ready. ![]() It's so funny today, but I think we all that in 1988." "During that pre-internet era, those myths would float around in small towns. "There was a name for it – 'The Satanic Panic,'" Kevin adds. There's devil worshippers!'" one of Thornton's videos exclaims. ![]() "There was a baseball park by my house, and everyone said, 'Don't go into that dugout at night. For example, the rumors of where the local Satanists would hang out. If you also grew up in a rural area, regardless of your sexual orientation, you'll probably recognize some of Kevin's stories. He said in a recent video he vividly recalls hearing sermons at church that made him think, "as a 12-year-old, what did I do (wrong)? God must have abandoned me and given me over to my evil desires." That has allowed him to tell a more serious side of his story about growing up gay – and, obviously, not out back then – in a conservative Evansville-area community, and how he has come to terms with that over the years. Kevin now has more than 2 million followers on TikTok and Instagram. I wasn't really thinking much of it at all, and they just blew up really fast." So I decided to make a couple of videos telling my funny, weird stories, and just as an afterthought, I put that Auto-Tune filter on it. But I've done standup comedy and storytelling festivals for years, I already had a lot of that material floating around in my head. ![]() I was just watching other people's videos. "I really wasn't intending to do anything with that. "There was a moment when it seemed like everyone downloaded TikTok at the same time during 2020," Thornton said in a phone conversation from his Nashville home. He has done standup comedy on the road for years, but Thornton's career took a viral turn when he started making those short videos – with the help of Auto-Tune – during the pandemic. And we even had a song we would sing in church, and the words were like, 'it's too late. One of Kevin's now-famous TikTok videos begins with him crooning, "In my super-fundamentalist church youth group when it was the '90's, we were obsessed with the rapture. The stories he tells about growing up, however, are different than the ones you may tell. These days, some of his comedy material comes from tales of his hometown of Evansville. He graduated from Ball State, a musical theater student while he was there. Kevin James Thornton may live in Nashville, Tennessee, now – but the comedian is definitely a Hoosier. ![]()
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