Ruadhán Jones
Jennifer Fulwiler Catholic comedienne and mother of six Jen Fulwiler speaks to Ruadhán Jones about Catholicism and comedy
Militant atheist, computer programmer turned Catholic comedienne and mother of six – Jennifer (Jen) Fulwiler has led a busy life. To say the least, it wasn’t how she expected it to turn out. But now, having just released an hour-long comedy special on Amazon, she feels that she has a life which is fulfilling and exciting.
Before she converted, Jen was a militant atheist: “I thought religion was manipulation, I thought it was something that people made up to control other people,” she explains. “I thought there was absolutely no basis to it.”
When I ask her if she ever expected the life she has now, married, Catholic and with a family of six kids, she says emphatically – “No”.
“It was one of the things that came from growing up in an atheistic, individualist mentality that the way to live a good life was to just be all about yourself, don’t let other people drag you down which is a sad and lonely mentality,” Jen explains.
“But I was still very clueless because that’s the world that I came from. I didn’t even imagine I would get married because life was all about doing your own thing. I just thank God every day that I got a clue because obviously my family is the best thing that ever happened to me and I’m so grateful for them and it just chills me to think of the sad world view I had when I was younger.”
A winding road
It took a number of twists and turns before she did “get a clue” and wise up to the possibility that there were truths besides the deterministic atheist model. What set her on the path was having a family.
“Once I started having kids I experienced love, love for them, love within our family and I thought – I just think there is a source to this love that is more than just the chemical reactions in our brains. I think this love has a source,” she says.
“I also started to realise that it’s a great fallacy of our times that people think you can and should prove everything with the scientific method,” she continues. “Even the great founders of the scientific method as we know it today – you know, Galileo and the like – they didn’t even think that. They understood that there are some things which are objectively true, like the truths of philosophy, that you can’t prove with the scientific method.
“Like, if you want to estimate when the big bang happened, ok yes you use the scientific method. But if you want to ask why, that’s a question for philosophy not science. That was a big shift for me that there could be things which are true even if I can’t prove it in a laboratory.”
Difficulties
Her atheism wasn’t broken down all at once, however, and there were initially hurdles she had to get over. Perhaps surprisingly, specifically Catholic conceptions such as the real presence proved no barrier.
“It’s interesting, once we started exploring Catholicism, for example the doctrine of the real presence – that actually wasn’t hard for me to accept,” she says, “because well, if there’s a God he can do what he wants. It makes sense for him to give a way of connecting with him that is very visceral and primal, so maybe you don’t have to have the kind of intellect that can understand big lofty truths, but you can have that kind of communion. Oddly, that kind of thing was pretty easy to accept once I read up on the ideology behind it.”
What proved difficult was the very first step, “saying that there’s something out there that I can’t see or measure but it does exist. I think it was just the concept of believing that there’s something else out there. I think for me that was the hardest concept,” she says.
Catholicism
Neither Jen nor her husband Joe, who converted with her, were Catholics. Born, raised and living in Texas, their primary contact with Christianity was through Evangelical Protestants. But Jen started a blog and slowly noticed that the religious people making the most consistent arguments were Catholics.
In the book she wrote about her conversion, Something Other than God, she admits that her initial reaction to this discovery was incredulity. “Catholics believe weird stuff,” her husband confidently told her. However, Jen and Joe slowly became convinced that their initial reaction was wrong and that the Catholic Church was Christ’s Church.
One of the things people ask me is if my life is better or worse now that I’m Catholic”
“We did a whole lot of reading because I was trying to get a grasp of the Christian moral code,” she explains. “Because people were telling me to follow Jesus, but I said who is Jesus because what he stands for matters, these moral codes matter because they tell you what Jesus stands for.
“There was just so much chaos in modern Protestantism that I couldn’t get a sense of who Jesus is or what he stands for. So the idea that Jesus founded a Church and filled it with his own authority – I saw that in scripture, but it just made sense to me that Jesus would have given us more clarity then the chaos you see in modern Evangelical Protestantism in America.”
So they became Catholics, converting on Easter Sunday 13 years ago. I ask Jen how she views Atheist Jen now that she has been a practising Catholic for more than a decade.
“Looking back, I’m kinda surprised that it took me so long as it did to see that atheism is just not a worldview that accurately explains the world,” she begins. “One of the things people ask me is if my life is better or worse now that I’m Catholic. And I really feel like my life has started now that I’m Catholic.
“I almost feel like people are asking the wrong question when they ask me that. Life is just so much richer and interesting – I feel like I really just started living and having an interesting life when I started being a Catholic and started living by the Catholic moral code. Honestly when I think back on being an atheist, my first gut response on it is that it was kind of boring.”
Family
Given their family’s integral role in sparking their conversion, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jen and her husband are devoted to their children. Both lead busy lives, especially Jen in recent months as she has been in the process of recording her comedy special, The Naughty Corner, with Amazon. In order to balance family and work, Jen and Joe have turned their work lives into a family project.
“The big thing that we do is we see everything as a family project like the comedy special that’s out now, all six kids were there for that,” she says. “And then earlier in the tour, when I was going to other cities, each pair of kids could choose where they wanted to go. So some of them went to South Dakota, which is very exotic to go that far out.
“So we really see all of this as something we do as a family. That’s one of the reasons – we had home-schooled for quite a while because at one point I had speaking engagements in Canada and New York, so we just took all the kids up there and then we did a family road trip to New York, so it’s been really fun the kids have been able to travel to so many different places.”
Career change
Turning her work life into a family project has enabled Jen to pursue her latest career in stand-up comedy. In fact, the change was in part the result of her family life. After the birth of her first child, she gave up computer programming and took up writing instead.
“One thing that was easy to do from home was to write so I started a blog,” Jen says. “And I always gravitated towards humour writing, I would do – even when I was writing about Catholicism I would do funny things. And then I got a job on a national radio show, on Sirius FM, the national American Network, and I used humour a lot on that show. Finally it occurred to me that the distillation of all this was stand-up comedy. If you’re going to take humour in its purest form, that’s stand-up comedy.”
Jen initially underestimated just how difficult a shift this would prove to be. Stand-up comedy has proven to be “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my career by a factor of ten,” she tells me.
“Stand-up comedy is so hard. Like with other speaking engagements you can go up and give a speech and if a crowd doesn’t react that’s fine, they’re not really supposed to react. But with stand-up comedy, if people don’t laugh at your jokes, everyone in the room knows you just bombed that joke. It is – stand-up comedy is a pass-fail thing, either people laugh or they don’t and it’s really embarrassing if they don’t.
You have to do comedy that is reflecting actually how the world is, otherwise the crowd won’t track with you”
“In order to get the material for this special, I had to go to clubs here in Austin [Texas] and stand up in front of crowds who don’t know me at all and see if I could make them laugh. I was bombing for weeks. I was getting up on these stages and I thought it would be easy, I would write something that seemed very funny in writing and then I’d get up on stage and nobody would laugh. That was my first clue that just because I had a background in humour writing, that did it was going to work in stand-up comedy.”
Catholics and comedy
Stand-up comedy, Jen says, is one America’s favourite past-times. But it’s not typically family friendly. Usually, in fact, the humour is quite explicit. Jen still feels that one can be both a good Catholic and a good comedian – she goes further, stating that Catholics are ideally suited to being comedians.
“I think we are really set up to be the best comics,” says Jen. “Oscar Wilde who was famously very, very funny, he converted to Catholicism. He wasn’t practising while he was writing, but he had that sensibility. I think that because as Catholics we’re not afraid to look at the darker things in life, we’re not afraid to look at the beautiful things in life – it goes back to what I said earlier, that I feel like my life really started once I became Catholic.
“I feel like I have a wealth of material in this culture where lots of people have big families and there’s all sorts of stuff going on at your parish. It just gives me a lot of material and the Catholic worldview – you know, comedy has to be based on truth. You have to do comedy that is reflecting actually how the world is, otherwise the crowd won’t track with you. They won’t laugh. I feel like the Catholic world view gives a very sober and realistic look at the way the world actually is. And that sets me up to do really strong comedy, in my view.”
Evangelisation
As well as setting her up with a wealth of material and the worldview to, as it were, exploit it, Jen believes it’s important that Catholics have a presence in major fields such as stand-up comedy.
“I would say – it’s sort of evangelisation,” she says. “The way I think of it, I wanted to see a Catholic female mom of a big family have a voice in the market place of ideas. In the US, stand-up comedy is huge, it’s what people do for fun on the weekends is watch comedy specials on weekends. This art form has really captivated the American imagination.
“Yet, there are very, very few practising Catholic comedians and almost none in terms of women. In fact, I can’t think of any women who have national presence who are practising Catholics who have a larger than average family and are happy about it and are not talking badly about it.
“And so one of the things that excites me about doing this is that I would like to see more diversity of viewpoints in stand-up comedy landscape and I saw a real lack of my viewpoint in that landscape. And so, could that end up evangelising some people, people might think wow her life sounds very interesting, I’d love to learn more about what she’s into? Yeah, I think that’s possible.”
“I think of that less as evangelisation and more as – I just want to represent my people in this entertainment market place.”
With Jen representing our views, we have little to fear – funny, lively and intellectually rigorous, she is well set to have a long career in this highly competitive field.
“I hope so. We always take it one day at a time over here. Obviously Covid has complicated everything because the way you promote a stand-up comedy album is you tour. So that obviously complicates things. But I’ve loved it, I’m having a lot of fun with it, I really enjoy it – I feel like everything I’ve done in my career so far has led up to this,” she says.
Jennifer Fulwiler is an American author and stand-up comedienne. Her one off Amazon special The Naughty Corner will be available in Ireland soon. Her podcast This is Jen is available internationally on YouTube, iTunes and other podcast platforms.