Laugh along with Jesus

At the height of his religious devotion, Troy Conrad spent 80 hours a week trying to sell Bibles.

“I had doors slammed in my face,” the Phoenix native recalls. “I had people who yelled at me. I collapsed on some guy’s yard, and he was poking me with a rake to wake me up.”

Though he has since checked his Bible at the door, Conrad still faces strangers nightly as a comedian. And those years of deep devotion are fuel for his act, The Comedy Jesus Show.

The 38-year-old says he grew up in a Christian household and often tried to convert his friends.

“From 11 years old on, I really embraced Christianity in a ‘Jesus Camp‘ sort of way,” Conrad says. “In high school especially, I brought a lot of friends to church with me and they didn’t want to come back.”

At 21, Conrad took a weeklong training class in Tennessee provided by Thomas Nelson Inc. so he could spend the summer selling Bibles in Kentucky. The Christian publishing powerhouse taught Conrad tricks to make headway selling Bibles. One trick: Look down while pretending to wipe your feet on someone’s doorstep. “Whether there’s a doormat or not, it looks like you’re coming in,” Conrad says. “It’s a psychological trick to make people open the door.”

Conrad’s belief system was dramatically altered during a routine business pitch toward the end of his three-month salesman stint.

“One day I went to this lady’s house and she started telling me that she practices witchcraft, that she’s a witch,” Conrad says. “As a sheltered Christian boy I was fascinated, so I listened to her instead of trying to sell her books.”

The woman gave Conrad “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, which examines everyday myths held dear by various societies. The book completely changed Conrad’s perspective.

“I realized that religion was all about people trying to control an outcome so they follow directions and don’t ask questions, which doesn’t really work well for life,” says Conrad, who graduated from Arizona State University in 1994.

Since his meeting with the woman he calls the “good witch,” Conrad has turned his experiences into a one-man comedic revelation about religion in America. His Comedy Jesus Show uses stand-up, short film clips, animation, PowerPoint presentations and improvisation to satirize religious indoctrination. It features Preacher B, a “reformed” homosexual anti-rock music evangelist, and Barry Skye, a church music director who can’t answer difficult faith-based questions.

“Preacher B is an amalgam of all the anti-music preachers that I grew up with,” Conrad says. “He tells people that rock music and pop music can make them gay, but he’s obviously gay himself. I have the audience yell out the names of bands and I tell them why it’s evil.”

But Conrad says the main part of the show is a Q&A with Jesus.

“I thought, if Jesus really came back, wouldn’t you want to ask him something?” Conrad explains. “And everybody did.”

The Jesus impersonator says he’s now anti-religion.

“Religion is the Wal-Martitization of spirituality,” Conrad says. “Everyone has a spirit, but religion comes along and says, ‘Hey, I can make 10 percent off this,’ like a bad agent or something.”

The comedian describes himself as an agnostic-atheist-gnostic who doesn’t believe in invented gods but believes in cultivating a healthy spirit.

“All kinds of things nurture the spirit, but somehow the church hijacked spirituality,” Conrad says. “Who is it that needs to come back to set us straight? Jesus, as a comedian.”

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