“I’ve been single since birth,” 42-year-old comic Kristy Byers tells an amused audience at a Christian comedy night event.
A pause, a raised eyebrow, and then the punch line: “That’s longer than Jesus walked the earth.”
Her personal life is a rich lode of humorous material, but it was Byers’ experience as a US-2 missionary that propelled her into a profession and calling that “is the heart of who I am,” she said.
Three years after graduating from Winthrop University, the Clover native moved to Clearwater, Fla., in 1990 to serve a two-year term as resort ministries director with the North American Mission Board. When her assignment was completed, she returned home to South Carolina and was invited to share her missionary experiences with girls attending Camp La Vida.
She wanted her presentations to be fun, and she discovered that people were laughing when she told her stories. Before long, she was getting calls from pastors who wanted her to speak at their churches. “They had no idea I was a missionary,” she said. “They just heard I was a funny person.”
Byers, who now lives in Columbia, considers herself a storyteller in the tradition of Chonda Pierce and Mark Lowry. She has learned the art of writing a “bit,” and she has a couple of hours worth of standup material. Her routines typically last about 45 minutes.
“My life is like a sitcom just waiting to happen,” she said. “When something interesting happens, I think to myself: tell this story and work it out funny. I keep a paper and pen with me.”
As is the case with many comedians, Byers admits to being insecure. She doesn’t remember being funny as a child, but she used to do “obnoxious things” to get attention from adults. Being funny became a “coping mechanism” for a shy kid. In college, friends asked her to go places with them “because we had a good time and we laughed.” Since then, “I’ve discovered that I am the one at the table who’s making everybody laugh.”
Comedy doesn’t always pay the bills, so Byers works part-time to support herself and has an apartment ministry that provides her with a place to live. Still, she wants to do Christian comedy full-time, and she says God is “opening some amazing doors.” She performs about 30 shows a year.
“I don’t ever see comedy not being part of my life,” she said. “I told my pastor, ‘I wonder if you get the same feeing when hearing pages being turned during a sermon that I get when I hear laughter – that they’re listening and they’re getting it.’
“My message is: this is life. Most of the stories I tell come from episodes in my life when there wasn’t much funny about it at the time. As comedians, we can see that, even in the darkest times, the joy of the Lord is our strength.”
Byers often ends her routine by telling the story of the time she was an elementary school teacher and a little boy brought her a rose but was upset because he sat on it and crushed it. She uses the story to remind her audience that “we often have to be broken before God can use us.”
“My heart is to minister to people,” she said. “Everybody is going to end up broken at some point. God not only ministers to that brokenness – he uses it.”
It seems only appropriate to end a story about a comic with a funny line, so we throw it back to Byers, performing at the Christian comedy night event, where she is confiding in her audience:
“I have gotten to the point where – well, let’s just face it – I need a man.”
(Pause – wait for it. Now.)
“I’m tired of carrying my pocketbook when I go shopping.”
(To view video of Byers’ comedy routine or to learn more about her, visit www.kristybyers.com.)