Cover Story

Ellen Skrmetti wants you to know that God wants you to have fun. The Birmingham comedian, who is known on social media for her “Hey Jesus” sketches and reels, believes that God is interested in all aspects of your life–even the absurd, sometimes outrageous ones–and she’s dedicated to sharing joy and laughter with Christians and non-believers alike. Her Instagram and TikTok popularity (she has 192,000 and 35,000 followers on the two platforms) has given her a unique audience, and Skrmetti says she’s confident it was God who gave her these opportunities.

Finding Comedy During Covid. Skrmetti was always the “funny one” in school, but it wasn’t until 2020 that she finally got serious about her dream of being a comedian. She’d enrolled in comedy classes and was due to start a new one the Thursday before Alabama announced its lockdown due to the Covid pandemic. “I’d just come home from Target to get stuff to make sanitizer when I heard the news. I cried and told my husband it was all over,” she remembered. “But, then Second City started offering online classes.” She kept busy during Covid taking comedy and writing classes through Second City–an improvisational comedy company based in Chicago that has been the starting point for such actors and comedians as Bill Murray, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler. And when one of her teachers told her that people were gaining an audience on Instagram and TikTok without knowing how to do standup, Skremetti took it as a challenge. “I told myself, ‘I know how to do standup,’ and maybe I can turn my standup into reels,” she said. “Covid had me do things backward and try something I might have never done otherwise.” She spent the rest of 2020 and 2021 honing her comedy craft and deciding what direction she wanted her work to take and leaped onto Instagram and TikTok (both @justskrmetti) in January of 2022. In the beginning, Skrmetti said most of her viewers were family and friends–but that she held tight to a prayer she made when she first posted. “I prayed every morning and every day, ‘Please do something so big it could only be you.’ I prayed about the people who would be watching the videos, not just the sheer numbers, and trusted God to do something with it,” she said.

She decided to not pay for clicks and instead relied on the organic growth of her channels. Early followers came from girlfriends sharing with other girlfriends, or mothers sharing with their daughters. “It was just my friends and family members laughing and enjoying it. It grew as slow as molasses,” she remembered. “From January to September, it grew from 700 to just 1100. I began to wonder what to do.” Skrmetti began, though, to celebrate her audience– small as it was. She then re-defined what “viral” meant to her and celebrated when she got 5000 views. And she vowed to keep going. “I knew if I stopped, I would never know what could happen.” And then Queen Elizabeth passed away. Srkmetti’s husband Tim is a huge fan of London’s Arsenal soccer team, and he bemoaned the fact that the team wasn’t playing because of the planned funeral for Queen Elizabeth in October 2022. She began to wonder: how would the funeral of Queen Elizabeth be handled in the South? And would it interrupt the airing of Alabama football games? “I decided to recreate every phone call I’d ever heard my Mom make when someone in the church died. It was the idea that Grandma’s not doing good, and we may have to get her in the ground before kickoff,” she said. “The video blew up on TikTok that day, then followed up on Instagram. Then people who watched it went back and watched my reels from the past, then followed me.” Today that post on TikTok has 1.6 million views.

Other posts and skits have evolved on Skrmetti’s social media channels, including her “Hey Jesus, it’s me” series and others where she posts as reporter “Kitty Potter” and other characters. “I was so nervous to be myself at the beginning that I started acting like these characters. The first was Kitty Potter, who is a reporter based on Kim Basinger’s Texas character in “Ready to Wear,” and then one day I did the ‘Hey Jesus’ bit asking Jesus if it’s okay if I pray for my co-worker to get a tapeworm. It’s just based on crazy things in my life.” Ultimately, Srkmetti wants her comedy to show that God wants us to come to Him with anything in our lives. “You can give Him a joke, give Him thanks, give Him anything, and not just at night or in the morning,” she said. “There’s truly not a second of the day that He doesn’t want communication.”

Finding a Way to Comedy. Although Skrmetti didn’t start taking comedy classes until she was 41, the desire to perform came from an early age. “I was always the class clown and my report card always said something about how much I talked,” she said. “It was always more important to entertain than to get good grades.” When she competed in the Miss Mississippi contest at 18, however, she remembers having extreme stage fright for the first time and making a deal with God about being on stage. She prayed that if God would get her off the stage, she’d never do it again. Now, she knows how misguided that prayer was. “I was naive because I took that as His word, and I didn’t get back on stage for a long time,” she said. “But one day I felt it in my spirit and God told me that He never took that bet. That was the devil trying to hold me back.” From that moment, Skrmetti consciously worked at taking classes and learning more about the craft of comedy until she got back on stage again– even though she was nervous to do so. 

Today, Skrmetti uses her current situations and family life for her on-stage and online inspiration. She and her husband Tim live in the Bluff Park area of Hoover with their children Meg, 14, and Nik, 9. Many of Skrmetti’s skits and posts are inspired by life with her family, or from memories from her childhood. In deciding what type of comedian she wanted to be, she often wondered if there was a place for her style; she learned that there was a need for the clean humor she provides. “Stories about my family are funny, and I’m confident that those stories about my children, raising my family, and my childhood are the ones I need to tell,” she said. “I need my mom and my Sunday School class members to have fun at my shows.” With Covid in the past, Skrmetti now does stand-up comedy shows in addition to her social media posts. And her family members and church friends have become some of her most staunch supporters and audience members at shows at places like StarDome Comedy Club in Birmingham and Zanie’s in Nashville. Skrmetti said that her presence at such comedy clubs is proof that Christians can provide high quality- and funny- material. “There are Christians in comedy, even though they don’t label themselves that way. People like Steve Harvey and Chris Pratt are always happy to tell people where their inspiration comes from, and I never shy away from telling people I’m here because of my prayers,” she said. “I don’t really like to call myself a Christian comedian. I’m a Christian who is a comedian.”

Looking to the Future. Skrmetti said she can now look back at that prayer she prayed for God (“Do something so big it can only be you”) and know that it was answered. She continues to post online and gain followers while also doing stand-up. She has also written a book based on her comedy routines. She met a literary agent through Instagram who loved her skits and asked if she’d be interested in writing a book. Her book proposal was accepted, and she signed a contract with Hachette for Hey Jesus, It’s Me: I Have Questions, Comments, and Concerns. The book, which releases this September, includes fun essays that have an “a-ha” moment of life and faith. The book-writing experience, she said, is an example of something she could have never imagined for herself. “Instead of praying, ‘God get me on stage,’ I prayed an unlimited prayer. I prayed that however big He wanted to make it, let’s do that,” she said. “It’s so amazing to see every door open.” Skrmetti likes to say that God will never show you the entire staircase of His plans. “I was at a point where I didn’t see the other steps,” she said. “I had to be patient.” That patience paid off- with followers on social media, with a book deal, and with the answering of what some might call a wild dream to succeed in comedy.

-Cheryl Wray is a freelance writer and book author who lives in Hueytown. She’s also the coordinator of the Southern Christian Writers Conference.