No One Accused the White Chicks Guys of Being Gay”: Social Media-Based Evangelical Comedy and the Specter of Femininity
by Caroline Matas
In May of 2021, social media-based Christian comedian Trey Kennedy released a YouTube video addressing the “funniest rumor” that had been circulating about him. When Kennedy announced his 2021 wedding to his wife Katie, a tabloid published an article proclaiming that his marriage had finally “clear[ed] gay rumors.”
Kennedy has built his comedy career around imitating white Christian women, honing an affected feminine voice through which he mocks “basic” white women’s proclivity for designer dogs, flavored lattes, and spending their husbands’ money. In his response video, Kennedy noted that his frequent impressions of women might be the cause of speculation about his sexuality:
Yeah, when I act like a girl, I’m sure it’s like…. No one accused the White Chicks guys of being gay. They were good at acting as girls. Am I too? Yeah. Sorry I’m an artist. Give me an Oscar.
With the matter settled, Kennedy then took the opportunity to direct viewers to his newest media venture:
There’s a whole lot of stuff happening in today’s culture that just grinds my gears. You too? Well, on my podcast, Correct Opinions, I, Trey Kennedy, have the correct opinions to give my take on these issues.”
Despite the plug, Kennedy’s Correct Opinions podcast does not, indeed, offer many opinions on “issues” of non-hetero sexuality. In fact, like his fellow social media-based conservative Christian comedians— including his infamous collaborator John Crist—Kennedy typically declines to comment on issues like same-sex marriage, transgender rights, racial justice, or feminism directly. Instead, he takes aim more broadly at the feminization of society, decrying what he sees as the irrational sensitivity of the political Left.
Kennedy’s frequent comedy collaborator John Crist has an even bigger ax to grind over what he describes as the Left’s proclivity for hysteria. In 2019, several women accused Crist of solicitation and sexual harassment. While denying some of the particulars, Crist admitted to a pattern of “destructive and sinful” behavior toward female fans and briefly ducked out of the public eye. Less than a calendar year later, however, Crist emerged with a podcast and a series of books all aimed at dismantling the “cancel culture” that dismisses his opinions because he is a “white male.” In his latest publicity tours, Crist has said he considers cancellation a rite of passage for comedians, and he now embraces being in “the club.” He told Barstool sports, “Everybody was texting me, like, dude, welcome to being, like, successful.” Like Kennedy, Crist’s comedy remains aimed at deriding femininity even as he expands his reach—through books, podcasts, and other appearances—into other rightwing social issues.
Kennedy and Crist’s comedy careers represent a new iteration of conservative Christian commentary—one that skims over divisive social and political issues in favor of caricaturing and lampooning the feminine in both their home lives and broader American culture. Getting his career off the ground in the early 2010s, Crist was an early adopter of the short-form sketch comedy video made on and for social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. One of his early break-out videos was his 2014 spoof commercial for a book teaching Christian women how to best flaunt their spirituality via Instagram. In 2017, Crist helped launch Kennedy’s career through collaborative videos in which the two took on the personas of young white women enjoying lattes, at bachelorette parties, or complaining about being single. Both comedians have since amassed millions of followers on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
What ties these men together is not just their Christian faith, their matching haircuts, or their frequent collaborations, but their penchant for imitating women as the basis of their comedy. I argue that comedians like Crist and Kennedy lay the groundwork for their veiled social critiques through their comedy, which is largely focused on mocking women and femininity—a venture that is always raced and sexualized. In this sense, casual misogyny becomes a metonym for other social ills—what Crist, Kennedy, and others perceive as the feminine irrationality and sensitivity that plagues modern American society. I posit that the specter of femininity is as central to these comedians’ personae as it is to their comedy itself. Specifically, these men’s performance (and performative rejection) of white femininity signals both their fear of being or becoming the feminine and their mastery over its influence.
In one of Kennedy’s viral video skits, for example, the plague of femininity takes the shape of actual (and imagined) illness. With a series of colorful scarves wrapped around his neck and his voice modulated up an octave, Kennedy plays a wife increasingly imposing on her husband’s day to complain of a series of low-stakes ailments. When the wife finally interrupts the husband’s virtual work meeting to tell him about her “engorged thumb,” the dam of the husband’s building rage bursts. “Babe, you don’t have to update me on every single freaking ailment you have. Stop telling me and go!” Kennedy yells in front of his all-male slate of colleagues. Seemingly shocked by his own outburst, Kennedy briefly corrects himself, apologizing to his now-sobbing wife and telling her he knows she is just looking for connection and attention. But at the end of the sketch, the truth comes out: as his wife sniffles and complains about one more ailment, Kennedy’s rage returns tenfold and he slams his laptop shut, silencing her next words. No amount of understanding can bridge the gap between men’s staid and rational investment in the “real” world and women’s irrational fantasies and trifling concerns.
White women’s ignorance and pretension are frequent themes of both men’s comedy. In a video where Kennedy and Crist pretend to be women at a bachelorette party in Nashville, their characters repeatedly express their love of country music while demonstrating their unfamiliarity with Johnny Cash and Elvis. In a video with over 2 million views on YouTube, Kennedy depicts a woman holding up a book for a picture and then immediately tossing it to the floor, saying, “I don’t actually read, come on!” The women of Kennedy and Crist’s imaginations are incapable of grasping basic concepts outside of the home, but are experts in the manipulation of their husbands and families. In Kennedy’s viral video “Wife School,” for example, his scarf-clad feminine persona instructs a class full of women to spend their husbands’ money with abandon, cry to get their way, and invoke “feminism” and “toxic masculinity” as conversation-stoppers. Men, it would seem, are prisoners in their own homes to the tyranny of women’s feelings.
If all men are in danger of feminization in their own homes, Kennedy and Crist make it clear that white men are especially vulnerable. Kennedy’s allusion to the unquestioned masculinity of Marlon and Shawn Wayans despite their own portrayal of white femininity in White Chicks suggests that, to Kennedy, Black men’s masculinity is impenetrable and obvious. Crist echoes this sentiment in a clip of his podcast when he recounts being complimented on his shoes by a Black man. “They can be like, ‘Hey John, your second [show at the] Ryman sold out, OR, a Black guy asked where he could get your shoes. You can only take one of these,” Crist tells his cohost. “I would take the Black guy.” More than career success, fashion affirmation from a Black man is evidence of white men’s masculine prowess.
As Crist and Kennedy’s work demonstrates, comedy that expresses anxieties about white masculinity often takes up a dialectic relationship with an Other, whether that Other is the unassailably masculine Black man or the creeping influence of the white feminine. For both Crist and Kennedy, it seems, these “others” serve as evidence that it is white men’s masculinity that is under siege by a popular culture seeking to feminize every aspect of American life. Their response is to create comedy that gets ahead of this feminization, wearing it on their own bodies to show both its allure and its dangers. Even as they reject femininity as inferior, these men rely on the performance of femininity as the basis of their careers. By immersing themselves in the performance of femininity, do Crist and Kennedy transform the feminine into fodder for comedy, or does the feminine become a tantalizing possibility for more men to embody? As with any comedy, audiences are left to draw their own conclusions.
Caroline Matas is a Postgraduate Research Associate in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her research focuses on American evangelicalism, media, identity, and humor. Her dissertation is entitled: “Splitting Sides: On Humor in 21st Century American Evangelical Media.”