From the moment Preacher Lawson answers the phone — his booming, boisterous “Hello!” followed by an awkward-yet-hilarious moment of him pretending to be someone else named Jonathan — you realize the comedian is in the right line of work. When I tell him it’s too late and that I recognized his voice, he responds, “Man, I should’ve been more quiet, but [singing Broadway style] that’s not possible!” All this in the first 30 seconds.
Some people were just born to make us laugh, and Lawson — one of last year’s America’s Got Talent finalists, who started sneaking into clubs and doing standup at 17 — certainly falls into this category. But growing up, standup wasn’t even on his radar.
“I didn’t have a huge influence of [standup] comedians. I used to watch sitcoms… my influences were Will Smith, The Jaime Foxx Show, and… Martin,” Lawson recalls. Things took a huge turn when he discovered a particular standup special.
“I didn’t know Eddie Murphy did standup until I was 17,” he admits. Then his mom gave him a DVD of the legendary Eddie Murphy Raw for his birthday. “I watched that maybe a hundred times.”
From there, Lawson says he was hooked. Still a teenager, he had to use his wits and charm to get past bouncers at clubs in Memphis, Tenn., where he wanted to perform.
“You know, Memphis doesn’t have a comedy scene, so I was doing standup in laundry mats, and random cafes, and in these random bars.”
“I used to sneak in,” he admits with a laugh. “I would talk to the bouncer. I would just talk to him like, ‘Yeah man, like, yo, where do you go to school at? Oh, my friend went to school there, that’s great,’ and then I would just slip in like ‘Alright man, I’m gonna go in and I’ll see you later.’ And I would just go inside, and they wouldn’t even notice. And then, after a while they just kind of knew who I was.”
Eventually, the lack of a true comedy scene in his hometown, and the long sleepless nights driving to different venues took its toll on the young ambitious comedian.
“I fell asleep when I was driving and then I got in a really bad car wreck,” he says. “I just [needed] to start anew.” So, he moved to Portland, Ore., where he had family. The Pacific Northwest comedy circuit was a big improvement, but Lawson says he never felt 100 percent at home there.
“I have family there, but a lot of your family isn’t blood, you know,” he explains. “I had a lot of blood family there, but I didn’t have a lot of family down there.”
Eventually, Lawson says he decided to try his hand in Los Angeles, and “then America’s Got Talent [happened]. Bam.”
Considered by many as the funniest comedian to ever take the AGT stage, Lawson, now 26, still finds it difficult to explain the feeling of going onstage for the first time on the talent competition show.
“It was pretty insane,” he says, sounding somewhat serious for the first time in our conversation. “I don’t know if I can explain it… it’s like your first time ever being on a roller coaster, and you know you’re not going to die, but before you’re like, ‘I might die!’”
He says that as soon as he got onstage, “I wasn’t nervous anymore. ... I didn’t care if I went through or not, to be honest with you, because… being on the show, I’d already won. Everything else was just icing on the cake.”
Beyond his boisterous voice, cartoonish facial expressions, and hilarious flair for physical comedy, Lawson’s success can be attributed to his brutally honest, sometimes heartwarming, material. Most of his jokes are family-friendly — often about his family — and very relatable, especially for people of color.
One joke that helped Lawson win over the judges during his first America’s Got Talent performance was about his God-loving grandmother, who will pray in emergencies rather than call 911.
“My grandfather had a heart attack one time… and she really started praying. It’s like, you can pray on the way to the hospital! You can multi-task: 9-1-1, then ‘Help me Lord, Father, God.’ That’s a true story.”
There’s also a portion of his routine dedicated to his brother’s coming out as a gay man — though Lawson admits he started telling the joke onstage before his brother knew about it. It centers on the idea that friends and family have often already figured out someone was gay long before that person comes out. Lawson says the response from LGBTQ folks has been very positive, he thinks, because “they can just relate to coming out, and that people already knew. Because we already knew… we was waiting on ya!”
Since his time on season 12 of AGT, the rising comedic talent has been traveling the East Coast with his aptly named Big Sounds and Loud Voices Tour, which runs through August.
Lawson, still in his 20s, is already a veteran performer and bona fide TV star — and we can’t wait to see what he’ll do next.
READER COMMENTS (