Out comedian Kevin Allison goes where no joke has gone before
RED-HEADED STRANGER | Kevin Allison is anything but ginger in his approach to humor, especially with RISK!, his show where people to tell shocking true stories from their lives. (Photo by Dave Dietz)
jonanna widner | Contributing Writer
jonanna.widner@gmail.com
The first conscious thought I remember having,” Kevin Allison says as we kick off our interview, “was, ‘Oh, wow, I like boy’s butts!’”
It’s not a big surprise that Allison “went there,” or that he did it so early. The 42-year-old comedian was a founding cast member of the early ‘90s cult MTV sketch show The State, in which he made a name for himself writing sketches like “The Jew, the Italian and the Gay Guy.” In 2009, Allison pushed performance boundaries even further, creating the popular live show and Podcast RISK!, on which people tell stories they never thought they’d dare to in public.
Out since 1994, this is a guy who doesn’t shy from sharing the intimate, the verboten, the visceral. In both his RISK! and his interviews, he freely volunteers details about his sex life, including his involvement in the kink scene. When I ask about the first-ever story he told for RISK!, he responds with a hilarious and somewhat unnerving tale about the first time he went to a sex club (at age 21) in New York City, where he picked up a stranger.
“I brought him home, and he instantly went into this dominant-submissive role play. He started yelling at me, and I was confused because I had never really been introduced to that yet,” Allison says, his voice rising as he gets into the story. “And he ordered me to tie my shoes to my balls. And so the story is about me being a deer in headlights, following instructions and not really getting any erotic charge out of it, because I was just so confused.”
The story is titillating, yes, and funny, and probably even shocking to some, but Allison isn’t being gratuitous or provocative for its own sake. Even this naughty little story is a reflection of deeper truths about Allison’s identity and all that involves — where he’s from, how he grew up, what his insecurities are, what his true character is.
Allison knew he was gay from a young age — “There were reports from the neighbors of me in diapers trying to get the boy next door out of his diapers — I’ve been a ridiculously horny little kid of forever” — but he grew up in conservative Cincinnati in a devout Catholic family, and the reverberations of being gay in that upbringing form the basis of his identity and of his storytelling art. He is at heart a sweet Midwesterner (he can casually toss off a BDSM reference, but still says “oh my gosh!” with sincerity) who has managed to find the nexus of humor, pathos and universality in his work, especially RISK!
And the danger of telling any kind of truth has never been lost on Allison.
“I remember being 5 years old and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, in one year I’m going to be 6, and I’ll have to go to school, and then other kids might be able to observe my behavior so closely that they’ll be able to figure out what is going on with me,” he says. ”So I was already having these closeted fears at the age of 5.”
Allison officially came out in a 1994 interview with Out magazine, but there were other parts of him that stayed tucked away beyond that.
“I was very shy,” he says. “When I would first meet a group of people, I always thought in terms of, ‘Oh I just have to come out, whether it be I have to come out as funny or come out as gay or come out as this or that.’”
His biggest challenge, however, is a different kind of coming out: Breaking away from the safety of the comedy formula. “I think those 12 years after The State broke up, when I was getting up onstage as crazy characters all alone, what I really wanted was to be able to go anywhere emotionally,” he says. “I felt kind of boxed in by comedy.”
Allowing himself to go those places — and encouraging RISK! participants to do the same — is what infuses the show with such humanity. It just might be the best work Allison has ever done, and it certainly continues to push him into uncharted areas, to come out of different closets on a continual basis.
“What truth even is can be a big question at times,” he says. “Memory can fool us. It can allow us to think of things that happened in a certain way that makes you feel OK, and then when you really start examining a story you’re telling, you think to yourself, ‘Wait a minute! I’m really bullshitting there, aren’t I?’”
It’s pretty heady stuff for a guy who once tied his shoes to his balls. Of course, there are all sorts of risks in the world, and Allison clearly is willing to go for it in every arena of his life.
“I will have moments in a story that will get really serious or really spiritual or really sad, and it still scares me,” he says. “It still scares me to step away from a laugh every 10 seconds.”
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition January 31, 2014.