Kevin James Thornton Is Not Just a ‘Big Baby’

With Big Baby: On Endings, Beginnings, and an Interdimensional Cat, comedian Kevin James Thornton proves that his charm is not confined to the Gen X-coded,  autotuned viral videos that made him a star after a half-century of struggle.

Big Baby: On Endings, Beginnings, and an Interdimensional Cat 
By Kevin James Thornton
Grand Central Publishing; 320 pages

There’s plenty of 90s pop culture filtered through fundamentalist Christian youth group sensibilities to please his fans, but the full-length memoir format affords Thornton the opportunity to lift the veil on some of the pain and insecurity of growing up in small town Indiana as a closeted gay boy. It’s still very funny, but it would be reductive to file it in the Humor section.

As a Hoosier theater kid from the pre-Internet era, I’m in the prime demographic, but Thornton  paints the late-20th-century Midwest and its unspoken rules so vividly, Gen Z and Alpha readers will have no trouble understanding the stakes.

Unlike actor Jeff Hiller, whose recently published memoir, Actress of a Certain Age, shares some overlap with Big Baby, Thornton was not yet a celebrity when he started assembling these reflections for public consumption. He was driving himself long distances to self-booked Fringe Festival gigs, staying in cheap motels when free accommodations weren’t available, building on bits he’d tested at open mics.

Comedians use audience response to help them refine their sets and it’s clear that Thornton paid attention to the temperature of his Fringe festival houses. An attempt to freshen up some well trod material with some inchoate “over-the-top dick-sucking jokes” was also instructive, yielding a disastrous review that scuppered a planned Canadian tour and provided lots of time for reflection.

“I was approaching 40 at this time, and it felt different,” he writes, citing Carl Jung’s observation that one’s first four decades are research for “the afternoon of life”:

…the details had now all simmered down and given way to the heart of things. I didn’t have skin in the childhood game anymore and could be irreverent about myself. It was a fun doodle, and maybe a bit of a therapeutic experience for me.

Many memoirs lose steam when their endearing underage protagonists grow up, but Thornton, now 52, sustains interest by exposing a touching, lifelong craving for acceptance.

The book is organized into three sections.

The first sees him through college graduation and ends with him telling some frenemies from Soul Wave Campus Church to fuck off before heading toward the twinkling skyline of Indianapolis (ha!) as “a proud homosexual.”

The second commences right around the book’s halfway mark, glossing over a decade in which he skates from “odd job to odder job” in order to get to Los Angeles with a “soulmate” — one that Thornton didn’t realize was an alcoholic who was not out to his parents.

The final section, by far the briefest, focuses on the events of the last few years, the dissolution of Thornton’s comfortable long-term relationship and his sudden pandemic-era rise to fame. He admits that he’s still chewing over the best way to present this stuff, explaining that “when people have difficulty in explaining a thing, they often lean into mythology.”

No longer compelled by Christian dogma, Thornton turns to his cat, Comet for mystic guidance. Comet opens a life changing vortex in dreams that smack of artistic license but also starts pooping outside his litter box, a real world problem that unexpectedly finds Thornton practicing some radical acceptance of his own.

@kevinjamesthornton

Greatest hits: coming out. #autotune #storytime #exevangelical

♬ original sound – Kevin James Thornton

Thornton’s  journey is not yet over, but by book’s end, he’s made peace with himself, the sort of grace that comes from within.