McKinney was in a particularly good mood when our interview started and his good nature radiated throughout the entire conversation. It wasn’t long before he was calling me “buddy” and you really start to feel like you’ve known each other for years. McKinney comes off as an all around good guy.
“I’m extremely excited about being able to play at the Improv in Schaumburg, I’m told that it is one of the best rooms in the nation right now” he said expectantly. “It’s not my first time playing Chicago but it will be my first time in the suburbs; I like to think of it as the windy suburbs.”
McKinney has not always been a stand up comic and the path he took to become one is one of the more unusual stories out there. Raised in a family that he jokes were regularly visited by the police, he made the decision early on that he would like to become one. His website justonmckinney.com tells how growing up, one of his favorite shows was the cop drama CHiPs. He defiantly had law enforcement on the brain.
For him it was only a matter of time before he became a police officer. At the young age of 19 he was hired by the state of Maine’s York County Sheriff‘s Department. “I was a small town cop” he says “There were only two cops in my county that I patrolled and it covered 14 towns and over 500 miles of land.” Being the happy fellow that McKinney is it is no surprise that he prided himself on being a good and honest police officer. A couple years after joining the force he got involved with the D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program and began doing guest lectures on alcohol abuse and drug awareness. He jokes that in one classroom of middle school children he had to give them a long lecture on staying out of gangs, but when the children didn’t know what a gang was he told them. “When I came back they had started their own gangs and kicked the crap out of me,” he says with a laugh.
It was while teaching the D.A.R.E program that he first realized that he wasn’t living his dream. “I heard myself speaking to these kids and telling them to follow their dreams when I wasn’t doing it myself,” he said. In the mid-90’s he packed up his bags and transferred his police duties to Boston in order to pursue his dream of being a stand-up comedian more passionately.
“Comedians like [George] Carlin and [Richard] Pryor were always inspirations for me. [Jerry Seinfeld] is another big one. I love his observational humor.” No surprise since much of his material comes straight from real life “I never make anything up, everything I put in my act actually happened to me” he says.
In 1997, McKinney officially resigned from the force after seven years of duty after his career in stand up comedy found new life in New York. He quickly became a regular performer at such venues as the Comic Strip, Dangerfield’s and the New York Improv. It was not long before he got signed on with Warner Brothers to write and star in his own sitcom. Unfortunately, it aired about the same time as the reality television craze hit and was quickly lost in the shuffle of shows. “This business has changed a lot,” he says “Back in the 80’s and 90’s comedians like Roseanne and Seinfeld were big contenders on the market. Now reality TV has taken over a big chunk and made it a lot harder for comedians to break through,” McKinney said.
McKinney himself has managed to stand out in the crowd and has had the honor of winning the “Listerine Clean Mouth Award” in 2002 at the Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado. The award is given out to comedians who stand out by keeping their comedy free of profanity. “I like to work pretty clean,” he said. “Just because a comedian uses profanity doesn’t mean he’s more witty. I think it’s possible to keep my entire act clean and still be considered smart and witty.”
More recently he has showed up on the “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno and had a guest appearance on the CBS comedy the “King of Queens”. He currently lives in Los Angeles but spends much of his time touring the country playing colleges and nightclubs. McKinney has plenty of prospects on the horizon including a new television show with Comedy Central. “It’s called “White Sheep”; it’s an animated television show about my early days growing up. I was the white sheep in my family since almost everyone else wanted nothing to do with the police. My dad actually spent 10 years of his life as a homeless man after I joined the force. My whole family hated cops so I really stood out.” The comedy is currently in the production stage and should be ready to be pitched to executives fairly soon, he speculated.
As a side project McKinney also started his own line of clothes for those involved in extreme sports. The company is called Suck It Up Sports and has been a side project of McKinney’s for some time now. “You can find it at Suckitupsports.com, just whatever you do don’t Google it,” he warned jokingly. “I tried that once and all I got were porn sites.”
You can catch McKinney’s lively performance March 29th through April 1st at the Improv comedy club in Schaumburg. It is sure to be a wonderful performance by one of the nicest comics around.
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