Jo Sunday Bet On Herself & Won

Last summer, in the sticky August heat in New York City, Jo Sunday had a decision to make. She was preparing to move a few hours north to start medical school at Boston University. Papers were signed, outfits were packed, a plan was in place — but something was off. “At the last moment, it just didn’t feel right,” Sunday says. There was a more pressing (and riskier) dream on the line: a comedy career.

“Before I had any sense that comedy could be a real job for me, the only thing I felt was that I really cared about it, and I really, really wanted to try.” In a last-ditch moment of clarity, that gut feeling won out, so Sunday dropped out of med school and sent up a prayer to the universe that this would all work out.

“This was the big crisis of my life up until genuinely a few months ago,” the 25-year-old tells me on Zoom, sitting in a sunshiney corner of her apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, her enviably long red hair billowing outside the frame. For years, she’d been pursuing both comedy and medicine, following two forks in the road for as long as humanly possible. “I would take pounds and pounds of flashcards to open mics, and I would do my jokes and stay to listen to everybody else’s jokes, but I’d also be studying my bonds at the same time,” Sunday says. Saying goodbye to medicine was the ultimate test in trusting her intuition. “There was so much genuine risk involved that it could have easily gone left.”

Spoiler alert: This story has a happy ending. Two months after throwing caution to the wind, Sunday was announced as a new writer on the 51st season of Saturday Night Live. Her monthly show Body Count, which she co-hosts with her friend Tessa Belle, keeps attracting new audiences to Union Hall in Brooklyn — “Basically every flavor of the girls and the gays,” she says. In September, Sunday was named one of Vulture’s 2025 comedians to know, and in a March episode of his podcast So True, fellow comedian Caleb Hearon sang her praises effusively. As one Instagram commenter so aptly put it, “med school is shaking.”

Up until two years ago, I don’t think I was someone who people expected to be a comedian. So I feel like I have a lot to prove.

Even when hearing these accolades listed out, Sunday still can’t wrap her mind around the fact that her big swing is paying off. “I got incredibly, incredibly lucky,” she says. On the one hand, she jokes that she can be “a little bit of a diva,” believing she should be recognized when she’s out to watch her friends perform at comedy events. (“Facetiously in my mind, sometimes I’m like, ‘Wait. You don't know who I am?’”) On the flip side, Sunday’s underdog mentality is what drove her ambition to get here. “Up until two years ago, I don’t think I was someone who people expected to be a comedian,” she says. “So I feel like I have a lot to prove.”

Growing up as a “first-and-a-half generation” immigrant from Ghana, Sunday moved to the United States with her family at age 3 and then lived all over the country, from Connecticut to Colorado. She never thought of herself as particularly funny, but she learned early that she could capture attention and hold onto it. “I had a sense that I was interesting or strange, and I had a sense pretty much right away that I could affect people,” she says. Sunday’s earliest comedy memory was watching her parents’ VHS tapes of Ghanaian stand-up sets on the sly, after they’d put them on when hosting friends for dinner. “I’d sneak down the basement steps and listen to everyone laugh at this thing that I wasn’t allowed to be part of yet,” she says. “Honestly, it’s funny because there was pushback from my parents to me becoming a comedian, and it’s like, ‘You guys created this.’”

One of the founding questions of my comedy is ‘Am I strange or is the world strange?’

She enrolled in high school theater and fell in love with improv specifically. “Theater was a little bit hard for me as one of the only Black students in a predominantly white school. It was often hard to fit me in,” she says. “Improv is so exciting because you get to come on stage and we all make it up together. There weren't those limitations anymore, and I could be whatever I wanted.” She chose the University of Chicago for college so she could dive further into the comedy scene, then started doing stand-up and figuring out her style.

Forbidden themes are Sunday’s favorite things to explore in her work. “I start with something that scares me or makes me uncomfortable,” she says. In Body Count, which is centered on sex and dating, she tackles heavy themes like sexual violence and misogyny with the deftness of someone twice her age and experience level. “One of the founding questions of my comedy is ‘Am I strange or is the world strange?’” Sunday says. (Her answer: It’s definitely both.)

She started Body Count a year ago and has been steadily growing her career ever since, performing at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal last July. The SNL gig marks her biggest breakthrough moment yet, and it has finally allowed her to quit her nonprofit day job to do comedy full time. Sunday got the call that she’d been hired while on vacation in Ghana after quitting med school. She had to fly back immediately to make it to the start date. “I went from JFK Airport to 30 Rockefeller Plaza for my first day working,” she says.

It really was the magic of SNL that I had read about in so many threads and seen in so many documentaries.

So far, her proudest SNL sketch has been “Cousin Planet,” which she wrote and directed with Jane Wickline and Veronika Slowikowska for the Dec. 6 episode. It’s a trippy techno bop about where cousins go when they’re not home for the holidays. “It really was the magic of SNL that I had read about in so many threads and seen in so many documentaries,” Sunday says of the skit’s creation process. “I’m this 25-year-old kid, and I suddenly get to work in this tower palace at Rockefeller Plaza, and I have teams of people who are looking to Jane, Veronica, and me as the mini directors of this world of a sketch.”

When she’s not pulling all-nighters for her job with SNL, Sunday has a few other personal projects in the works. “I really want to be in a TV show,” she says, mentioning Adults as one of her favorites. “I have some pilots in the works — one about a girl at a fancy, fancy college who is an undercover spy and another about a pop star who falls in love with their bodyguard.” She and Belle have plans to turn Body Count into a podcast, and Sunday also wants to appear in a stage play.

Life is moving quickly, but she’s still on the same daily grind of trying to prove herself. “A lot of my life as a comedian is about presenting myself as glamorous and fun and larger than life,” Sunday says. But the reality is that she’s like any other 20-something living in Brooklyn. “It’s like I don’t have money, and my crush is rejecting me, and I have to move suddenly. Life is continuing at the same time that the glamour is setting in.”