In 2013, a decade before Mekki Leeper wrote and acted in the Emmy-nominated series Jury Duty, he was a college student, leading something of a double life. During the day, Leeper attended classes at Temple University, in Philadelphia. Then, at night, he was out on the town, hopping between dive bars and clubs to perform stand-up comedy.
“It was really hard to get booked,” says Leeper, now 30. So he and a friend, fellow actor Chris O’Connor, decided to widen their nets, embarking on “little trips where we would go to a city for a week,” he says. “We would do every bar show there,” couch-surfing to save money.
Leeper blames Donald Glover (otherwise known as “Childish Gambino,” his rapper alter ego) for his unwavering desire to pursue comedy, even when it would have been much simpler to be a normal university student. Leeper, who was raised in rural Fayetteville, Pennsylvania, by his American father and Moroccan mother, was making comedy sketches with his friends as early as 12 years old.
Leeper recalls realizing that Glover was not only “a really funny YouTuber,” but “also a stand-up comedian with a special on Comedy Central, and he’s an actor on a real sitcom.” Upon learning that Glover had also written for 30 Rock and gone to film school, Leeper became determined to pursue a similarly multifaceted career path. “He was maybe the first person that lit up all the steps it would take to have a job in comedy,” Leeper says.
So when Leeper arrived at Temple to study film, he began to create the same kind of humorous sketches and short films he enjoyed watching as a child. And yet, as he became enmeshed in Philadelphia’s local comedy circuit—originally in order to recruit actors for his student films—“I just fell in love with stand-up,” Leeper says.
During his senior year at Temple, in 2017, a fortuitous set at Comedy Works Downtown, in Denver, changed the course of Leeper’s life. “The club had a great open-mike night,” he says. “I put [a video recording of the performance] on YouTube, and somehow a Daily Show writer, David Angelo, saw it.”
Angelo’s friend Hasan Minhaj had just been tapped to host the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and he needed writers. “David gave the tape to Hasan, and Hasan cold-emailed me with the subject line: ‘writing gig,’” says Leeper. Reading the offer on a train back to campus from a performance in central Pennsylvania, he had to quickly decide: Should he return to his classes? Or should he ship off to New York City the next morning? He took the leap.
Working for Minhaj that spring convinced Leeper to drop out of college and commit to comedy full-time. After moving to Los Angeles, he began working on digital productions for Comedy Central and, in the years leading up to the pandemic, secured a talent agent, worked as an actor, writer, and director on a variety of short films and television shows (once as a waiter on New Girl), and continued performing stand-up.
In 2021, he landed another big break, catching the attention of Mindy Kaling, who was casting for her HBO show The Sex Lives of College Girls. “Being on a Mindy show was the greatest honor in the universe,” says Leeper. “I felt like a kid in a candy store.”
By the time the second season of The Sex Lives of College Girls aired, in November of 2022, Leeper was already hunkered down on a new project that was being described in the media as a “secretly shot” documentary featuring James Marsden.
“Being on a Mindy [Kaling] show was the greatest honor in the universe.”
This was Jury Duty, the inventive Amazon series about a real-life and unsuspecting juror, Ronald Gladden, who gets duped into participating in a fake trial and surrounded by improv actors who are in on the joke. Leeper, who both wrote for and acted in the show (recall geeky virgin Noah Prince) and loved the idea of the series, didn’t expect it to be a hit. “There was never any point that anybody attached to the production of Jury Duty ever suggested that there would be any talk of awards, that there would be a lot of people that saw it—frankly, that anybody would see it,” he says. “I think mostly we were wondering how many years we would spend in prison.”
In the months that followed its relatively quiet April 2023 premiere, the series became a sleeper hit, thanks to TikTok, where clips from the show received hundreds of millions of views. Jury Duty went on to receive four Emmy nominations, including one for Leeper in the category of Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. “If I learned anything” from the show, Leeper says, “it’s probably that it’s most worthwhile to just do stuff with people you enjoy, that makes you laugh.”
That same genuine sense of fun comes through in Leeper’s latest series, the mockumentary sitcom St. Denis Medical, which premiered this week. Set in a hospital in rural Oregon, the show stars Leeper as Matt, a recently hired nurse. “It’s just a hard comedy in a time when there aren’t many hard comedies,” says Leeper. “I don’t think it’s a show that exists to stress you out in any way.”
And while the series is sure to draw attention—co-stars David Alan Grier and Wendi McLendon-Covey are as funny as ever—for Leeper, stand-up comedy is never too far in the rearview. While shooting St. Denis Medical this summer, he continued to tour and hone a new set. “I’m really proud of my new hour, and I’m looking to put out a special soon,” he says. “I can’t give any more details than that—but it’s my favorite hour that I’ve done.”
St. Denis Medical is available for streaming on Peacock
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at Air Mail
