The Interim Pope Is A Guy Called Kevin. Why Do People Find That Funny? | Emma Beddington

The name was good enough for actor Kevin Costner and Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson, to say nothing of an actual saint, Kevin of Glendalough. Maybe the papal connection could make it cool again

I don’t think I’m imagining a collective amusement at “a bloke called Kevin”, as one headline put it, becoming the camerlengo, or interim pope and conclave organiser. The Vatican is such an incense-scented swirl of robes and ritual, history and high camp that it feels pleasingly incongruous that the person temporarily presiding over all its weird arcana is the very ordinarily named Cardinal Kevin Farrell.

But is there a kind of snobbery to it? That’s something the Kevins of France know all about. The name became exceptionally popular there in the early 1990s, especially among working-class families, peaking in 1994 when 15,000 babies were called Kevin. It caught on, the thinking goes, thanks to the prominence of a handful of US pop culture Kevins at a time when people were starting to be more adventurous in naming their kids, including Kevin from Home Alone (1990), Dances with Wolves-era Kevin Costner (1990) and Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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