CLEAN COMEDY BY BRAD MONTGOMERY

Selected Posts from Brad’s Past

We found a few posts, videos and stories from Brad’s past, and thought it would be fun to re-publish them here.  So pour yourself a cup of coffee, put on some classic rock, and check out this classic blog post from a decade (ish) ago.  

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Yours,

Brad Montgomery
Motivational Speaker, Humorist, Seminar Leader, Squeaky Clean Comedy

For you folks who prefer to read, here’s the transcript to the video:

Hey, it’s Brad Montgomery in the house with a little note for you about comedy, clean comedy, comedian speakers and how not to get in trouble when you’re booking one. Alright, so here’s the number one concern. I hear this all the time from both my clients and from my meeting planners and that is, when you’re booking somebody who’s advertising themselves as funny or you know is going to use humor on stage, you want to know they’re going to be clean, you want to know they’re going to be crystal clean and you want to know that you’re not going to be embarrassed and having to deal with that after the meeting is over.

Well, there’s a couple huge mistakes that are going on. First, let me speak to the speakers out there and then I’m going to speak to the meeting planners and the people who are booking speakers. If you’re a speaker or a comedian, you know this. It is brutally hard to come up with material that’s original and funny. It’s brutal. It’s just really hard. It’s a lot of work, but here’s the obvious point. It’s just as hard to come up with stuff that’s dirty as it is to come up with stuff that’s clean.

So that being said, why would you invest a single calorie working on material that you can’t use in the corporate world, in the association world, on the TV world? Why wouldn’t you just make it clean, for crying out loud? I think you’re an idiot, basically, if you’re writing stuff that’s not so clean that your grandma can see it, that your nine year old daughter can see it without any embarrassing questions. Well, I think you’re foolish just because you’re shooting yourself in the foot and you’re pretty much screwing up your career.

So why bother? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s a bunch of comedians out there that work dirty who are fabulously popular. But I just heard Chris Rock being interviewed, he was interviewed on the WTF podcast and one of the things he told us on the podcast was that when he’s talking to young comedians, he says, work clean, don’t cuss. This is Chris Rock. This guy is known, he’s edgy, especially earlier in his career, he was working really dirty and he’s funny as heck right? But he’s telling people to work clean.

What is the lesson in that? The lesson is that he’s looking back on his career from his perspective now. So if he’s telling you, somebody who’s done it the hard way, why wouldn’t you listen to him? I’m telling you I’m clean, but he’s telling you, he’s huge, and he works blue, work clean. It’s easier, it’s more profitable, it’s good for you.

Alright, the second thing I wanted to tell you is targeted towards my clients. If you’re looking for a speaker, if you’re looking to book a comedian, check them out. Alright, so I cannot imagine this but I’ve heard it from, oh, I’ve heard the same story at least 10 or 15 times. I hear it at least once a year, how some corporation booked a comedian, the comedian got up there, embarrassed the president or the audience or the whatever by not working clean, by being racist or bringing up uncomfortable sex jokes or cussing and they ended up pulling the plug on them.

The president, in all these cases, it’s always the president or the director of HR or somebody in authority has to go up and take the mike from them and say, thanks, you’re dismissed, thank you so much. And then have to explain the apology to the audience. Can you imagine?

Well here’s what kills me, for crying out loud, in this day and age, search Youtube and see what they’re all about. So yeah, you ought to check out their preview video. You ought to check out their video, but look at all their videos. In this one most recent case, they’re explaining that the preview video showed a very clean presentation, but I’m telling you because I was curious, I looked on Youtube, there’s a zillion videos up there of this particular comedian and this comedian doesn’t work clean most of the time. So most of the videos were filmed in a comedy club with a brick wall behind this person, all kinds of stuff that would never fly in the corporate world and so my takeaway was this, I thought the buyers were idiots too because they didn’t check.

Check, do a little search on Google. Do a little search on Youtube and then finally, talk to your comedian. Talk to your speaker. Are you funny? Do you work clean? Give me some of your references. Why wouldn’t you do that?

Hire A Motivational Speaker That Can Deliver Clean Comedy

One final note really comes in the form of a story. I was working this corporate date with another comedian. So in this case, they had two comedians. I was headlining and they had this guy open and you could see that this guy was, he had it in his mind, oh, I’ve got to work clean. I’ve got to be clean, but because he was so out of practice of working clean, he had a tough time doing it. So you’d see him, he’d start down his little path on a little bit of material, like, hey, I just broke up with my girlfriend and, and then you’d see him kind of panic because he could see a minute and a half forward that this is going to lead to a joke that I can’t do. So he’d back up and say, yeah, but enough about the girlfriend. Hey, just, boy don’t you hate flying? Then he’s going into some airplane jokes and he starts talking about airplane jokes and then he realizes he couldn’t do it, so I’m on the side.

I am busting a gut because I know exactly what’s going on. I know that this guy is self-editing his stuff on the fly. And I know also, that the reason he’s doing that is he’s not used to working clean. And the final thing is I knew also is the meeting planner was unhappy, the meeting planner was pretty aware that something was going wrong with this comic because it wasn’t funny and the flow as bad and it just was choppy, obviously.

And what the meeting planner didn’t understand was that the comedian was up there panicked, trying to stay clean but unable to do it without any effort. In my case, everything I write is clean so I don’t have to worry about it. Any material that I want to go to, pull it up, no problem. I’m not going to get to a dead end and say, I can’t say the punch line because I’m in trouble. Will never happen.

Alright, if you’re looking for a motivational speaker who is funny, if you’re looking for a comedian speaker who can work clean, I hope you’ll consider booking me.

My name’s Brad Montgomery. You can learn more about all my keynotes and my funny, motivational speeches and my corporate comedy at bradmontgomery.com. Hope to see you there. Have a great day.