Today’s stand-up comedy is filled with F-bombs and N-words. The monologues in late-night shows have turned into profanity-laced political rants that Standards & Practices would need to censor. If he were alive today, Steve Allen—the very first late-night TV host—would be appalled at what comedy has become.
However, it appears that Americans are eager to hear clean comedy once again. That’s where comic Keith Stubbs and his Dry Bar Comedy platform come in.
Stubbs is a seasoned stand-up comedian and businessman. He puts on two shows each on Friday and Saturday nights at a comedy club in Provo, Utah, featuring different talent at every performance. He books comics who keep it clean, and the audiences know to expect that. The performances, also available for viewing on streaming services and the Dry Bar Comedy app, now count an audience in the millions. The Dry Bar Comedy YouTube channel has 1.97 million subscribers, while the app has had 167,000 downloads so far by subscribers who pay a monthly or annual fee to access the content.
“There is a large audience of comedy fans that were underserved, and we saw this as a great opportunity,” Stubbs told American Essence.
Comedies Used To Be Clean
Comedies during the era of silent movies were family-friendly. There was no swearing because there was no sound. The jokes were visual and acted out by bigger-than-life talents such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton.
With no television—and radio and major league sports in their infancies—the only other viable form of entertainment at the time was vaudeville, which was made up of short acts in a live theater. It was here that future comedy stars such as Bob Hope, The Marx Brothers, and Milton Berle honed their acts.
When television came around, Berle, Sid Ceasar, and shows such as “The Colgate Comedy Hour” kept Americans laughing with stand-up and sketch comedy. While comedy duo Dean Marin & Jerry Lewis’s acts were high-energy and frenetic, they were clean. “The Ed Sullivan Show” had Joan Rivers on as a stand-up comic regularly, whose shtick was about being single.
