Jeff Allen is a self-styled corporate Christian comedian. After kicking off his career in 1978 playing Chicago clubs, Allen ended up on the bitter brink of addiction and divorce when he was called to the niche market of clean comedy.
Since then, he’s performed for receptive congregations in churches around the country, providing squeaky clean jokes free of politics, profanity, religion, negativity or acknowledgment of changing values.
Allen’s latest tour comes to the Laugh Out Loud Comedy Club after Dry Bar Comedy served up several clips of his show online to viral acclaim. The bits show Allen lamenting the absurd rise in safety standards for playground equipment and car seats.
Allen’s safe space for comedy seems confined to the upper middle class American home, with other viral bits devoted to his weathering of the trials of domesticity, particularly marriage. The institution may be ripe as ever for ridicule, but Allen’s routine approach as seen in his previous special Happy Wife, Happy Life is to lampoon his partner’s stereotypically feminine passive-aggression — the “Wife Code.”
Naturally, your mileage may vary, depending on what America you presently live in.
$25-$35, 8 p.m. Thursday, December 5, Laugh Out Loud Comedy Club, 618 N.W. Loop 410, (210) 541-8805, improvtx.com/sanantonio.
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This article appears in Shop Local 2019.