Is Clean Comedy Harder to Write?

Yes! Wait no... but maybe? Definitely not. I'm not sure.

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“Clean comedy is more difficult to write” - Mother Teresa

Just kidding, she didn’t say that. She said this:

“I ****ing **** stupid clean comedy. Dirty comedy’s better” - Mother ****ing Teresa

She didn’t say that either, but many people often find themselves in either of these two schools of thought. The first group of people (represented by the normal Mother Teresa) love clean comedy. They think the use of cuss words in a joke is unnecessary, and only serves to distract from the comedy. You might hear someone in this group say, “If a joke needs a cuss word to be funny, it’s not actually funny”.

The other group, which alternate universe Mother ****ing Teresa so eloquently stated, loves the realness and authenticity that come with cussing in a joke. They might find some clean comedy boring or uninteresting because it doesn't seem real. They like their comedians to sound like a friend they can talk to about anything, not like a pastor making corny observations about the world.

While you may not have a preference between clean or “dirty” comedy, I think we all have this assumption that clean comedy is harder to write. That, because you can’t rely on any cheap cuss words to get a laugh, you’re forced to have solid premises for your jokes. While there’s some truth to that, I think generally “dirty” comedy is just as hard to write as clean comedy. And I’ll prove it.

The comedian Bob Smiley once told me, “you write how you live”. Though, he might have been quoting someone, I’m not sure. Comedians write based on their own experiences and lives. Stand up comedy, improv, movie scripts, any piece of comedy writing is a chance for a comedian to give you their perspective on life. Thus, if you don’t normally use cuss words or talk about crass things, it’ll be easier to write “clean” comedy because that’s authentic to who you are. Similarly, if you cussing is a normal part of your vocabulary, you’ll naturally write “dirty” comedy. Obviously, “clean” and “dirty” have very loose interpretations, and I’m putting quotes around them for a reason, but the trick to writing a certain way is to be living a specific way.

If you’re trying to write clean comedy, and you normally cuss as a person, of course it’s harder. You’re censoring part of your comedic voice, so now you have to work harder to appear authentic to an audience. I’m a christian, and I don’t normally cuss in my life, so writing “clean” comedy comes super natural to me. Writing raunchy comedy? Now that’s something I’m abysmal at. If you don’t cuss in normal life, trying to cuss on stage goes horribly.

So my advice to typically raunchy comedians trying to write clean: find the innocent parts of yourself and start from there. Search your brain for fun, new perspectives on life that would appear clean to an audience, and write about those.

My advice to a clean comedian trying to write raunchy material: why? (I’m biased lol)

Thus, clean comedy isn’t exactly “harder” to write, it just depends on your unique perspective as a comedian! But clean comedy for the win baby!

- Mother Teresa (the whole article)

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Q&A

“How does one submit questions for the Q&A” - Me (because no one submitted questions)

Great question whoever asked that! You can send me a question by email, commenting on Substack, or answering the Q&A I send out every Friday.

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Joke of the Week

This is the section where I spotlight an OK joke I wrote recently. Alright, here goes:

“I feel bad for people with weird hands… mainly because now every picture they take of themselves, people will think is AI. Bethany you didn’t go to the Bahamas, you only have 4 fingers in that picture.”

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