In the last days of throat cancer, Coach Jones, my 11th-grade civics teacher, whispered a joke during class: “The thing about different languages is why does there have to be a word for everything?”

It was met with groans, like most of his jokes. Yet nearly two decades later, I still remember it. Because in all its awkward simplicity, it serves as a template for the failures of clean comedy: flat, low-risk, corny, and, well, lame. But it also reveals some of clean comedy’s most endearing features: upbeat, eager, and wholesome.

'You wouldn’t ask the Beatles why they write clean music. They just write music, and people take away from it what they want.'

On the spectrum

Clean comedians like Nate Bargatze, Jerry Seinfeld, Brian Regan, and Jim Gaffigan aren’t just niche acts — they’re among the most prominent performers in comedy, period, transcending the clean-versus-blue debate.

Clean comedy exists on a spectrum, from "Club Clean," which avoids cursing and explicit references, to "TV Clean," with mild innuendo for network audiences. "Church Clean" adheres to strict standards, avoiding obscenity, while "Squeaky Clean" offers G-rated content for children.

Clean comedy flourishes in the faith-based world. Comedians like Brad Stine, dubbed the “Christian George Carlin,” and John Crist, whose playful takes on church life resonate widely, demonstrate how faith and humor intersect. Jeff Allen is a born-again Christian. Jenna Kim Jones, who cut her teeth writing for "The Daily Show," is Mormon. Jim Gaffigan is a devout Catholic.

Even Shane Gillis, the reigning champ of stand-up (and by no means a clean comedian), draws on his Catholic upbringing, while Mike Birbiglia performs clean, cerebral comedy possibly rooted in his own Catholic upbringing. Brian Regan is also a Christian.

Some comedians, like Henry Cho, prefer to avoid labels. “I’m a comedian who’s a Christian,” Cho says, “not a Christian comedian.”

Polite society

Western civilization decided that the color of filth is blue.

“Blue comedy” denotes ribaldry — crude and bawdy humor, unrestrainedly explicit and profane and often downright shocking. It thrives on taboo, from sexual innuendos to crude punch lines, intended to desecrate sacred or deep-held conventions.

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Clean comedy takes a radically different approach, yet the outcome of both routines is often the same. Laughter, obviously. But deeper down, both remind us that comedy is a game of defiance and contradiction.

Penn Jillette says that “the difference between clean and dirty is like the difference between electric and acoustic guitars. Both make music. Both are valid."

Brian Regan has never been fond of his "clean" label. He doesn’t set out to avoid edginess for religious or overly wholesome reasons — he just writes about what genuinely interests him. For Regan, that usually means finding humor in the everyday.

“Clean,” as Regan sees it, is more about tone than intention. He also uses a music metaphor: “You wouldn’t ask the Beatles why they write clean music. They just write music, and people take away from it what they want.”

Science is not funny

To dig into this question, I reached out to Stu Burguiere, BlazeTV host of "Stu Does America.” During my six years writing for Glenn Beck, Stu was my boss, and we often talked about comedy.

“Curses are inherently funny words,” Stu explained. “They work as jokes without the hassle of actually writing jokes. But in the wrong hands, they’re cheap and blunt — easy to use and wildly overplayed. In the hands of a master, though, they can be devastatingly effective.”

The real magic, he added, lies in working clean. “If you can master the art of making the right crowd laugh without leaning on profanity, there’s no limit to your powers — or your ability to print money.”

Jim Gaffigan once called profanity emotional manipulation, a shortcut to provoke rather than earn a reaction. Clean humor depends on timing, structure, and universal relatability.

It also ages better. What shocks today might feel stale tomorrow, but humor rooted in shared experiences endures. Even the definition of “clean” evolves. Bob Newhart, a lifelong clean comic, recalled being labeled a “sick comic” in the 1960s by Time magazine for poking fun at “sacred topics.”

Stu’s right, though. Profanity is just funny. This has a biological explanation.

Why clean?

I recently introduced my toddlers to stand-up comedy, a milestone that I had expected to come later. They aren’t exactly ready for Dave Chappelle or Ricky Gervais, so I put on Nate Bargatze’s “Your Friend, Nate Bargatze.”

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Bargatze is so mesmerizingly funny that you don’t even notice his material is clean. He places his family at the center of his craft. He never curses. His daughter has introduced each of his Netflix exclusives.

This devotion to family is one of the most important reasons for the success of clean comedy. And at its heart is a consideration for children and an eagerness to include them in comedy, one of life’s most beautiful experiences.

Justin Robert Young zeroed in on this. He’s the perfect balance of professional comedian and political commentator, podcaster, journalist — and possibly the wittiest person I’ve ever met.

“I used to think that my worth in the world of politics was to be the funny, smart guy who used adult analogies,” he told me. “One year I did a survey of my listeners, and I found out that they really wanted me to be the smart, funny guy who stayed clean so they could play the podcast for their kids. The idea of the content being accessible to smart kids with good parents was enough to make me swear off swearing. “

Hollywood clean

For much of the 20th century, American media operated under strict self-regulation, largely to avoid government censorship. The Production Code, introduced in the 1930s, and later the MPAA rating system set moral boundaries for Hollywood.

As film historian Andrew Patrick Nelson explained in an email, “The industry created its own oversight out of fear that national censorship laws would be enacted in response to public outcry, often driven by religious concerns over immoral content.”

This framework shaped the humor of mid-century stars like Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, and programs like “I Love Lucy” and “The Andy Griffith Show,” which relied on situational humor and wit rather than vulgarity.

While clean comedy dominated mid-century media, the countercultural movements of the 1960s pushed back, leading to the erosion of the Production Code. Artistic freedom flourished, and raunchier comedy gained traction.

In an era when vulgarity is allowed, clean comedy has not just stuck around, it has flourished. Why do audiences still find it refreshing? Which human need does it heal?

Is clean comedy political?

Brian Regan, described as “the funniest stand-up alive” by Vanity Fair, points out that “blue comedy is so commonplace, it’s no longer counterculture.”

At the same time, the clean comedy movement is entirely countercultural. Much of its success has been the result of high-paying corporate gigs, where an edgy, Louis C.K.-style performance would trigger HR alarms.

Clean comedy often feels more conservative. Not necessarily because the comedians are — many aren’t — but because its themes align with common gripes and traditional values. Family, marriage, and everyday frustrations are genre fodder.

For decades, however, the cultural elites dismissed clean comedy, favoring the sharp, antiestablishment tone of satire they deemed inherently liberal.

This perspective, articulated in the book “A Conservative Walks into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor," argued that satire thrives on rebellion and freethinking — qualities, it claimed, that conservatism lacked. Conservatives, according to this view, were humorless defenders of tradition, incapable of the self-awareness or irreverence needed for great comedy.

Even in 2012, when "A Conservative Walks into a Bar" was published, this critique felt outdated. By then, the so-called revolutionary gatekeepers of comedy had become the establishment they once critiqued.

I read the book in graduate school as research for my master’s thesis on the political possibilities of comedic journalism, as practiced by John Oliver, an arrogant maniac cushioned by HBO.

LMAO

Can dark humor be clean comedy? Probably not. Dark humor requires a deliberate confrontation with subjects that are taboo or disturbing.

At its worst, clean comedy can feel safe to the point of blandness. By avoiding controversy, it risks losing the edge that makes comedy medicinal.

Relatability, a hallmark of clean humor, can become a crutch. Too many jokes about family dinners or traffic jams become filler, lacking the boldness needed to stand out.

Additionally, clean comedy sometimes struggles to address life’s darker complexities. Comedy thrives on truth, and truth is often messy. Sanitizing humor can dilute its impact, leaving audiences with smiles but no deeper catharsis.

But ultimately, its greatest strength is its reach: Everyone is invited. This cohesion produces group cohesion, one of the finest miracles of humor.

In his memoir, “Are We There Yet?” clean comedian Jeff Allen traces his stand-up roots to his parents’ rare moments of laughter while listening to comedy albums. These moments inspired Allen’s commitment to clean, loving humor, eager for redemption and connection.

As Henri Bergson observed, “Laughter needs an echo.”

The art of restraint

“I swear, frequently, when doing comedy, but I don’t have to,” Andrew Heaton told me. “When I perform at a country club or on television, I just quit swearing.”

Heaton knows comedy like a beaver knows dam-building; the fundamentals are coded into him.

When I asked him about clean comedy, he heralded the art of restraint: “If your comedy requires swear words or filth, from a practical standpoint you’re cutting yourself off from venues and opportunities.”

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Clean comedy thrives on suggestion and nuance. Innuendo replaces the aggression of bawdy humor. The performance is subtle, like Bargatze’s self-deprecation or Gaffigan’s facial expressions.

Norm Macdonald demonstrated this at the Comedy Central roast of Bob Saget. Norm had no problem with vulgarity — he told some of the most offensive and obscene (and hilarious) jokes of our time.

But not at Bob Saget’s roast. Saget’s decades as the on-screen goofball dad on “Full House” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos” typified the extremes of clean comedy. Yet Saget’s stand-up was dark and profane, entirely unclean. And roasts are the domain of bawdiness and comedic depravity.

So Norm delivered intentionally outdated, absurdly clean jokes from an outdated joke book his dad gave him when he started comedy: “Bob has a face like a flower — yeah, cauliflower.”

In a room full of shock humor, Norm’s restraint brought down the house.

This is true rebellion, true comedic genius: Never let the audience predict the punch line or, in Norm’s case, the entire routine.

“Comedy is surprises,” Norm often said, “so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny.”

Profanations

Jerry Seinfeld is the reigning king of clean comedy. In contrast, Larry David, Seinfeld's collaborator and writer, has embraced unrestrained vulgarity in "Curb Your Enthusiasm," proving that his comedic brilliance shines regardless of the approach.

Together, they have created some of the most iconic comedy in American history.

Clean comedy plays with boundaries. The barriers between clean and profane are thinner than we realize.

Comedy exists in the tension between opposites: the sacred and the profane. Clean comedy respects boundaries while secretly reimagining them, transforming solemnity into something approachable through laughter.

This is the fact that can’t be trusted: Comedians will lie if it is funnier than the truth. On an episode of “Riding in Cars with Comedians,” Jerry Seinfeld discussed this: “Funny is funny. Funny has a certain life to it, a certain magic to it. If you only needed truth, people would just read the paper and howl.”

Push an idea far enough into the profane, and it circles back into the sacred. But there’s a halfway point, between the sacred and the obscene. At its finest, clean comedy achieves this balance — dancing between opposing forces, maintaining a structure while celebrating spontaneity. Like a ritual, it holds space for both reverence and irreverence, allowing us to see life’s absurdities in a new light.

The essence of humor is play. It frees us from the weight of existence, allowing us to laugh at ourselves and confront the absurdities of life.

This playful spirit is profoundly democratic. It takes what feels distant or oppressive and makes it relatable, reminding us of our shared humanity.

But like any beautiful and complex human quality, clean humor comes down to one thing: simplicity.

I asked my friend author Nathan Dahlstrom his opinion on all this. In his usual thoughtful manner, he took a day to ponder, then texted me: “Comedy lives in irony, which takes a first-rate intelligence. An old dumb person can be vulgar.”

A few moments later the correction came: “Any old dumb person …”