PROVO —
A comedian walks into a bar …
.... that doesn’t serve alcohol …
… and does clean stand-up.
Sound like a really bad joke? Like the start of the world’s worst bit? Like a surefire way to get booed off the stage?
The joke, it turns out, is on anyone who bet against it.
* * *
The corner of 300 West and Center Street in Provo may be the unlikeliest place for a stand-up comedy revolution to get started. But that’s precisely where brothers Neal and Jeff Harmon decided to launch their revolt back in 2016.
A bar and dance club across the street from the Provo police station called The Madison had gone out of business. With its demise the Harmons saw an opportunity.
They would turn the bar into a nonbar, featuring clean stand-up comedy.
At the time, the Harmon brothers were in a tight spot with the company they started in 2014 called VidAngel, a video streaming service that allowed users to remove content they found objectionable from Hollywood movies and TV shows.
By 2016, VidAngel had attracted enough customers and irritated enough Hollywood studios that a court issued a preliminary injunction ordering it to stop its streaming service. (A subsequent verdict this summer ordered VidAngel to pay $62 million in damages to several studios, although that is on appeal as the company focuses on creating its own content. Stay tuned).
Stymied at one attempt to put the good back in entertainment, Neal and Jeff looked to the world of comedy to continue their quest in a different direction.
They named their new comedy club the Dry Bar; and invited any and all comedians to come to Provo and perform.
They let it be known they wanted clean acts, but also made it clear there would be no censorship on what a comic could or could not say; no threat of a hook pulling anyone off stage if their act got too inappropriate.
Instead, these were the rules: You’d get paid according to how well you were received by the audience.
Explained Jeff Harmon: “We’d tell them, ‘The live audience is going to be expecting clean comedy, so they won’t laugh if you don’t stay clean, and the audience online has the ability to skip anytime they want, and the more you get skipped the less you get paid.’ Then we’d give them a list of all the data we have on skips and say, ‘This is what gets skipped,’ so they’re not surprised if it happens.”
Three years later, hundreds of mainstream comedians have made their way to the Dry Bar in Provo — their faces line the walls of the club —– delivering clean content (and collecting full paychecks) to not only live audiences but to a legion of online viewers. (Dry Bar’s Facebook page followers alone stands at 4.6 million.)
“This stage has now been seen over 2 billion times,” Neal Harmon said as he stood next to the platform that hosts the comics.
“Someone said the other day that Dry Bar is probably the largest media project, as far as total eyeballs is concerned, to come out of Utah in history.”
The Harmons are now making plans for a national Dry Bar Comedy Tour (see drybarcomedy.com). Not only that, a handful of comedians have told them that their Dry Bar experience has given them the impetus to only do clean comedy wherever they perform.
“The stand-up comedy world is never going to be the same after Dry Bar,” said Neal.
“And now the question is,” added Jeff, “can we take the skipping concept — if your movie or your film gets skipped you get paid less — to movies, films, Sirius content, big budget stuff? Because if we can do that you no longer need MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) ratings, you don’t need all the policing systems, because people will police what’s in their own homes, according to their own values.”
The brothers shrug. Who’s to say it can’t happen? When they first brought up Dry Bar, they were met with mountains of skepticism. “The comedy world was like, what?” said Jeff. “We were really railed on. It was like pulling teeth to get people to come perform here in the beginning. They laughed at us.”
Three years later, the laughs are all in-house.
