Crown Comedy's John Branyan: Wired for Comedy

Winner of a 2009 Bronze Crown Award for Best Comedy Video (Fly-Over Comedy), John Branyan's comedy is considered by some to be hazardous to your health. Growing up he always thought he was funny, and three minutes at an open mike night in a comedy club confirmed it. After 12 years of honing his craft and working full-time as a graphic designer for a printing company, John decided to work full-time as a comedian when his routine was turned into a theatrical play.

We talked for a few moments about comedy, the intelligence of Christian audiences, and his unusual outreach of bringing secular comedians to church audiences.

Do you have a standard set that you do when you're performing stand-up routines? Or is it pretty improvisational?

John:    I have a block of material that I've developed over the years that I will use.  But in a live performance, there's always the possibility of something spontaneous happening. I've got things that are built into the act that sort of fish for spontaneous reactions. But if it doesn't happen, I can fall back on the material. The goal is to make it look like I'm making it up on the spot.

The phrase "fishing for" a response is interesting.

John:    Every audience its own personality. Some people are really geared up and they have a lot of energy that they put out. Other people are more subdued. You can tell pretty much in about 30 seconds what the audience is like. It's difficult to explain how, but you can gauge an audience in about 30 seconds to one minute. You can tell where they're at and where they're coming from.

For me personally, it's a matter of adjusting the energy level. Some people get frightened if you hit the stage too big. Others, particularly at youth events, lose interest and tune out if you don't come out with guns blazing.

I have a couple of things I start with usually to bring the audience in so they get the sense I'm not just pushing "play" on a recorder and doing material that I do everywhere. If possible, I try to take in the surroundings and make comments on the venue and on the town. I make comments on the group, if it's a group that brought me in. Then we see where it goes.

I've got basically three or four branches I can go down – different routes I can take. If it's a couples' group, I've got material about being married and raising a family (WedLocked, for example). If it's predominantly younger kids, I've got stuff about being school, growing up and playing sports. If it's somewhere in between, I've got kind of a mixed bag of random material that I talk about.

How long does it to take new material? Are you constantly doing that and building it into your routine, or do you work on material for a few weeks or months?

John:    It's constant for me. I've worked with comics who decide to do a new project and write a body of material for that. I don't do it that way. I'm always working on things and I'm always intentionally writing things in a notebook and developing material. When I go out and do shows, I'll introduce this new material in the middle of a regular show to see how it goes and what happens.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Then you take it back, rework it a little bit, knock the edges off of it, and eventually after you do it a few times, it gets to where it's fairly solid. Then when I go to record a new project, I've got this material that I already know works that I put on DVD. That's how I do it.

You have an advantage over a writer, songwriter, or filmmaker. For them, there's a greater period of time between the creation and putting it in front of an audience. And sometimes there's no time for feedback before the project is finished. That's a great advantage for you. In addition to your stand-up, you've also posted some music videos on YouTube. Do you do those very often?

John:    Music is not the thing that I do really well. My music studio is very ad hoc and thrown together and I don't have any musical training. The music videos are really the result of just hacking around. I don’t really mean them to be taken seriously, but occasionally I'll get an idea for something and just do it.

Do you perform in a mix of venues of churches and groups? Are there any groups that you'd turn down?

John:    There aren't really any groups that I'd turn down, per se, unless they came to me and wanted me to be a spokesman for or promote a particular thing that I'm not an advocate of. I don't think a pro-abortion group would have me speak, but if they wanted me to come speak, I would have to make it clear to them that I wasn't going to pursue or push their particular agenda.

I do get asked to go to church groups a lot because church people like comedy. They like to laugh, and they can't do it at secular comedy clubs because it's just too dirty many times. I also go into regular secular comedy clubs and do this. It's basically the same material that I do in church, and they respond just as favorably.

I read an article by a secular comedian the other day that said he did comedy with Saddleback's drama department. He thought it was a hard audience and that he had to keep editing himself. Do you work with any secular comics?

John:    I do. The secular comics I work with in the clubs respect the fact that I can make people laugh. You can't argue with that. The fact that I'm a Christian doesn't detract or take away from the fact that my act is funny. I still make people laugh, whether they're Christian or not. That was a goal of mine when I started doing this.

I didn't want to be a "church comic." Not that there's anything wrong with being a church comic, but I wanted to be able to work in secular venues as well. I wanted to be able to go into secular comedy clubs and make those people laugh without swearing. It's much harder to do that. It's a cop-out for people to fall back on swear words and vulgarity to make people laugh. They won't admit that and will get upset with me for saying that, but it absolutely is a cop-out.

There are certain words that you can drop that will always get a reaction because of the word itself, but it's not creative or imaginative to use that sort of language to make people laugh. It's much harder to be genuinely funny.

I am funny, and the secular comics have a respect for that. They know it's not easy to do.

I had several secular comics over the past few years said, "I want to go with you and do shows in church," and they will say, "I can work clean."

But they don't really know what they're talking about. They think that when you're clean, you just take the swear words out of your act and you're good to go. But it goes deeper than just the language you use. It's a philosophy. It's the type of material that you use. It's your attitude about the material and people that you talk about.

I don't call out specific people. I don't have any material where I make fun of celebrities or call out people by name. I don't think it's Christian. So it goes deeper than just the words that you use.

I've had a number of people who wanted to go and do church shows because they realize that church audiences are very appreciative, and they like to laugh. But they have standards and it's not easy. A lot of people think that going and doing shows at churches is easy because they think Christians are childish and they don't think of them as sophisticated audience members. But that's not true either.

Christian people are probably the most discerning people in the world. They're used to listening to preachers and speakers and they read things, so Christian people tend to be very smart, and it's hard to make smart people laugh if you are sophomoric.

That's a very upside-down perspective. Have you found anyone who successfully made that crossover that's not a believer?

John:    There's one guy that I've encountered (that doesn't mean he's the only guy, but the only one I've worked with), named Jeff Caldwell, who is not a believer. But his material is really smart and funny and he's clean. He and I have done a couple of tours together. I set him up and we went into some churches and did some shows together. It was great.

He's the guy who said to me, "Man, I didn't even know that this market was out here," because he'd been experiencing some frustration in the comedy clubs because they are dirty. They take a guy like Jeff, who's so smart and so clean, and they just dismiss him. They're not interested in listening to him.

I found him in the green room of a comedy club one night and told him, "This isn't your audience here. You're beating your head against the wall. These people in the comedy clubs are never going to appreciate you and they're never going to get you." So we went to church and he was successful there.

That's a pretty unusual outreach. Have you always know you're funny? When did you decide to make a career out of comedy?

John:    The whole time I was growing up, I made people laugh. I didn't do it on purpose necessarily, it was just the way I thought and talked and behaved. I made people laugh. From the time I was a little kid, folks were saying to me that I ought to be a comedian when I grow up; I ought to do this. You don't pay much attention to what people say until you hear it a lot from a lot of different sources.

I always liked stand-up. I always liked listening to people who were funny talk, but it bothered me that it was so dirty and that there was R-rated comedy. I just couldn't understand why that had to be.

I was watching comedy on TV one night and turned to my wife and said, "I'm as funny as this guy." She said, "Yeah, you're actually funnier than he is."

I said, "I'm going to try this and see what happens." So I went down to a comedy club and did an open mike, fully expecting them to say, "Don’t come back," because I didn't have any idea how it worked. I didn't know anything.

I did three minutes of comedy, and after my set, they said, "That was your first time on stage?" I said, "Yeah, that's my first time out of the gate," and they said, "You're pretty good. You should come back."

That was not what I expected to hear. So I came back and forged some friendships with some secular comics. We worked on material together. I started going around to churches and doing my little set and the phone calls started coming in. I was working for about three years before I ever got paid for it.

I worked for about 12 years as a graphic designer in a print shop while I was doing comedy. I didn't really make the leap to full-time until I was really well established. I had a lot of material and I had already recorded some DVDs before I went "full-time." It was something that I sort of eased into. The phone calls and shows kept coming until it reached the point that I had to make a decision between my job and pursuing the stand-up thing.

What was the tipping point that made you decide to pursue it full-time?

John:    That came really when I had a producer from Los Angeles call me up and say he'd seen my stuff and wanted to build a theater show around my material.  We did that, and it took a couple of years to craft the show. But it was successful enough and was requiring that I be gone three days a week. It wasn't possible for me to maintain a full-time job and be gone three days a week at the same time. So I had to decide which one I was going to do.

I think this is what God wired me to do. It's a gift. It's not something that I brag about because it's not something that I created. It's something that was given to me by my Creator. I think that I have to use it, to put it out there, because that's why He gave it to me.

What kind of advice do you have for someone who wants to go into comedy?

John:    The primary thing I tell people is to work clean and write clean. You can always be dirty. I get a lot of people who are not Christians who ask me for advice. I tell them that first and foremost you have to be clean, because if you're clean, you can work anywhere. If you work dirty, you immediately limit your options. So first of all, work clean.

Secondly, tape everything. Tape every show that you do. If you can't videotape it at least audiotape it. Play it over and over because you are your own best critic. All of the questions about what to do and what to do for punch lines and is something funny enough get answered when you listen to the tape. It's amazing how much time you can save for yourself by recording everything and listening to it. You hear everything. You hear all the pauses, mispronunciations, and mistakes. You hear every "like," "um," or "you know."

Finally, be honest about the audience's reaction. Not only can you learn by hearing yourself, but also listening to the audience's reaction on the tape. There are a lot of comedians who are what I call "comedy deaf," because they don't seem to pick up on the fact that nobody's laughing while they're up there talking. But that's the goal. If the audience isn't laughing then you're not doing comedy. You're doing a lecture. You can't really call yourself a comedian unless people are laughing. That's another advantage to taping, is that you can get honest feedback from an audience.

If it's a church comedian that's starting out, I tell them to go to different types of venues. Don't just go to your church and do material because those people love you and won't be honest. They'll tell you that you're better than you probably are. But if you go to a comedy club or another church or a Rotary meeting, or some place where they really don't know you, you're going to get more honest feedback from that audience.

Are there comedians you look up to that are succeeding and you feel you can learn from?

John:    There are a few. Not many because a lot of comics are not doing what I want to do. There's a guy named Brian Regan who is not specifically a Christian, but he's excellent and he's really clean. He's been a role model of mine. Brad Stine is actually the first Christian comedian that I saw that I thought was funny, and that was early on in my career. I didn't even know there was such a thing as Christian comedy.

Jeff Caldwell is someone I admire a lot and I pay attention when he talks. There were other guys early on who encouraged me and were helpful. I didn't necessarily think they were funny, but I learned from them. You can learn from anyone. You can learn from bad comics too. If you watch a guy totally stink up the place, you can learn from that too. You can ask, "why is this not working, and how do I avoid doing whatever he's doing?"

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