Photo: Johnny Beehner - johnnybeehner.com
Johnny Beehner
Johnny Beehner
As with many aspects of life, in comedy, it’s less difficult to travel in some directions than others. Johnny Beehner knows.
“It’s always easier to go dirty if you’re clean, but it’s not so easy going the other way,” says the Omaha native of his stand-up, billed on his website as clean comedy. It’s family-friendly for the right clientele, anyway.
“I have it on my website,” he explains, “because when I do corporate shows, I am a very clean, by all definitions, comic.”But when he’s not providing entertainment for a company’s function?
“Honestly, I am not a huge fan of the label ‘clean comedy’ just because it can sometimes put the comic in a box," Beehnerconfesses. “I am a pretty clean comedian for the most part, but I definitely don’t like to limit myself with any restrictions. When I am at a club for a weekend, some of my subject matter skews outside what is considered squeaky clean just because sometimes I think of funny things that don’t fit that description and I like to try it all.”
Beehner will likely keep his material somewhere between a PG and R rating when he joins Brandon Wein and Milwaukee's own Chastity Washington for Laughs for UPAF, a fundraiser for the United Performing Arts Fund at The Improv in Brookfield at 7:30 p.m. Thursday May 25. Since it’s not quite a corporate event, but takes place in a comedy club, he negotiates a hybrid approach for his stage time.
“When doing benefits or fundraisers, I will generally get a bit of info on what it’s all about and have that bouncing around my mind day-of,” Beehner shares. “And when I occasionally go to the audience just to riff and switch gears, it generally goes into the cause and why we’re all there. But for UPAF, I think I’m gonna sit down and crank out 30 brand new minutes of A material just for the one show. Aaaand that’s the first joke.”
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Performing Arts
He may be kidding about debuting heretofore untried bits for UPAF's affair. But Behner has serious bona fides when it comes to his own history of performing arts experience. “I performed speech and did the speech tournament circuit in grade school,”he recalls, adding, “I got into plays and musicals in high school. And then I led the improv troupe at Marquette University, the Studio 013 Refugees, in my time at college. I continued onto train at Second City in Chicago and then went through the program at Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles. The stage background definitely played a role in the ease of getting onstage for stand-up.”
Beehner credits his older brother, Scott, a working actor in Los Angeles, with his sense of humor an d his start in comedy. As the younger sibling relates it, “He did stand-up a little when I was in college. I was so impressed I just had to try it, too. That was how I got the bug.” Now that Beehner is a husband and father, his own family figures into his act. It’s a comedy tradition on which he puts his own spin.
“People have been joking about relationships since standup comedy was a thing,” Beehner observes. “As the world changes, the material changes. I kind of look at it as my material is seeing some of those old tropes, but through unique eyes. Just trust me, it’s funny.”
And it is, whether it's in his stand-up or the podcast he hosts with fellow comic Andrew Sleighter, The Calvary. And along with providing a distraction that helps audiences to not take life too seriously, Beehner sees another societal function for his and other comedian’s artistry. “I think they keep society in check. It sounds cliché, but comedy does shine a mirror on what’s going on in the world.”
Watch Beehner give what is at least an initially contrarian take on the kind of work many in his current position take on until being funny can make them a living ...
