If you’re going to book a comedian for your after prom, you have to be careful.
Comedy shows in general are like walking through a minefield, but adding teenagers to the situation makes things ten times more difficult.
Why?
Paranoid, uptight parents, vs. the interests of a teenager.
The after prom by its very nature is an interesting concept. Instead of letting kids run riot on prom night, driving around, causing mischief and getting into trouble (translation: pregnant), parents offer an alternative.
After the prom ends, you remain at the school overnight, staying until 5, 6, or 7 in the morning.
But this isn’t a slumber party, no.
You’re gonna be awake all night, and you’re gonna be exhausted.
So, to incentivize kids to remain at school instead of going out drinking, they offer many things: entertainment (comedian/hypnotist/magician), movies, pizza, candy, and of course, prizes.
But First, an Aside:
Sometimes I’m asked (and sometimes I offer) to pull names out of a hat for the prize giveaway. These prizes can range from exceedingly nice things (new laptop; PlayStation 5), to items that get dropped in the trash can on the way out the door (no example needed; we all know what cheap gifts look like).
One year, after pulling the name for a brand-new MacBook Pro, there was a slight groan from a couple of the teachers.
A puffy boy with shaggy, unkempt hair and dressed in mostly black (but all dark) clothes is who shuffled apathetically to the stage to collect his prize, barely remembering to mutter, “Thanks” as it was handed to him.
After he meandered back to his seat, I wandered over to a gaggle of four teachers gossiping, and they looked at me and said, “That was the one person we didn’t want to win the main prize. He’s simply the worst student in the entire school!”
They weren’t blaming me; they were just upset that the Gods had played such a cruel joke on them.
I waited until I got to my car to laugh; there was no way I was going to tell them that back in the day, I would’ve been the burnout/loser they didn’t want to reward with a new laptop.
But, look at me now!
An unknown comedian performing for half-asleep high school students for hundreds of dollars.
Never give up on your dream, kids!
(And choose a real career, with benefits.)
Side note, before we get back to the blog: if you’d like to contact me, you can do so, HERE.
Anway, I digress…
Paranoid parents, and teenagers.
Let’s start with the parents.
Truth is, their hearts are in the right places.
They don’t want their kids doing something incredibly stupid: driving drunk, getting caught drinking, getting (or getting someone) pregnant…
Teenagers act on impulse, not thought, and that isn’t a healthy way to go through life.
That said, sometimes parents go too far.
They think their little angels are good and pure and Ivory white in all ways.
They don’t remember their own confused teen years, or the experimentation they did with illicit substances and members of the opposite (or, the same, I guess) gender.
Not only do parents go too far, sometimes they plain just forget what it was like to be a teenager.
So, some parents want to control every aspect of their child’s life. These are the helicopter (or bulldozer) parents. They create safe bubbles for their children, which leaves them stunted later in life.
They want very sterile, no controversy, don’t-even-approach-the-line jokes.
Meanwhile, the kids are all watching South Park, and are interested in hearing about real things.
They want a little dirt; they don’t want to be mollycoddled.
Which means the struggle of the comedian is attempting to make both sides happy.
This can be challenging, and leave neither side satisfied.
The problem with basically everything in life is the extremes. You don’t want a comedian that’s going to be swearing non-stop, and telling dirty, sexual, inappropriate jokes. You also don’t want a comedian who’s going to tell the most benign, boring, lame “What’s up with the reclining seat on airplanes?” yawners.
The trick is to find a comedian who has a proven record, and to trust them.
Side note: do I have a proven track record? Check my testimonials page.
If you over-police your comedian, you’re going to end up with a boring show.
I’ve seen it, and unfortunately, lived it.
Next up: the setting.
The setting for your after-prom show is extremely important.
Let me tell you about two after-prom shows I performed at last year; one was an abject failure, the other a great success.
We’ll start with the failure.
To begin, I was going on at 6am.
You read that correctly.
I was the last gasp of dying air before the morning light, which meant every kid was completely wiped out by the time I got there.
The kids had ingested untold amounts of sugar and caffeine, and were crashing hard.
The excitement of prom had worn off, and the reality of exhaustion had set in.
No the ideal start to a show.
Even worse, when I arrived, I was told the performance would take place in the gymnasium; the kids would be sitting on the bleachers.
Oof.
Comedy is not a stadium-sized event, it’s supposed to be intimate.
The instant I walked out, you had two hundred students sitting sporadically across the span of an entire half of a gymnasium that probably held over 1,000 people.
This is no bueno.
For a comedy show, the audience needs to be seated directly in front of the performer, packed in as tightly as possible.
The gym might have worked, if they had told every student to sit in one section of the bleachers.
They didn’t, which means that at any given point, I had someone sitting several hundred feet away from me.
Next up, at a comedy club, you’re told to put your phones away.
Do you know how difficult it is to take a phone from a teenager?
They didn’t even try, and I don’t blame them.
So, it was announced, “Next up, we have a comedian…”
And I walked out to see 75% of the students looking at their phones.
It gets worse.
I opened my mouth to greet them, and spoke into a dead microphone.
Wait, no, I’m sorry.
That was my first thought, “The mic is dead.”
Turns out the entire PA system had gone down.
This left me in an enormous, echoey gymnasium, doing my best to shout-talk my jokes into the void using my theater voice.
Remember a moment ago, when I said some of the kids were hundreds of feet away from me?
Yeah… you think they heard anything I said?
I doubt anyone could hear me three rows back.
Well, I still had a job to do, so I talked to the students I had right in front of me, made eye contact with anyone looking at me and not their phone, and did the best I could to power through everything.
When all was said and done, one girl in the front row told me I was “low-key funny.”
Because I’m old, I had to Google what that meant, and discovered it was actually a damn fine compliment.
But, truth be told, I bombed.
Hard.
I bombed so badly that I was actually nervous before my next after-prom gig.
I almost wanted to cancel.
That’s what happens after you have an exceedingly negative experience, right?
“Never again!”
Thankfully, I squared my shoulders and went through with things, and wow… what a difference.
First off, before the gig, I’d shared some of my experiences with the woman who booked me.
I told her about the gig where I bombed, and what went wrong, and they worked with me wonderfully to make sure everything was different.
My start time?
Midnight.
Not 6am, midnight.
Prom ended between ten and eleven PM, they had a little time to change—generally, the kids take off their suits and dresses and drop into casual sweats or normal everyday clothes—grab a slice of pizza, and find their way to the comedy show.
They weren’t exhausted yet, and that was helpful beyond words.
Next up, the setting.
At this performance, I was set up in the school cafeteria.
They had games, a bouncy house, and plenty of things to do over in the gymnasium, but spreading out and listening to a comedian wasn’t one of them.
No, for the live show, they packed in to every single spot they could in the cafeteria, and I got to perform in a place where no one was beyond one hundred (give or take) feet of me.
Because it was such close quarters, I didn’t even need a microphone/pa system.
I just talked to them, and in doing so, was able to relate to them, and they related to me.
Best of all, I’d talked to the booking committee before hand, and we had a really nice discussion about content.
They trusted me to dance around the invisible line of good taste, which was incredibly liberating.
Now, let me give you a real example of one joke I did at both schools.
The place I bombed, they gave me a talking to after the show, telling me this joke was inappropriate.
The place I succeeded, the parents laughed along with the students when I told the joke.
Here it is: “I hope you appreciate all your parents, and the volunteers, are doing for you tonight. It’s a lot of work, and I heard two of them talking when I got here. One of them said, “I’m so tired. This is too much work. Next year, let’s just let them go out and get drunk and pregnant.”
Conventional wisdom says, “If you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny.”
Whatever.
For funsies, let’s break that joke down, shall we?
Let’s examine why it’s funny, which is different than explaining a joke.
As said much earlier, we’re in a situation where the parents are afraid the kids are going to go out and make bad choices.
The parents want to prevent that from happening.
But, no one ever says that part out loud.
It’s understood, but not said.
So, situationally, everyone in the room knows why they’re there, but there’s a big old elephant sitting in there with them.
I brought that elephant to light; called the parents out on why they created the after-prom, and acknowledged to the kids that we all understood they were curious about certain activities.
It was a nice moment, and the relaxed parents at the successful show laughed, while the Karens at the failure show said I shouldn’t have brought up such truths.
The last thing I can think of regarding a successful after-prom show is: the length of performance.
Things between the failure show and successful show got off on wildly different starts.
When inquiring about booking me, the show that ended up being a failure near-demanded a 60-minute performance.
I said, “No,” repeatedly, and even said I wouldn’t take the gig if they didn’t dial it back.
When I book and after-prom, I tell the school, “I will only do 30 minutes, maximum. I will price accordingly, meaning you pay less than you might otherwise, but I won’t contract for anything longer than 30 minutes.”
Teenagers are easily distracted; I already discussed their (well-known) addiction to their phone.
They demand constant change, and the best you can hope to hold their attention for is 30 minutes.
Especially given their surroundings.
Bullet points…
In order to have a successful after-prom comedy show, here are the main takeaways of this article:
- Trust your comedian. Have a conversation with them about show rating, but don’t paint them into a corner where they’re going to be telling knock-knock jokes to bored teenagers.
- Find an intimate location for the show. The gymnasium? Too big. Do you have a school theater? Use it.
- Don’t put the comedian last. At 5am, you want something interactive for the kids; keep them involved, and motivated. When they’re tired, “Be quiet and listen” isn’t on their radar. Have your comedian go before 1am at the latest.
- Don’t go past 30 minutes. Keeping a normal adult focused is difficult enough; tired teenagers with smartphones aren’t going to watch anything for an hour.
That’s it, so good luck!
Note: Google really likes long blogs these days, and I haven’t hit my required words.
I’m going to ask ChatGPT to write something about the benefits of having a comedian at your after prom, and paste it below.
Thanks for reading, and remember, you can contact me here.
Chat GPT says…
Why Hiring a Comedian for an After-Prom Show is a Great Idea
After-prom events are designed to provide a fun, safe, and memorable way for students to continue celebrating after the big dance. While there are many entertainment options available, hiring a comedian is one of the best choices for several compelling reasons.
1. Laughter Creates Lasting Memories
Prom is already an unforgettable experience, but adding a comedian to the after-party ensures that students end their night with joy and laughter. A professional comedian can engage the audience with humor tailored to the occasion, making the event even more special and unique.
2. Safe and Inclusive Entertainment
One of the biggest concerns for after-prom organizers is ensuring that entertainment is appropriate for a diverse audience. A skilled comedian can deliver clean, high-energy humor that resonates with teenagers without crossing any lines. This makes it an ideal choice for school-sponsored events where inclusivity and appropriateness are key.
3. Encourages Social Interaction
Comedy has a way of breaking the ice and bringing people together. A stand-up performance encourages students to relax, interact, and share in a communal experience of laughter. This is especially beneficial for those who may not have attended prom with a date or a large group, as it provides an opportunity to connect with peers in a fun and lighthearted setting.
4. Cost-Effective and Hassle-Free
Compared to other entertainment options like hiring a DJ, booking a live band, or setting up elaborate activities, a comedian is often more cost-effective. A comedy show requires minimal setup—just a microphone and a stage—making it an easy and stress-free option for organizers. Many comedians also customize their sets based on the audience, ensuring the material feels fresh and relevant to the group.
5. Keeps the Energy Up Without Overstimulation
After hours of dancing and socializing at prom, students may want entertainment that is engaging but not physically exhausting. A comedy show provides the perfect balance—keeping the energy high without requiring students to be constantly on their feet. It’s an excellent way to wind down while still enjoying an engaging experience.
Conclusion
Hiring a comedian for an after-prom show is a fantastic way to ensure students continue celebrating in a safe, fun, and memorable way. Laughter not only enhances the overall experience but also strengthens social bonds and provides a much-needed stress reliever after the excitement of prom. By choosing a comedian, organizers can guarantee a night full of smiles, shared joy, and unforgettable moments.
Picture credit: Apollo & Ivy Photography