Comedian Chris Monty plans to leave audience ‘rolling in the aisles’ during Chabad’s annual Jewish comedy night
ComedyChris Monty

Comedian Chris Monty plans to leave audience ‘rolling in the aisles’ during Chabad’s annual Jewish comedy night

'Everybody's so uptight about everything that's going on. You gotta take time and just let the stress out, and just laugh.'

Chris Monty is looking forward to an evening with Chabad of the South Hills. Photo courtesy of Chris Monty
Chris Monty is looking forward to an evening with Chabad of the South Hills. Photo courtesy of Chris Monty

Chris Monty was once eating in a restaurant with his wife when a tourist approached.

The comedian and his wife were enjoying a plate of chicken Parmesan. The vegan tourist asked the couple if they knew “how cruel it is the way they murder their animals.”

Monty ignored the question.

The tourist then asked, “Do you know what eating this food will do to your health?”

Monty replied that his grandmother just celebrated her 102nd birthday.

The surprised tourist asked, “Your grandmother eats meat?”

“No,” Monty said, “She minds her business.”

Monty, a New York-based comedian who opened for Joan Rivers and B.B. King, appeared in “Mall Cop: Blart 2” and has cracked more jokes inside Jewish Community Centers than your favorite uncle, is headlining Chabad of the South Hills’ annual Jewish comedy night.

As a leadup to the March 3 event, Monty spoke with the Chronicle by phone from his New York home.

Coming to Pittsburgh and appearing at Carnegie Stage, he said, is a chance for a more personal show.

“I’ve played big venues — I was with Julio Iglesias a couple of years ago, working 3,000-seat rooms — and now I’m working smaller, intimate, black box theaters in comedy clubs. I like the intimate, smaller settings,” he said.

A lot of people don’t realize that the process of cracking quips varies given a space’s size, Monty explained.

If the performance is in front of thousands, “it takes longer for the joke to go out and come back with the laughter — you actually wind up doing less material because of the size of the room — where if you’re in a smaller setting you can get more stuff,” he said.

Carnegie Stage seats fewer than 100 people.

That atmosphere should afford a fun and kosher repartee with the audience, Monty explained.

Those who assume that an entertaining evening requires ribald humor are mistaken, the comedian said: “I talk about family. I talk about being a husband, being a father, being an older guy who started late with my kids.”

“I was taught early on, when I started in this business, that if you write clean and work clean, you’ll work more. There’s more areas to plug into,” he added.

Monty can make a dirty joke — his Instagram account features some of his comedic depth — but most of his shows, especially ones for charity groups, eschew vulgarity.

“They don’t want to hear filth. You can be adult and you can talk about sex, they just don’t want to hear the graphic version of it. I can do it in a clean way. They enjoy that more and it’s funnier,” he said.

Monty, 51, has refined his craft for decades.

He spent three years opening for Joan Rivers during her East Coast tours.

The experience was fantastic, he said: “She was really down-to-earth and really cool. Really sweet.”

Though Rivers’ show was “a little bawdy,” she had a different persona off-stage, Monty continued: “She was genuinely just a great soul.”

“She had a line in her act where she said she wanted to have a Christmas tree because she was tired of Hanukkah,” Monty recalled. “So she said she got the Nativity scene. She had the baby. She had little Jesus. And she got the baby a nanny because she’s Jewish.”

Good humor can cross religious and demographic boundaries without being dogmatic, Monty said.

“There are comics that are opinionated in politics, or opinionated in whatever it is, and they just feel like, ‘Hey, well, I’m an artist and I want to say this so I’m saying it.’ God bless them, that’s fine,” Monty said. “I’m deliberate in the fact that I don’t want to talk about politics.”

So much of life is “everybody’s on one side, or the other side, and everybody hates everybody,” he continued. “I kind of feel like when you come to my show you want to get away from that.”

That’s how Monty is plugging his upcoming show with Chabad.

“We gotta get back to laughing,” he said. “We don’t laugh as a country anymore. Everybody’s so uptight about everything that’s going on. You gotta take time and just let the stress out, and just laugh.”

If that’s the audience’s charge, what’s the comedian’s responsibility?

“I’ll do my best to leave them rolling in the aisles,” he said. PJC

Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

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