When You Have A Really Uncommon Name

Clint Hall’s mother Clarissa and father Kenneth combined their names to create Cleneth, a romantic gesture that cursed their son with a lifetime of spelling out his name to confused receptionists and baristas. Hall uses this administrative nightmare as the starting point for his Dry Bar Comedy special, building a set around the small indignities of living an ordinary life with a confusing name.

Filmed at the Dry Bar Comedy club in Provo, Utah, the set runs on a self-deprecating, low-stakes energy. Hall, an Indiana native who won Nashville’s Clean Comedy Challenge in 2019, focuses his material on the quiet quirks of his home state and his upbringing in Dale, Indiana. He spends a significant portion of his time on stage examining the mundane details of modern life, from the sheer panic of competing on the Food Network show Chopped to the embarrassment of a terrible bowling outing with his wife and father-in-law.

The humor is strictly clean, relying on gentle observational storytelling rather than edginess. Hall has a knack for finding comedy in the obsolete, like the lost art of aggressively slamming down a landline phone during an argument, or the absurdity of vending machines that require a credit card swipe for a Diet Sprite.