Jeff Allen was a happy man.

The 67-year old standup comic and author was scheduled to get connected to high speed internet on the day he spoke to The Blade from his home in a rural area of Nashville. And he was positively jazzed.

“I’m getting high speed internet for the first time,” said Allen, excitement in his voice. “My social media guy keep bugging me to go on Facebook Live and I’m like I can’t ‘cause it keeps buffering.”

The convenience of technology makes Allen happy. So does his relationship with his wife and their family, his relationship with God, and he’s gotten a lot of happiness from making audiences laugh since 1978 when he first began his career in standup on the Chicago south side where he grew up.

He hopes to bring a dose of that happiness to the Funnybone comedy club in Perrysburg Saturday afternoon.

Allen knows the depths of despair all too well. His experiences with pain form the nucleus of his special type of standup comedy.

In September, Allen published the book Are We There Yet?: My Journey from a Messed Up to Meaningful Life, which chronicled the ups and downs of his journey towards sobriety and inner peace.

“The book was a hard thing to write. it goes back to when I was in my thirties and newly married and I was getting sober from alcohol and drugs. If you can get through the first six chapters of the book without killing yourself, it’s actually an uplifting tale,” said Allen.

Now in his sixties, Allen said he wrote the book for people who are in their thirties and forties, which is when he began seriously searching for the answers to the questions that plagued him.

“You get to a point in your life where you check the boxes that the culture tells you you should be at peace, and you’re not. I had a beautiful wife, I had a job I loved, I had kids who were healthy, and I was the most miserable I’d ever been,” said Allen. “My joke used to be it’d be a lot easier in my life if I was in prison and someone was beating me with a stick because of how I felt. People would look at my life and not understand why I was so bitter and jaded.”

For seven or eight years, Allen combed through various schools of thought. He started with self-help books, New Age philosophy, went through an Ayn Rand phase, and explored humanism and Buddhism.

“Finally, someone stuck the Bible in my hand. and the first sermon I ever heard was ‘all of life is meaningless’ from the book of Ecclesiastes. And that summed up my eight years of searching. It was all meaningless,” said Allen. 

Allen found the answers he was looking for by asking the right questions.

“Somewhere in the book I ask five questions. What are my values? That all changed as I got older and more mature. What are my expectations? That’s huge. What voices do I listen to? And certainly in this culture, we live in a very loud, noisy cacophonous culture. Where does your hope lie? If it lies in a government institution or anything man made, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure because it will change with circumstances. You’re just gonna be flailing in the wind,” said Allen.

That said, Allen’s routine is anything but depressing, even though he’s talking about pretty heavy topics.

“The show is 75 minutes and the goal is to make everyone laugh as hard as they can. That’s what I do. I’m a stand up comic.  I love what I do. And that’s the point  – I just want people to laugh, and if it’s my pain their laughing at, that’s fine. I’m 67 years old and I can look back at the people we were and mock them for our ignorance. It’s not fun when you’re going through it, but it’s all part of the healing process.”

Allen said he loves playing at the Funny Bone in Perrysburg and promises a family-friendly show where everyone can leave sore from laughing, but also inspired by his message of hope.

“It’s nice to put together a show where families can come out and laugh together. I pick on the kids, I pick on the parents, and the grandparents,” said Allen. “I try to leave people with a seed of hope that if they’re in that position with a lot of questions and no answers, the answers are there, you just have to ask the right questions.”

First Published December 15, 2023, 1:00 p.m.