Tag: Sketch Comedy

This past Tuesday, Humber’s Comedy program held its’ first Stand-Up Gala at Yuk Yuk’s – to be aired (perhaps) (eventually) on Sirius XM satellite radio.  We had a special guest host, Levi MacDougall, who you probably recognize from all those Rogers commercials, but who you should probably learn more about because he’s a lot more impressive than the dude in those commercials.  ANYWAY,  it felt good to perform that night, because I hadn’t had the strongest set in our showcase the week prior, (the one in which a bunch of Humber alumni and other industry people came to evaluate,) and yet I was still asked to participate.  And, I believe I had a better night on the Gala show than I did on the showcase, so Win 1 for Brie!

I’d like to say I’m over the relatively shitty feeling you get when a bunch of people you hardly know tells you what they didn’t like about your performance in the form of a numerical grade, but I’m pretty over it.

Some people had better Showcase nights.  Some people had better Gala nights.  There are good and bad nights & good and bad sets.  I am uplifted that my Gala night went better, because it encourages me to want to go out more, to write more and to keep at it.  Life doesn’t end at the showcase.

Obviously.

It ends at the Industry Show.

No.  Not really.

That being said, we are currently hard at work on our end-of-year Sketch show, which has been TREMENDOUS fun!  Our director, Gary Pearson, is so profesh, organized & on the ball.  I’d aim for an attitude like his if I was ever to be back working in a sketch troupe.  And I am SO stoked that two of my sketches, one black-out and an improv-come-sketch (with help from the very funny Brandon Trainor,) were selected to be part of our show.

There’s something about the collaborative nature of sketch comedy that makes upcoming performances more exciting than the nerve wracking excitation of stand-up.  It’s probably because you have others to play with and fall back on.  It’ll also be a moment to take in because it’ll be the last time us 02s work together as a collective.  Unless we’re all chosen for the Industry Show.  (Fingers crossed.)

Maybe it’s the cough syrup talking sentimental, but I’m sure gonna miss thing gang when clown college’s is all over. 😦

I had the privilege of working Front of House for the very talented first year comedy students’ Archival Show over the past few nights.  While they seemed anxious, excited, proud & stoked – I felt calm and reflective.  It reminded me of the simpler times – of my own first year…

(Flashback to Brie’s First Year Archival Show Performance)

Well, that was fun.  Now.  Back to the present.

I wish I’d taken home each of the programs so I could have pointed out which of the performances stood out to me, but I’m forgetful and I didn’t do that.  I guess I can point out some points I noticed overall about the performances – I’ll do it in order of how I saw them:

1)  Team Melody: What I would have given to be in this performance!  An ode to vaudeville with great little snippets & bits all throughout, each just as fun as the last.  Lots of individual stage-time for many people in the cast, lots of singing AND a LOT of great parts & focus for the LADY performers!  It flowed so nicely.  And Monty Python’s Penis Song was in there.  Hilarious.  I left singing that Eva Tanguay song for hours upon hours after both nights Melody’s group was performing, which I suppose is good and bad.  OMG the Bored Room sketch.  Too much.  SO good.  And the Lie Detector sketch.  LOVE Mr. Show.

2) Team Eric/Christel: Reminded me loads of our performance last year, structure-wise (which makes sense, considering the Tothmeister directed my section.) BUT… our transitions were better.  I’m just kidding.  But we had that weird onesie Bruno was crabwalking around in– However, this year they had an exceptionally well-choreographed Thriller transition, which was rather impressive. The Lumberjack song – a classic!   It was also fun to see the Lawrence Welk song revisited – and as funny as it was to see a lanky dude in drag, I still couldn’t get the image of Camille Cote out of my head singing around and chasing bubbles.   Oh, and OMG the Hunger Strike sketch is amazing.  LOVE Mr. Show.

3) Team Baumander:   Lewis’ group seemed more, disciplined, more sharp.  Does that make sense?  I don’t know.  All I know is that adding the CSI intro to the Wayne & Shuster bit was a stroke of genius.  And the Smothers Brothers song was super well done!  The Jerry Lewis opening was FANTASTIC!  Holy cow!  It seems that some people were more heavily featured in this group than the others.  You would see some performers a lot more than others.  I’d be curious to know Lewis’ decision-making process for allocating roles.  It was fun, again, to see some of the performances revisited from last year ie: the Marx Brothers one (well done!), Bronx Beat (still heard Rachel & Camille in my head the whole time) and the Hail Satan one, thought not my favorite… I just wanted to make sure I mentioned that I LOVE Mr. Show!

All in all, the performances were very well done and SO much fun to watch.  First years should congratulate yourselves on a job well done – and a good chunk of dough raised for LAMP.  I’m glad to have been part of the whole thing. 🙂

And now I’m filled with the desire to research and watch some classic archival sketch comedy over the reading week break!

This post is several weeks in the making – this past January 30th, a Canadian comic icon, Don Ferguson, of the epically successful Royal  Canadian Air Farce came to speak to the students of the Humber School of Comedy.

Here’s what I got out of it:

When I got the music, I got a place to go!

The Air Farce got their start back in old days of r-a-dio…. radio.  Is that how you pronounce that?  Radio?  Ferguson and the late Roger Abbott met in Montreal, where they began performing sketch comedy together in front of live audiences.  They would perform in theatres before they got picked up to do radio, which was advantageous to them because they learned by the reception of the audience what went well, what didn’t go so well and ultimately what worked.

It was then that they understood how much the audience wanted topical, current material. *For those of you who don’t remember, Ferguson took the role of many a politician on Air Farce, including this one:*

(Oddly enough, a similar reaction to that which I had when leaving Ottawa.)

Here’s what you could do with a live audience and with radio vs. on TV with a laugh track:

  • You can hear the audience laughing;
  • You can be plugged in to what they think is funny & relevant;
  • You can go more places (it’s almost like animation the amount of places you can go! But CHEAPER!)
  • Radio gets into people’s head & taps into their imagination;
  • Did I mention how much cheaper it is than TV?  Because it’s cheaper.

Ferguson mentioned how comedy, and particularly Air Farce’s TV sketches, demands precision.  Something can be funny if written a certain way, but then if you re-word it, the message won’t come across quite as clearly.  THIS is something extremely relevant to all aspects of writing for comedy, and probably especially to stand-up.  I’m currently in the process of conducting some massive edits to my stand-up bits.  It’s true, sometimes it hurts to kill your babies, or at least to dismember them, but it ends up with more laughs, then bye bye toesies!

Don Ferguson’s method for making it as a comedian in Canada:

  1. Get a show

  2. Be a hit

  3. Remain a hit

It’s as easy as that!   The pressure, he said, isn’t off as soon as you get a show.

Get a Show

“You can’t let up for a MOMENT.  It’s like being a pro-athlete.”

Crossing the Border = Security

If any of us Humber kids are in the mindset that comedy will provide us with any kind of job security, Ferguson reminded us that his longest contract was one of five years.  That’s it.  Everything else was shorter than that, normally one or two-year contracts with Air Farce.  That might make some people nervous, but Ferguson believes security can breed complacency in a business like this one.  The anxiety, fear and nervousness is what a comedian needs to stay sharp.

How’s that for noble, eh?

Ferguson and Abbott were asked to work on the American sit-com TAXI, but they declined as they’d realized “what Air Farce was doing on Radio was more important to [Canadian] listeners than ANY sitcom would mean to US viewers.”

Writing for Andy Kaufman would have been pretty... fun?

___

At this point, we skipped into a Q&A with Ferguson in which he gave us tips, tricks, encouragement and advice.  Because I pay so much for tuition, I’m going to keep this segment of our Prime Time with Don Ferguson private.  If you want more details, be sure to check this book out; a work that will serve to remind us how relevant; how important Air Farce really was for Canadians ever since their days back in R-A-D-I-O.

... no big deal. (!!!)

(Next on the schedule… Brie needs to dye her hair again!)

I am currently overwhelmed by the amount of talented performances I had the honour of witnessing this evening. (Which is great, because I was having relatively poopy day in class prior to the evening’s festivities.)

I saw sketch troupes that made me want to work so much harder and get so much better at performing as part of a sketch troupe!

I’m excited about all this stuff happening for LaughDraft and I’m simultaneously frustrated.

There’s lots to be excited about.  For one, there’s the upcoming Halloween show at Comedy Bar:

 

This is exciting because:

  • Its’ the first time we perform at Comedy Bar;
  • It’s the first time Humber contributes to our troupe (Free Food, anybody?);
  • We’re performing ALL NEW sketches;
  • It’s Halloween!
  • One of my sketches got in;
  • We might make some money if enough people come, which will help us with future projects, etc.

We were also selected as the one troupe from Humber to be submitted into the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival (which my class friends and colleagues are quick to point out is only due to the fact that we are currently the only performing-sketch troupe in the program so far this year.  To which I say: Default performance in SketchFest is better than no performance at all.)

Why this is exiting:

  • Two of the Kids in the Hall are performing in this festival. OMG!;
  • Other AMAZING sketch troupes are performing in this festival;
  • Our program coordinator at Humber, Andrew Clark, likes us enough to recommend us to the organizers;
  • We get to showcase 15 minutes of our best material to date (none of which was written by me… sigh.);
  • We get unlimited access to see all the shows in the festival;
  • Vest of Friends got to do it last year, and this year they might make it to Just For Laughs… just saying…;
  • Etc.

For everything there is to be excited about, it’s difficult because there are always some people ready to downplay the achievement, however meager it may be in our just-beginning careers and for what purpose?  I simply do not understand.  Are they still in that “it’s cool to be apathetic” stage?  Do they simply not want to be a part of this but feel obligated to stay on?  But again, for what reason?  I just don’t get it.

I wonder if it’s to do with the fact that I’m older.  Or  that apathy has naver been in my nature. I crave DOING.  I crave things to give a shit about!  Maybe it’s relative to what you put in.  I put a lot into LaughDraft, creatively and professionally.  I do a lot of the organizational aspects of it, I try to keep our meetings on track.  I often meet with Andrew to discuss Humber’s involvement and have done since the very beginning.  Because of that, I expect the same enthusiasm from all the others.  Here’s the problem.  It’s not them. It’s me.  Maybe I just have unrealistically high expectations. When something excites me, I expect it to excite the others in the group.  And it does some.  And others not.

And who cares, at the end of the day?  It’s no big deal.  But I do.  That’s the problem.