Serious about laughter
Comedy Festival works to maintain a high-quality grassroots image
Sharilyn Johnson



Two years ago, a group of comedians sat in the near-empty lounge of the Sheraton Hotel on the Sunday night of the second annual CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival. Cigars and beer in hand, they shared their excitement about a wildly successful week of great shows, appreciative audiences and the rare chance to enjoy each other’s company.

During a lull in the celebrations, one of the veteran performers sat back, pulled on his cigar and said, “Remember this week, because this festival will never be the same.”

With the sudden success, it was plausible that the Winnipeg festival could become a glorified TV production and thus lose the coherence and creativity of its programming choices. But festival executive producer Jason Andrich doesn’t intend to let that happen. While the festival continues to add venues and increase its volunteer base, the focus behind the scenes is still on creating a great vibe.

“It’s always going to be like that,” Andrich says. “We can’t pay for huge names. We have to treat people well. That was a very conscious thing right off the top.”

It seems to be working. The non-profit festival, on now through April 10 at venues throughout Winnipeg, is getting repeat business from the big names. Russell Peters, Mark McKinney and A. Whitney Brown are all back to perform at the Pantages Playhouse shows, which are taped for TV broadcast.

Contrary to popular belief, the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival has little to do with the CBC other than title sponsorship rights and the presence of cameras at the Pantages Playhouse. The festival is actually produced by the Osborne Village Cultural Centre (OVCC), the non-profit organization that owns the Gas Station Theatre.

Andrich says the perception of the festival being CBC-run is a challenge when talking to potential sponsors or other media outlets concerned about promoting the “competition.” At the same time, being associated with the big fish of the Canadian culture pond adds credibility to the festival.

“There’s perception, and there’s reality,” Andrich says. “The reality is fantastic. The perception is a little challenging sometimes. But the reality is so great, you deal with the perception.”

The recent controversy surrounding the possible sale of the Gas Station Theatre resulted in the OVCC’s membership replacing its board of directors in December. There may be a new board to answer to this year, but for the festival organizers it’s business as usual.

“We are absolutely supported, and this new board is absolutely behind us,” says Andrich.

The festival has a few other new challenges this year, including the fact that the Juno Awards fell on the weekend before the Comedy Fest was set to open.

“We really feel that our audiences are quite a bit different,” Andrich says. “It’s something we’ve known and we’ve been dealing with it, and ticket sales are good.”

Another challenge is the growth spurt of the festival’s community outreach arm.

“It would be really easy for us to get really caught up in the TV shows and the radio, but if you’re going to be a festival you need to be community based. If you’re not community based, you’re not sustainable. And we want to be around for a long time,” he says.

Programs that have been in the works for the past few years are now fully up and running. Learning From Laughter takes improv comedy into schools, while Comedy in Common produces free comedy shows so non-profit organizations can raise money through ticket sales. Every Pantages Playhouse show has a block of tickets donated to people who would otherwise be economically unable to attend the shows. Plus, the festival is experimenting with a tour of eight shows in rural Manitoba towns.

All of it is part of the festival’s original vision.

“It’s really important to us that we make this festival as accessible as possible. That’s the comedy festival creed. To make people laugh, to teach other people how to make other people laugh and to bring laughter to those who need it the most,” says Andrich.

“And we’re taking that really seriously.”

For more info see our What’s Up entertainment listings.

Best of the Fest
There’s No Place Like Home
April 8, 7:30 p.m., Pantages Playhouse
Tix: $34.95 & $29.95

It’s hard to pick just one Pantages Playhouse gala. All centre around a different theme, have equal star power and include material written especially for the festival. Thursday’s Man Alive show is intriguing, promising “a tribute to Al Rae’s penis.” Sunday’s CBC Gala features members of the Royal Canadian Air Farce and The Frantics. But the winner is Friday night’s There’s No Place Like Home, which will serve up a cross-section of Canadian comics who will spew forth on their home and native land. Russell Peters, currently the hottest commodity in Canadian standup, hosts the show that includes Montreal’s Joey Elias, local favourite Big Daddy Tazz and “King of Canadian Comedy” Mike MacDonald in his first Winnipeg Comedy Festival appearance.

Best of the Fest
Until April 9, 7 & 10 p.m., King’s Head Knight’s Pub
Tix: $24.95

Blues and Blue Humour
April 8-9, 9 p.m., Times Change(d)
Tix: $10

If you’re one of those people who hates surprises, these aren’t the shows for you. Last year, the festival experimented with four shows at the King’s Head, each of which had a different lineup that wasn’t disclosed until showtime. This year, the number of shows at the King’s Head has doubled, and now there’s a second venue also offering surprise lineups. At Times Change(d) on April 8 and 9, two performers per night will do their things, followed by music from The Perpetrators on Friday and Righteous Ike on Saturday. The performer lists are still being kept top secret, but if you keep your ears open at other venues you may hear something you aren’t supposed to. Blatant attempts to squeeze names out of the festival organizers will only get you one of those intense “Trust us” looks. Considering the track record, it’s probably worth it to do so.

Festival Fundraiser — A. Whitney Brown
April 10, 8 p.m., Gas Station Theatre
Tix: $24.95

While the CBC fans are getting their Air Farce fix at the Pantages Playhouse, the man who once provided the Winnipeg Comedy Festival with its most talked-about performance will perform a solo show at the Gas Station Theatre on April 10. In 2003, A. Whitney Brown made waves at the opening night show by sharing his opinion on the then-impending Iraq war and speaking openly about the friendly-fire incident that killed four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. While the bulk of the controversial content was chopped for the TV broadcast, CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera played the performance in its entirety and was inundated with both positive and negative feedback from across the country. A. Whitney Brown isn’t the type to aim for shock value, but you can depend on him to speak his mind with unrestrained honesty.

All tickets available at Ticketmaster.

The return of Mr. Canoehead?
The Frantics reunite for more all-Canadian comedy

PREVIEW

The Frantics
April 9, 2 pm, Gas Station Theatre
April 10, 7:30 pm, Pantages Playhouse Theatre

There’s a young generation of Canadian comedy fans who’ve never been exposed to The Frantics.

By the same token, there’s an older generation of Canadian comedy fans who don’t stay up late enough to catch the dark comedy Puppets Who Kill on the Comedy Network.

Thankfully, Dan Redican is here to bridge that gap.

Canadian sketch icons The Frantics — made up of Redican, Rick Green, Peter Wildman, and Paul Chato — are best-known for their CBC radio and TV work in the 1980s, most notably the TV show 4 on the Floor. The Frantics went their separate ways in 1989 but began working together again about a year and a half ago.

“We realized that our kids had never seen us perform, so we thought we’d do a show just for the kids,” Redican says, “but we had such a great time doing it. We were going to do sort of old favourite stuff that we liked doing, but then each of us ended up saying ‘I have this idea...’”

The quartet started writing more new material and performed monthly shows at Second City’s Tim Sims Playhouse in Toronto. Saturday afternoon’s Comedy Fest show at the Gas Station Theatre will be the group’s first in Winnipeg. The Frantics are also on the bill for Sunday night’s CBC Gala at the Pantages Playhouse, and Redican will go solo for the Mid-Life Crazy show at the Pantages on Friday night.

Even though the guys have aged a decade and a half, Redican says the group hasn’t lost its edge.

“There’s nothing really old fart-ish about what we’re doing. It still feels fresh, and we’re getting a great response from younger audiences,” he says.

That younger audience is thanks in part to fans of Puppets Who Kill, where Redican stars as Dan Barlow, the social worker assigned to rehabilitate violent criminal puppets in a halfway house. The show is in its third season on the Comedy Network, and Redican is currently writing scripts for season four.

As unique as it is, Puppets Who Kill sometimes gets compared to another cult comedy featuring puppets, the 2002 FOX series Greg the Bunny.

“I think Puppets Who Kill takes itself much more seriously,” Redican says. “The puppets are much more serious about their situation than Greg the Bunny. Greg the Bunny was really a standard sitcom, and Puppets Who Kill is certainly outrageous, but it’s more of a dramatic performance for the characters.”

Canadian television has come a long way since 1986, when the Frantics starred in 4 on the Floor. Cable has changed the landscape, and Redican cites programs such as Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys as great examples of what this country can produce.

“That a Canadian show can be an audience draw and a commercial success and be regional, I think that’s really great,” he says. “I don’t think things are in a bad state now. I think a lot of the shows that are coming out right now are quite good, and being recognized as such.”

For more info see our What’s Up entertainment listings.

Still standing – up
Industry mogul predicts resurgence of standup comedy

PREVIEW
The know business of show business
A pril 10, 2 pm, Gas Station Theatre
w/ Howard Lapides, A. Whitney Brown, Mike Macdonald & Mark McKinney

If you want to learn to speak fluent comedy, Howard Lapides makes a good tutor.

A former comedy club owner and now a Los Angeles-based talent manager whose roster includes Tom Green, Jonathan Torrens and Scott Thompson, Lapides will have plenty to contribute to Sunday afternoon’s The Know Business of Show Business panel as part of the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival. He’ll be joined at the Gas Station Theatre by A. Whitney Brown, Mike MacDonald and Mark McKinney.

Lapides has been in the business since the 1970s and has witnessed all the peaks and valleys of standup comedy’s popularity. The glut of standup in the 1980s is simply referred to as “the boom” within the industry.

“(Standup) started in the late ’70s, moved right through the ’80s, kind of petered out in the late ’80s and people realized it was gone in the early ’90s,” he explains. “It was there for a variety of reasons. It became cheap entertainment... People who owned bars realized, ‘Well, we can put a microphone up and put a comic in there instead of a band and all the aggravation.’ And that became a comedy club.”

With any boom comes a bust. The small-time clubs closed, and Lapides says the business was left to those who “knew how to do it right.”

The same can be said for the talent pool.

“You’d get people getting up on amateur night and not long after were working themselves into the schedule,” he says. “They had no real point of view, and there was a lot of copycat stuff going on.”

It was also a time when Roseanne, Jerry Seinfeld and Tim Allen became sitcom stars. Standup was suddenly a legitimate way to get famous fast. Montreal’s Just for Laughs Festival, heavily attended by the industry, became a virtual sitcom lottery through the ’90s. It still remains the place for performers to push their careers over the top.

“Every year there are two or three people who are really hot coming out of that festival,” says Lapides, who’s gearing up for his 21st year in attendance.

With sitcoms taking a back seat to reality TV in the last five years, the idea of standup for the sake of standup seems to be making a comeback. Non-industry dominated comedy festivals, such as Winnipeg’s, are popping up all over North America. Could there be another comedy boom on the horizon?

Lapides doesn’t predict a repeat of the ’80s but has a hunch that good things are in store for the future of standup.

“There’s something,” he says. “I’m just feeling that the art form is being recognized again.”

For more info see our What’s Up entertainment listings.