television Tag

Episode 022: Brent Butt

Welcome to Okay, So Here’s One!: A Podcast Celebrating Street Jokes, hosted by Todd Van Allen. This week we welcome comedian, screenwriter and author, Brent Butt. Brent is an accomplished comedian, was the creator and star of the television show “Corner Gas“, and now has...

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Five Literal LOL TV Moments

The previous two entries I’ve posted dissected a really crappy right-wing comedy show where the other talked about how comedians in Canada are consistently expected to not get paid for their work. So, let’s talk about something fun for once.

I have a thing where I will remember jokes, entire sketches, or just a two-second funny moment from anytime in my conscious history. My mind just keeps them in a box somewhere and will throw one of them at me at the most inopportune moments to make me laugh.

“What are you giggling at?”

“I just remembered Kyle Kinane’s joke about gentrification.”

“Well, stop it.”

“Okay.

May we continue having intercourse?”

“Shut up.”

This happens to me all the time, and I hope artists in other art forms have this as well. I picture one of my musician friends at a funeral suddenly getting hit by his aunt’s purse for humming the guitar solo from ‘Paranoid Android’.

The COVID pandemic has forced us to be left with our own thoughts. A lot. Like “Locked in a car with a guy while driving through Saskatchewan” trapped. Because of this, I’ve had a lot of these comedy moments bubble to the surface. I’ll be walking my dog in a socially distanced park and then BOOM! I’m hit with a Monty Python sketch and blurt laugh while tying up a full dog poop bag. I will laugh through my mask in a grocery store queue about a line from “Night Court” (Kids, ask a Gen-Xer) which then forces people to socially distance from me further.

For whatever reason, I’ve been tracking funny television moments for the past while, so I decided to come up with a list of five of them. They’re not in any order, and they may not even be five that I would consider the best over the course of my life. They’re just the five moments in television that recently have consistently brought me joy and make me laugh when I think of them. Let’s go.

LOL All the Way to the Bankruptcy

This is what I love about comedians. A comic will tell another comic about the gig they just did that was the worst show. 4The crowd had 18 people in the audience. They were spread out across a 200-seat venue. (Note: This was in the Before Times when you would hate to do shows like this, instead of wanting them to be like this now.) The microphone muted if you took it out of the stand. It screeched if you left it in the stand. The management wouldn’t turn off the Jays game even though they were losing 72-4 in the 6th, because “my customers will get mad and leave if I do”. Someone tried to shoot a rat as it ran across the stage area. So much respect for performers. The comic will go through every detail of this nightmare. Then there’s a pause, and the second comic will ask “Who books that?”

In the same manner that fish enjoy a little bit of water once or twice, comics like stage time. It’s necessary for their craft to advance, to test jokes, to figure out where new jokes suck so you can fix them, so they don’t suck. Comics will do anything for stage time. And the sad part is, people in power know this. Here is an example of this happening:

Amazon are producing a Canadian stand-up comedy show!