My wife was noting that she had a FB memory the other day of me from four years ago announcing that I had done my full plan for the coming year of shows — NAC, Great Canadian Theatre Company, Ottawa Little Theatre, everything! Many of those shows were later in the winter/spring season, but the plan was in place! Until March 2020 when all those plans joined the global swirlies.

We’ve done a few things here and there, mostly for special occasions or shows, but this was our first real “hey, this looks good, why not?” impulse. And since it was Andrea’s birthday, the synergy was hard to miss. Particularly with your wife asking you several times early on if you’ve bought tickets yet so that she doesn’t have to plan something else for her birthday. 😉

The show was “My Jokes Are Up Here” with four female comics performing for the night.

Erica Sigurdson led off, and also served as moderator/host for the night. Many of the comics are known for being on various Canadian television and radio shows, almost none of which I watch (The Debaters being the most prominent), so they were all “fresh” to me. She was obviously the most polished of the group, and handled audience interactions well. It was a fabulous start to the night, mostly around standard fare of the life of a 49-year-old woman living in Vancouver and travelling for shows. While a bunch of the “jokes” were not nominally hilarious, her delivery was flawless and they all sang for the whole set. Awesome opening.

Christina Walkinshaw was up next, a former Carleton student who got some reaction to having a tie to Ottawa. A bit younger, and nominally single for the set, she covered standard fare like dating apps, d*** pics, etc. She says she prides herself on trying to be a really “positive” person, very upbeat and perky, but she did a couple of darker jokes in the middle. One of them was almost Andrew Dice Clay-cringeworthy (“What’s worse than ants in your pants? Uncles!”). It was not indicative of her set, just a one-off perhaps to show she can do darker, and was an example of a joke someone told her while working cruise ships. She tried to do some audience interactions, but I wouldn’t say an older crowd at Centrepointe’s Meridian Theatre is the best group for that feedback energy. I’ll come back to that in a second.

Rebecca Kohler was my favourite of the night. She is an Ottawa native, and started strong with some riffs on French immersion as a kid, the teacher’s pronunciation of her name, etc. She also did a regular impression from time to time of a rich white woman’s startled manic laughter (you’d have to see her to see it), and so the bits would occasionally swing to the side for a moment. Expertly done, great pacing for the presentation, and a good mix of life in the modern era. She had fresh takes on sex, vibrators, and learning to masturbate as a chubby 14yo in her parents basement. But her best bit was about her enjoyment of lesbian porn. Her final take might spoil it for any man out there or create a fetish for them for cat videos, it could go either way. The final story though around anal adventure? Jaw-dropping funny. Excellent night. She wasn’t quite as polished as Sigurdson, but she was awesome.

Jen Grant closed out the night, with a little bit of her act on her life in Wakefield. I find it hard to pinpoint exactly what was off with her show for me. She was funny, that wasn’t it. But it seemed slow, almost a little too flat, passive maybe? I didn’t feel like there was much energy in her delivery or bits. A few places for pacing between bits made for a VERY quiet theatre. I feel like in a more intimate venue, like a comedy club, she’d rock. A big wide theatre? Not so much. She did a little bit of audience interaction, and it was good, but nowhere near as good as Sigurdson’s at the beginning.

Which leads me back to an interesting element for the night. For those who watch comedy specials or go to clubs for shows, you can tell that the good comics generally know their audience. Russell Peters generally knows what they’ll react to, or Taylor Tomlinson, or Jeff Foxworthy. If any of them asks a specific question, they generally know the audience is going to be close to that demographic. It’s the same profile as they had at the previous 20 shows.

But the audience at Centrepointe shows skew very heavily towards older, diverse but still mainly white, married and with some disposable income to buy tickets to a comedy show that isn’t for hardcore fans downtown at a comedy club. So when one of the comics went to do a small bit about apartment life, she asked how many people in the audience were living in / renting an apartment. Dead silence. It totally threw them off. Equally, when they did their bits about Tindr, d*** pics, dating in general, etc., the audience laughed, but it was often the laugh of “isn’t that interesting” as opposed to “you are living my life!” roars that they would get in a comedy club that skews younger. That’s not their fault, they’re doing one-off shows, not everyone in the crowd is a standard demographic, so harder to gauge in advance. Just something that stood out three or four times.

As a small aside, there was also the standard challenge that all comedy ensemble shows face when they do a booking like this. This was their first night together (I don’t know if they’re doing it elsewhere too or if this was a one-off), and some of the bits overlapped. Over time, comics who perform together often realize that if they’re going on third, and doing a bit that overlaps with the first comic’s take on d*** pics, then they either need to refer back to it so it seems like a continued conversation and then take it in a different direction OR drop it entirely from their set. Comedy clubs have the same problem, luck of the draw for some comics going earlier lessens their need, but if you come out 6th in a long lineup, and do your bit that mirrors the same subject matter of someone else earlier, the laughs still come, but not anywhere near as loud. I once saw a comedy set where four comics in a row gave their standard take on dating apps, making it abundantly clear that they had not listened to the previous comics’ sets AT ALL. Some of the jokes were IDENTICAL. Not in a “they stole my joke”-sense, but more “I’ve heard this commentary before”. The fourth person got almost NO reaction other than polite laughter.

However, those are small issues, and it was a good show. I’ll probably search for some more stuff online for Rebecca Kohler, although all four were good. We had debated taking Jacob, but he would have HATED the night, missing the meaning of most of the jokes, as we expected. I loved stand-up shows when I was his age, but it’s a different world after all. A few more years, maybe.