Last Laugh Resort

Toronto’s Laugh Resort comedy club closes this week

It’s no joke: after 18 years the Laugh Resort is hosting its final shows next Saturday. Located in the Holiday Inn on King St., the hotel has been bought by the Hyatt chain, which is renovating the entire facility. Now it’s time for the basement floor where the club is located to begin its makeover.

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The Laugh Resort was initially located next to the Old Firehall, which was at that time occupied by Second City. A much larger space, Laugh Resort used to book acts like Ray Romano, Adam Sandler and Ellen Degeneres. In 2000, it moved to the Holiday Inn location. The club allowed independent comics to perform, as opposed to places like Yuk Yuk’s that want exclusive deals with comedians.

Without the Laugh Resort, independent comedians’ main alternative to the four Yuk Yuk’s GTA locations is Absolute Comedy at Yonge and Eglinton.

Comedy in Canada, like the Sith there can only be two.

Comedians in the news

A good piece on Nikki Payne’s recent pains in the career.

Don Kelly continues to milk the native thing.

Jason Rouse provides health tips.

No, that last one is not going to lead to a “Rick Astley” video.

Bye George

You were always one of the greats.

My Comedy is Like Pizza

The product is weakened by the delivery

The thing that holds me back in stand-up; the stuff I write is funny of that I’m certain so at least on paper I can do the job but when it comes time to go from the theoretical to the practical it loses something. Like a pizza fresh out of the oven vs. the one that Habib drops off, yeah you’ll eat it but it’s not as good as it was because it sat in the back seat of his station wagon for 45 minutes while he yelled at his girlfriend over his headset.

I’ve always been aware of the problem as well as others, in fact I’ve had everyone from full-time pros and managers to fellow amateurs and hobos on the street tell me so. Good writing hamstrung by ham fisted delivery is the hurdle I need to clear if I’m ever going to get my own show on the APTN or be allowed to re-write and perform a beer commercial for the Senators.

So how to do it? I’m not really sure, I feel a bit like Homer Simpson in the episode where the FBI tries to give him a new identity; it just won’t take. Every time I try to be “me” on stage, that is a natural delivery, it just doesn’t work, “me” simply refuses to show. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve said something really funny offstage and thought “Why the hell can’t I sound like that when I’m on?”

And it’s not even what people hear, there’s a mental space, a groove that I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling, when you know you are being 100% funny, that every cell in your body is harmoniously hysterical and every word, tone and mannerism the exact right one to elicit spontaneous and genuine laughter from anything human within a sixteen foot radius. It’s lightening in a bottle and the real comedians are the ones who can uncork it anytime and anyplace they feel like it.

Can that be learned or even grown into while still looking and feeling like a natural talent?

I think so because I’ve seen it happen, most notable with Tracy McDonald. I remember the first time I noticed; she was telling the same jokes she always told (I’m so fat! I’m so from the East Coast! I’m so drunk!) but the delivery suddenly was different, it was natural, the nuance was “right” for her as a person and a comedian and the material, somehow. It’s something I’ve thought about but still can’t quantify. It was like watching a TV for years and then someone adjusting the sharpness a percent or two and then suddenly the image was clean and sharp and we realize what we had taken as good was really an inferior representation. That slight knob twist made a world of difference, so how to twist my own knob? (ba-dah-bum! Huh? Huh? See what I did there?)

My other issue is that my material has an underlying inconsistency of self-deprecation followed by vicious attack on someone or something else. That’s usually on purpose, my theory being the audience will let me get away with being mean to others because I’m also mean to myself but maybe that’s the wrong way to go; that the audience wants consistency rather than balance.

Well I’m on at least one stage every week for pretty much the rest of the summer so I’ll have lots of time to chew it over and experiment but I think what I really need is a button of peyote, a desert and Jim Morrison to vision quest me to my stand-up Nirvana. Sadly this is Ottawa so all I can hope for is a joint of hydroponics, Lebreton Flats and Brad Lyons.

A review where the headline says it all

The Love Guru is a comedy like the Leafs are a hockey team

Oh Mike, what happened man?

Woot!

Fans of the Great White North can take heart and take off! Again.

Bob and Doug McKenzie will soon be among us once more. Not in the flesh, but their animated facsimiles, voiced by Canadian comic actors Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis.

They invented the characters for the now legendary satirical SCTV skit “The Great White North” in 1980 and portrayed them in the feature film Strange Brew three years later. And they will be up to their old antics when The Animated Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie goes to air in Canada on the Global network in January.

Of course what they’re not telling you is that like all our childhood characters they’re coming back edgier, grittier and more eXtreme then we remember. For instance the fist episode has Bob and Doug going to Kandahar for a beer and bacon run.

NSFW but pretty LOL

Unless your employer is a Scottish pub that caters to heroin junkies I would not play this at work but you should play it at some point.

More things people don’t find funny

Native abuse appology

Woody Allen (anymore)

Inbreeding

Trevor’s Pad Launch Unsullied by Audience

With a crowd of three (3) whole customers… no wait… one was the father of one of the acts so really just two people… Trevor’s latest source of neurosis got off to a quiet start.

The small audience wasn’t too surprising considering:

A: The Italian Street festival had everyone in the street being Italian

B: Father’s Day

C: Flood of Biblical proportions

D: No D is required as the first three are excuses good enough

Some quick thoughts:

Alastair had maybe the shortest set I’ve ever seen, two bits, no shave or haircut, I think he spent more time in the washroom at the Prescott than the stage.

Rebecca, the 16 year old Anto replacement once again showed that she has balls bigger than her older male counterparts. She has Trevor so worried that I saw him afterwards telling her father the sad story of Tracy McDonald in an effort to get him to put a stop to all this stand up comedy nonsense.

Don Kelly, wow has marriage made that cat darker or what? His new high school rampage reunion bit may very well be one of my favourites. I look forward to hearing it over the next decade or so. Will it replace parts of grandpa for Don’s edgier material? Only time will tell.

Alex Wood’s set… never happened, the trail of joints and Jos Louis that we laid across the street certainly succeeded in drawing him out and he nearly made it to the stage but at the last second realized what was going on, evaded the trap and ran back to AC before the cage could drop.

Don’t worry, next time we’ll get you and your little dog too!!!

Dave, Peter, Anto, Russ all did stuff too but I can’t think up any jokes about them so who cares.

I had a pretty good set, 95% new material and of that 15% seems to have potential. Specifically I’m really happy with my new donated kidney (thanks to Nikki Payne for the inspiration) and Guitar Hero bit and one or two other lines that I’ll be trying out at Yuk’s this Wednesday.

Og’s Fair and Balanced Review of Nikki Payne

defibrillating an audience out of a comedy induced coma.

Angelo Tsarouchas (MC / opener / split middle / gravitational well) seems to be out of his “whore” period as he didn’t yell the word once the whole night but he yelled about some other new stuff so that’s okay. Big and loud and funny as always Angelo kicked the night into high gear like the unnatural force of nature he is. While he was the MC and did the MC thing he really did a split middle length and style set. That’s not a complaint, I don’t think there can ever be enough Angelo and I doubt there ever will be. The only problem was that someone had to follow him.

Just deep fry the walk in freezer and soak it in Ouzo, I’ll take it up to my room after my set

Tony Vendetti (split middle) rushing back from the Pad had the unenviable task of cleaning up after Hurricane Ang. He has to spend the first 6 -10 minutes of his set dealing with the aftermath. The audience didn’t let Angelo go until Tony started talking about tripping over his own balls. That seemed to get their attention enough for him to remake the stage his own. Which lead to the next problem, he went long looking to get off stage on a big laugh. He got it but not until the show started to creep into too late for an Ottawa in bed by 11:00 pm crowd.

And then Martha Chaves (opener in the middle) was thrown on to do a five minute spot.

It figures that a Nikki Payne show would upset the system.

Martha did fine as usual, she and Tony are a great mix but the audience was spent. They were tired and had enough. Fortunately for them Nikki hadn’t.

As Angelo was starting to bring her on she was literally jumping up and down like the meth had finally kicked in and she’d need to rob the 7-11 before the high wore off. She exploded onto the stage and told the audience in no uncertain terms that they would wake up or she’d stalk and beat the crap out every last one of them.

“Then I told Charlie, that’s not how you spell “helter-skelter”, give me the knife you idiot.” Nikki recalls some of her old days adventures in California.

Advancements in GPS technology and the insanity defense makes that sort of thing possible in our modern world so they did wake up and for the next 40 minutes or so Nicky devastated the room and pretty much all the other acts on the stage that night were relegated to warm-up status. This was definitely what the crowd came to see. She was rambunctiously foul, a demented pixie from the wrong side of the Enchanted Forest’s tracks. Not just jokes about her being a stripper:

Note to Nikki other people have to use that mic stand

Or the snacking preferences of her vagina (crackers, who knew?) but there’s actually a startling post-feminism bend to her material that may very well be unique in comedy. A woman getting ahead in business with a blow-job isn’t a bad thing to Nikki; in fact it strikes her as an efficient time saver and a quick observation of the irony of free choice to modern women laid bare a fundamental truth. She spritzed ferociously, veering in and out of her material effortlessly, picking up the established audience quirks (and damn was it a target rich front row, the planets were aligned) and throwing them way over the line. You know she did it right as the victims gave up a standing ovation in payment for their public humiliation.

At the end of her set, an audience that was ready to pack it up and go home were left wanting more, is there any higher praise for any performer in any art?