There are comedy clubs in every major Canadian city and even in some minor ones. But what if you live in a very small town? How and where would you ever see live comedy? And if that small town had been ravaged by poverty, tragedy and worse, wouldn’t you need a good laugh even more?
That’s the question a new CBC series called Still Standing attempts to answer, bringing comedy to communities of just over a thousand people.
These towns, from coast to coast and in every province, except New Brunswick, play host to comedian Jonny Harris as he gets to know the town, its citizens and its eccentricities, capping off his visit with a standup comedy performance drawn entirely from his experiences in each hamlet.
The show is an odd mix of travelogue, reality show and comedy performance.
It’s based on a successful Danish TV series that the CBC has turned into a wry slice of Canadiana.
Each week features a different town and stories about its inhabitants, and at the end, Harris performs a standup routine about his experiences.
I was impressed that Harris could come up with a new five minutes each week. Then I found out he performed a new 45 minutes each week, which was edited down to five for the TV cut. That’s like writing a new novel every week. Wow.
These towns are not well-to-do and have known their share of woe. In Coleman, Alta., the town still reels from a series of mining disasters that snuffed out a lot of lives and decimated families. But Harris made them laugh.
It was an episode that ranks as one of his favourites. But he also will never forget his week in Buxton, Ont. It was the terminus of the underground railroad, and when he performed for the townsfolk, he was acutely aware he was doing the show for “the descendants of runaway slaves.”
This is a comedy show that could actually bring a lump to your throat.
The standup routines, Harris told me, were usually done in legion halls or school gymnasiums to a crowd of about 150 locals. Many of them had never seen a live comedy show before and certainly not one about their own lives. As each episode progresses, we meet the characters and events that Harris will gently lampoon in his eventual routine. It’s a great lesson on how standup is created from raw material. The show is well edited so the home audience knows exactly what Harris is making fun of.
I asked Harris if he encountered any resistance from the locals, if any of them seemed to feel exploited by the experience, and he had some good points to make:
“Arriving in the town under the banner of the CBC suggested I’m not there to be mean or abusive,” he explains. “And as a Newfoundlander, people saw me as an outsider much like them. I’m not sure a city slicker could have gained their trust.”
Harris, whom you will recognize from his ongoing role on Murdoch Mysteries, is indeed the perfect host for the show. He exudes the openness of a young Rick Mercer. He seems to be having fun throughout and got to “go whitewater rafting, perform fertility testing on a bull and do real rural stuff” during the course of the shoot.
The show is also pretty to look at, with a lot of glamour shots of Canada’s hinterland. And there’s not a whiff of condescension in the series, which is a relief. It’s a funny show with a lot of heart and a smidgen of sadness.
There’s a lot of talk about the role of the CBC and what kind of programming it should be doing. It seems to me this is exactly what our public broadcaster should be producing. It’s hard to imagine this show on any other Canadian network.
It’s a great antidote to the celebration of greed on shows like Dragons’ Den, and after all the recent scandals, the CBC should be proud of Still Standing and its link to the ideals of the network’s glory days. If this is public broadcasting, give us more.
Post City Magazines’ humour columnist, Mark Breslin, is the founder of Yuk Yuk’s comedy clubs and the author of several books, including Control Freaked.
