All Members Rise

In my life I have been a member of several organizations like 4-H, Co-operative Groups, Farm Associations, Teacher Organizations, Hockey clubs, Baseball teams and Social Media groups. I have belonged to Book clubs and Record clubs. I have been a card-carrying member of my favored political party for over 50 years. However, the most “memberable” groups to which I have ever belonged are the one’s that didn’t take me seriously as a member. What I mean by that , is that I was seriously a member of a few Comedy groups, clubs and organizations in which I never had to be serious while being a member. Groucho Marx once stated that, “He would never want to be a member of a club that would accept him as a member.” Comedy clubs are like that – if you are serious about being a member of the group, then you can’t be a serious member. Seriously!!!

So then the snail looks up at the guy and says, “What the hell was that all about?”

Try and imagine the best joke you have ever heard, or the funniest comedian you’ve ever seen. What makes the joke funny? What makes the stand-up guy, stand-out? Believe me, I have been trying to figure that out for most of my life. From the moment we got our first television set in the living room of 'our little house on the prairie', I started watching comedies and sit-coms whenever I had the opportunity. I truly liked the way Bob Hope and Jack Benny and Lucille Ball looked at the world. I imitated Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton. Every kid that I knew at that time was into the same thing. Students who rode the same school bus as I did, would get on board on a Monday morning and recite every joke that had been told by Jack Carter, Jerry Stiller, Myron Cohen and the Smothers Brothers on the Ed Sullivan Show the previous night. I grew up impersonating comedic heavy-weights like Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Bill Cosby, Phyllis Diller, Richard Pryor, Rowan & Martin, George Carlin, Joan Rivers, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. I had no choice but to appreciate comedy. It seems like everyone in my life was funny. My mom was funny. All my aunts and uncles were funny. My friends were all funny. My brother was funny looking . . . . I grew up thinking that the world was just a funny place – and it was a funny place and still is for the most part. Because of my immersion in this environment of comedy, I came to notice all of the truly hilarious occurrences taking place around me. And that has been my 'normal' for the last 65 years. The farm I lived on provided fuel for jokes and laughter. The school I attended was a constant source of humor. My family had me in stiches most of the time and, as I grew older, my love-life became more and more of a joke . . . . I couldn’t help what I had become. My life had turned into just one insatiable quest for a laugh. I soon caught on that I also had the power to make people laugh. One evening when I was about nine years old, and when our family was returning from the city to our family farm, we stopped at the Kentucky Fried Chicken drive-through restaurant. Part way through the meal, which was served to us in our car, I got out of the car, found a discarded cardboard KFC bucket, put it on my head and danced blindly around the parking lot. My mom and my aunt couldn’t stop laughing. People in neighboring vehicles hooted out of open windows and beeped their horns in encouragement. I was on a roll. I had ‘em in the aisles I tell you. There was no stopping me. It was at that moment that I discovered the absolute power of being a member of the world of comedy. When you cause someone to laugh, you grab them by the crotch and shake their world a little (or a lot). I loved grabbing crotches and shaking worlds. My life’s path had been uncovered. Of course, I had no informed notion that a living could actually be earned from making people laugh so I began to work and continued to work at rather ordinary things for the entirety of my life. I farmed, I attended school at several different levels, I taught school, I dabbled in Science Entertainment, I delivered milk. No matter what I did, I had a good time at it. I found the comedy in every last thing I did. To enhance the comedy I was finding in my every-day life, I periodically attended live comedy shows by stars like Bob Hope, Bill Cosby, Brent Butt and Rodney Dangerfield as well as some lesser-knowns. It wasn’t easy being me, I’ll tell you. Finally, one day, after hearing that certain colleges and even some universities offered courses (and perhaps degrees) in stand-up comedy, I had the opportunity to enroll in just such a course. The Langara College in Vancouver, which was quite near the school where I taught, delivered a course in Stand-up comedy and comedy writing. At last, I had found a teacher. So began the next chapter in this funny life of mine.

When I first enrolled in the Stand-Up Comedy course at Langara College in Vancouver, I had no idea what an effort it would entail to get to class every Wednesday evening for 10 consecutive weeks. I just paid my $250 and took my chances. Like I say, I was teaching in a fairly remote little school district about 60 kilometers from Vancouver, as the crow flies (not as the highway meanders). On the morning of my first Wednesday-evening class, I was feeling a little edgy, I guess you could say. I hadn’t been a student in any school for nearly 15 years and I wasn’t sure of exactly how I should go about that sort of routine anymore. As Gilda Radner / Rosanne Rosanna Danna might say, “When I go to this school will I be writing and if I’m writing, what am I going to write on and what am I going to write with? Should I use a pen or should I use a pencil? And what kind of pencils should I use? Should I use a double HH pencil or a softer HB lead pencil? And where will I get these pencils? Will my teacher provide me with these pencils, or should I go out and buy these pencils for myself?” I made it through the school day trying not to think too much about the class that evening. I got more excited as the day wore on. I went through thought-binges of, “Why am I doing this? It would be so much easier just to drive home after work and veg out in front of the television, than it will be to go to Vancouver and fight people and traffic and all that other city stuff.” At 2:55 and with 15 minutes left in the school day, I dropped by the principal’s office to inform him that I was on my way and that the kids in my classroom were fully engaged and engrossed in some sort of meaningful yet torturous assignment and could he please pop up to my room and supervise them until dismissal. He agreed of course. What can I say? He was a nice guy!

I sprinted to my little Chevy S-10 truck, threw my stuff, and myself, in, started up and took off out of the school parking lot for an 85-minute drive to the Ferry terminal at the other end of the Sunshine Coast. If I missed the 4:20 ferry, I could always catch the 6:20 ferry instead, but that would mean my arrival time at Langara College would be ten minutes after the Comedy class ended. In other words, I could not miss the 4:20 ferry. As I neared within two or three kilometers of the ferry terminal, I began meeting a line of cars going in the opposite direction. This meant that the ferry had landed and had off-loaded the vehicles from that sailing. I bore down the hill to the parking lot. I parked and secured a validated parking pass from the stupid, stupid, stupid, STUPID machine that needs exact change and a credit card, your license plate number, phone number, mother’s maiden name, reason for parking, a lock of your hair, fingerprints and address in order to print said validation. I finally got the parking voucher, put it on the dash of my truck, did a Usain Bolt impersonation to the loading ramp and narrowly made it on board as the doors swung closed. I had made the first leg of my journey. Stroke of luck and note to self: next week, definitely don’t think about driving on board. Leave school at 2:45 pm.

I am not sure if any of you have experienced the calm and serenity of riding on a ferry boat of any kind, but if you haven’t, suffice it to say that it is truly a therapeutic form of travel. Sandwiched between two extremely stressful and life-changing events (i.e. getting to the ferry on time and, exploding off the ferry into real-world freeway traffic), the peaceful vibe of riding on-board a ferry boat is something everyone should experience at least once or twice in a lifetime. So, I was now safely on board the ferry. I could relax in one of the big soft lounge-type chairs and stare out the window in wistful bliss as the waves and cares floated by me. This particular ferry ride was 45 minutes in length so my peaceful blissful bout of therapy only lasted for about half an hour before I had to jostle for a starting position in the pedestrian, walk-on traveler’s exit-line-up. Moments after docking, the exit gate flew open and I, along with the entire population of West Vancouver exploded through like a litter of hungry puppies heading for ‘momma’. My next mission was to run through the maze of walkways and marshalling corridors that eventually emptied at the city bus stop outside the terminal. The bus I needed was an express bus that would get me from the ferry terminal to downtown Vancouver in about 30 minutes. There was a second bus that I could catch, if I missed the express bus – it would see me arrive in downtown Vancouver in about 30 days!!! In other words, I had to catch the express bus. As I rounded the first turn and into the back stretch, I was safely in third place. The fellow ahead of me faltered momentarily in a fit of indecision as he hit the straight-a-way. I bolted into second place and plotted my assault on the front runner. I knew that with only one person ahead of me, and should the express bus indeed be caught, I would be rewarded with a seat somewhere on the bus. Perhaps because I didn’t want to miss that last empty seat on the bus or perhaps because of my competitive nature, I erased the gap held by the guy in front, and as he looked behind himself to the left, I flashed past him on his right and on to certain victory. I was, in fact, the first passenger onto the express bus and I did get a choice empty seat, so the 30-minute ride into the city center didn’t seem so long or so bad. Again, this half-hour journey was another bit of calm before entering the storm of downtown Vancouver right at 5:30 pm when everybody was making efforts to "get the hell out of town."

As predicted, the walk from the bus stop in the downtown area to the light-rail Sky-Train (my next segment on the path to comedic enlightenment) was crowded and patience-testing. I needed to jog for two blocks to get to the Sky-Train station, get my ticket and get on board by 5:45 pm in order to go three stops in time to disembark and catch my final bus. Again, I elbowed my way through dozens and dozens and scores and hundreds of pedestrians seemingly lost in the ozone layer of apathy and disillusionment. “Hey, I'm walkin' here. Can't you see I'm walkin' here.” I could feel my sense of humor slowly slipping out of my body like a soul leaving its home in some poor sod recently fallen prey to some sort of coronary incident. Finally, the station was in sight and, there before me was an unused ticket kiosk. The train approached, I was in, life was good again. There were no seats but that didn’t matter because I only needed to go three stops before starting on the next-to-last leg of my journey. The automated voice blared, in at least one recognizable language, that we would soon be arriving at my desired station. I got off and ran to the closest bus stop and waited. Just one more bus to go.

At 6:30 pm my bus pulled into the small sheltered station. A few passengers got off and then some sort of a kerfuffle ensued as a wheel-chair passenger attempted to get out. Somebody else tried to get on or off while he was apparently attempting to get from point A to point B. The wheel-chair passenger took exception to the other guy’s move and a verbal battle heated up. The man on wheels was screaming “discrimination”, and that, as a disabled person he had the right to be the first one on a bus and the first one off a bus and that he should be able to sit anywhere he wanted and have as much free room as he wanted around him and that he should have many, many other things that none of us have ever dreamed of realistically. I always feel bad for disabled persons attempting to make there way in a world that is far from equipped to give any sort of advantage to them, but here I sort of felt sorry for the other guy – he had two kids to look after and he wasn’t trying to be pushy. Anyway, the matter finally ended after the wheelchair man had his rant at the world, and everyone got to where they wanted to be. Because of the altercations prior to boarding the bus, a few people got ahead of me in the queue and I ended up not having a seat for the 37-block trip to my final stop. My sense of humor had all but dissipated into the urban mist as I ended up performing some sort of funky-chicken dance for the next half hour in attempts to see out the window (at hip-level) to figure out just where the hell I was. I finally discerned that my destination was near. I pulled the bell-cord and muscled my way to the back door and departed, only to find that I was two blocks short of where I should have gotten off. So now my walk to the college was five blocks instead of three blocks. I started jogging and when I finally stood (like 'Rocky Balboa') on the main steps up to the entrance of the college, it was 6:55 pm – exactly four hours after I had left school. I was now almost in the classroom and ready for my class. Luckily it only took me five minutes to find the class. When I got to the door and I looked inside. I felt about as far away from being funny as one could imagine, so in an effort to get ready for the class, I enquired, “Is there any funny business going on in this room?” I got a great laugh and the rest, as they say, is history! Except, I still have more story to tell you so it wasn’t quite history yet at that point.

Note to reader: this would be my Wednesday evening pilgrimage for the next nine consecutive weeks. LOL right?

My classmates and I made up a group, consisting of a few teachers, a couple of business people, three stay-at-home dads, one guy whose wife worked with the 2010 Winter Olympic Committee, two fellows who came from the local Indian community and some retirees who wanted to improve their confidence for public-speaking - go figure!! We had a pretty diverse group and lots of background fuel for good comedy. Our instructor took time off each Wednesday evening from working with one of the Mental Health organizations in the city. Much of his comedy work was done in efforts to improve mental health for everyone. One thing for certain is that on class days, by the time I reached the classroom, my mental health was in pretty bad shape. But, by the time I left the classroom after three hours of listening to our leader, and writing jokes and hearing the jokes and routines of all the other members, my mental health had improved to a point where I was in a state of complete remission. Comedy may not be “pretty”, as Steve Martin would say, but, boy it sure is good for your head!!

After class was over, everyone went their separate ways. Most went home I suspect, but a few ended up in bars and comedy clubs. I, reversed my trail from the college back to the Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal and checked into a hotel room. Early the next morning, I would get up, walk a few hundred meters to the ferry that would take me back to the Sunshine Coast. On board, I would eat one “All-Aboard Breakfast” in the cafeteria, and then disembark, walk to my truck and drive back to the other end of the coast to my school. By the time I reached the school, one half of my first morning class was usually over. My students were always great and very supportive. They knew that I was usually the first person in the school every other morning and they knew exactly why I was late on Thursday mornings. They would cheer and whistle when I walked into the room and attempt to persuade me to give them at least part of the stand-up routine I had worked on the night before. After the first Wednesday evening class, I knew this was expected from me back in my classroom so I always kept my comedy routines really clean. This was quite different from the routines put together by most of the others in the class. I remember some of the jokes written by a few of the other members:

Olympic Committee Husband – My wife works with the 2010 Olympic Committee, and they have finally come up with the slogan that will be used for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. It goes like this - FUCK NORWAY!!!

Indian Business Man – I went to my cousin’s wedding last weekend. The bride and groom didn’t bother with a honeymoon though. They ‘ve known about the wedding since 1980.

They thought it would be good to make a Bollywood movie at the ceremony too, but it didn’t work because there were only 300 people there – and no bushes to hide behind!!

Working Woman – I came home the other day about 2:00 in the afternoon and found my husband in bed with another man, giving it to him up the bum. Before I had a chance to ask, what the hell was going on, my husband says, “This isn’t what it looks like honey. Bill has had a heart attack and I’m trying to revive him.” So I say, “Well why don’t you try giving him mouth-to-mouth?” To which my husband replies, “How the hell do you think all this got started?”

Anyway, the kids were happy when I told them some of my (clean) jokes and when I finally finished my Stand-Up Comedy course, I gave them the whole routine one day in class. They were a brilliant and supportive audience and I appreciated their cheers and applause.

Anyway, I attended class every Wednesday for nine weeks. We were taught about the etiquette of comedy. That is, it is not permissible to make and tell jokes about anyone who is on a lower socio-economic level than you. It is not permissible to write and tell jokes about anyone who is more disadvantaged or worse off in life than you (whether that be actual or perceived). For instance, a white person cannot tell jokes about a black person but, the reverse is alright. A man is not allowed to tell a joke about a woman unless he is presently in a relationship with that woman, however a woman can tell all the jokes she wants about any man. In short the universal joke maker/teller would be a handicapped elderly black woman living in a cardboard box. There are four universal joke recipients – God, Jesus, the Pope and Donald Trump. That’s why the first three are so serious. Joke etiquette dictates that they can’t make jokes about anyone. Donald Trump should be serious too but . . . well . . . he’s just a dick!! It was also important that we stay well clear of sensitive issues like domestic violence, racism and rape etc. This made perfect sense to me because I, nor any of the other members of my class ever saw anything remotely funny surrounding those topics. We were also taught how to write a joke using a variety of different lead-ins. There was the “Top Ten” lead-in and the “Difference between” lead-in and the “Similarity” lead-in. There was also the “Three people walk into a bar” lead-in and others. All of the lead-ins were to be followed with a punch-line that brought with it a degree of unexpectedness and perhaps shock, taking the audience in a completely different direction than what they got from the lead-in segment. We were also taught that 99.99 % of all stand-up comedians follow a memorized script which they perfect and follow at all costs. Even comedians who appear to be ad-libbing their performance, in fact, have improvisation built right into their scripts. Our instructor let us know each week, that it was very, very important to never, ever, stray from our written scripts under any circumstances.

It was so interesting to hear everyone’s jokes and new jokes each week. It was fun to watch them grow in confidence and funniness from session to session. We were a club, almost like a family. I felt warm and fuzzy (and funny) to be a member of this group. And finally, it was amazing to watch the members perform during our final class exam. The final exam, of course, was where we all performed for a night at a comedy club in the city in front of a packed house of people, all there for an evening of dining and comedy. Each of the performers in my class was from Vancouver so each had anywhere from 10 to 20 supporters, family members and friends in the audience to cheer them on. Because I lived on the Sunshine Coast and needed to take a Ferry boat to get to the city (as did all of my family and friends), I ended up having only one fan to cheer and laugh when I told my jokes. It was interesting to watch the members of our exclusive little club on the night of the final performance. Most of us, if not all of us were nervous – one guy so much so that he bolted from the club before he was called onto the stage. Two of the women and one of the Indian guys puked. It was all great comedy just being part of this group at the back of the house. My routine was scheduled near the end of the evening, so most of the audience were finished their meals and most of them were reasonably inebriated, and laughter came easily and with great gusto by the time I took the stage. As I fought with the microphone, I was surprised at the rousing and resounding cheers I received from the crowd. I could barely hear my lone friend at the back of the house, it was so raucous. My routine contained some jokes about things I knew and loved, like pig-farming and Canadian Football. The crowd was with me and I was again on one of my 'rolls'. One of the things I had not written into my script, and which was therefore totally unfamiliar to my instructor, was a little blurb about the Saskatchewan Roughriders (my absolute favorite professional Canadian Football team). My crowd that evening, of course were not supporters of that team, but rather supporters of the British Columbia team in the league. My team had just recently won the League Championship two weeks prior, while the home-town team from Vancouver had finished dead last in the league and did not even qualify for playoffs. So, when hearing my comment about the Roughriders, many of the laughs and cheers in the audience suddenly turned to boos and jeers. My instructor was sitting at a table directly in front of the stage. I could detect an uneasiness in his demeanor as I went on about my team’s championship and the jealousy and envy that this particular crowd must be feeling as a result of those unfortunate circumstances. The jeering graduated to hissing and my instructor’s discomfort morphed to a rather animated set of “cut, cut, cut” gestures and hand motions. Next, and from some restaurant patron I presume, I cleanly fielded a jettisoned dinner bun with my right hand while a second one narrowly missed my head. Spotting one of the throwers in the audience, I turned and fired the bun I had caught, back in his direction. The battle was on. Several more buns made their way onto the stage. Things looked like they could not get much worse, when finally my cooler head prevailed and I simply carried on with the rest of my routine. I think the crowd realized that this whole situation was, in fact, the highlight of the evening and that no one would remember any of the jokes I told, or that anyone told for that matter, but they certainly would remember the bun fight between 'that one performer' and the audience. I did manage to get the house back on my side by the end of the routine, and when it was all over I even got a standing ovation. My lone supporter acknowledged afterward that he had never in all his trips to theatre or live performances seen that sort of performer-crowd interaction. I think the comment he used was "something, something, something . . . giant balls of steel”.

My friend took me out for a drink afterward and then drove me to my hotel. He said good night and thanks for the laughs and then took off back into the city. The next morning I got up, caught the ferry, drove to school, taught some biology to some grade eleven kids, went home, fed the cats, watched some television and went to bed. I have often thought back about my one and only stand-up comedy performance, wondering if I should ever go back. But, I always come to the realization that it could never get any better or more memorable than that one night in Zawa’s on Commercial Drive in Vancouver where I told a joke and that guy threw a bun at me, and I caught it and threw it back at him. It was sort of like hitting a hole-in-one on your first golf shot ever in your life. There would be no sense trying to top that, so it was probably better to just move on to the next challenge.

Some years later, when I was teaching high-school in China, I did organize a Comedy Club within the senior student body of our school. I found that Chinese kids loved to laugh and had such an inherent knack for comedy. I used the tools, information and experience I had gleaned from my enrollment in the Comedy course at Langara College. Some of the members of the club performed some 'stand-up' for groups of teachers and, the whole club performed some “Monty Python” skits for the entire student body at a few Variety Night performances. I had such a great group of truly funny students in my group, so a lot of wonderful and hilarious memories came out of our time together. One of my proudest moments however, came when one of the students from this Comedy Club graduated from our school, and traveled to Canada to attend Langara College. While he was in attendance at the College he enrolled in the same Stand-up Comedy course I had taken years earlier. He had the same instructor I had and, his final exam was on the same stage in the same Comedy Club that I had performed in. He had a few of his High-School classmates from China (also graduated and then going to school in Vancouver) in attendance, and to cheer-on his performance. He later showed me his final-exam video of the performance. It was fantastic and brought back some pretty potent memories. I was so proud. He was much funnier than I ever was. Being both an actor and a dancer, he had a great on-stage presence as well, so he shone like a brilliant star in the sky. Unfortunately for him though, he did not manage to get one single dinner bun thrown in his direction. I can’t help feeling that I perhaps failed him somehow, as the leading member of our comedy group.