Poppin' My Comedic Cherry!

Toastmasters meetings supply us with many things, but, the one thing you can always depend upon is a warm, enthusiastic audience. Oh sure, eventually someone will be invited to stand up and critique your presentation, and after the meeting you will get handed little notes extolling your virtues and/or itemizing you failings; i.e. “You mispronounced Leptodactylous!”, or, “Was the fact that your fly was down an intended part of your presentation?” Most are kinder than others!


All told, the club provides us with a safe comfortable environment where we can test our wings and a huge safety net for those times when we don’t quite fly right! Ideally these would be the same circumstances we would face when we finally attempt standing before an audience in the real world.

I recently was given an opportunity to make my debut appearance on Broadway…. No… not the one in New York, but right here in downtown Saskatoon. It was in a bar and I was to be the first of six Stand Up acts! This was not a Toastmasters crowd.

Now, I have done a little humour in Bars before. But only when I was in High School, and then I was able to take my own audience and therefore my own comfort zone with me. At that time I’d been issued a challenge; how to get a very large number of obviously underage high school students into a bar and served without the benefit of fake ID!

I accomplished this by approaching one of our local establishments and asking to rent one of their banquet rooms for a Roast. They enquired as to whether my group would be remaining at the premises after our event. I assured them that the only way my friends would leave before closing time would be if they were forcibly ejected. “In that case,” the owner smiled, “we won’t charge you rent for the facilities”. It worked very well.

I was a little apprehensive when Julie and I approached the Joint where I was to deliver my Stand up ‘Ice-breaker’; I didn’t want to end up on the rocks! Outside the place were 4 genuinely huge ‘good ol’ boys’, their arms bare in the February cold to better display their Tats!

Inside we took a table one row back at the far right of the stage. Front and centre was a table of five young fellows who were boisterously celebrating something, and appeared to have been celebrating for some time. I was just starting to try and formulate a few funny, ‘shut-up’ lines, to defuse any heckling, when who should walk in and take a seat behind them, than those four nasty looking sets of Tats! “Might have been,” thought I to myself, “a good night to have stayed in Kinley!”

In the end they worked out just fine! By 9:00 there were well over 100 people there. The only annoyance was the fact that I had to stop talking every few seconds because a lot of them were laughing! However, if they see me a couple more times I’m sure they’ll get over that!


It was an interesting line up of speakers. After me there was a charming driver from the Saskatoon Transit system. Not too funny, but a winning personality. Next was a fellow who seemed to have put some thought and polish into his presentation. Next up was an aboriginal fellow who did some awesome impersonations, and a string of ‘Indian’ jokes that were hilarious, but couldn’t be repeated by you or I.

The young fellow who organized the event goes to U of S, and he MC’d for the evening. He was quite good, and did well with the introductions. It was the last two acts that brought disappointment to the evening; and these two the ‘pros’, they do this for a living! I hate to damn anyone with faint praise, but, “Putrid”, is the only word that sums up my opinion and can be used in these pages!

The first wasn’t totally brutal, but, he was very drunk, took every opportunity to brag about how much cocaine he’d ingested, and looked entirely pleased with himself throughout. Then came the main event; this guy went on for 50 minutes in the most homophobic, misogynistic manner possible. The worst thing about it was that he wasn’t funny! Not just with me; he couldn’t hold the audience! He was irritated that people were talking and ignoring him. The four nasty sets of Tats left about 10 minutes into his routine, and he was smart enough not to say anything! Then the 5 young fellows got up to leave, and the performer started heckling them. It was all I could do to hold back my Bride from leaping over our table, storming up on stage and cold-cocking him with a beer bottle!