Latest news with #improv
CBC
a day ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Comedian Lisa Gilroy is tapping into Canada's 'pure creative energy'
Lisa Gilroy was caught off guard when she was asked to host this year's Canadian Screen Awards. "I pushed my team to say yes immediately before they changed my mind, because I couldn't help but feel like it was a mistake that they asked me," she says, adding that she is particularly flabbergasted that her name will be added to a list of hosts that includes Andrea Martin and Martin Short, "people I would absolutely die for." But then again, the Edmonton-born comedian and actress — known for her viral social videos, appearances on comedy streaming service Dropout, and role on Hulu's Interior Chinatown and Prime Video's Jury Duty — kind of feels that way about her whole career. "When doing improv for free leads to real jobs, it's kind of criminally insane," she says. "It takes a lot to wrap your head around it….I'm always just tickled and feeling so grateful for any and every opportunity." Gilroy didn't set out to become a performer. Coming out of high school, she wanted to be a teacher. She enrolled in the University of Alberta's dual Bachelor of Fine Arts/Bachelor of Ed program with the ambition of being a drama teacher. But she found herself drawn to performing, and when she found improv, she fell in love. "It just looked so fun to me," she says. "You know, like, when you see someone doing something that you really want to do and you just get that burn in your belly and you're like, 'Oh, I have to get up there or I'm going to explode.' That's kind of what happened to me when I saw my first improv show. So I hung around at the back stage door and asked, like, how can I watch every show or be in a show? And then I never looked back." From there, she moved to Toronto, performing with long-running sketch comedy troupe the Sketchersons, and then with Second City, before moving on to Los Angeles. It's a career that Gilroy describes as "just kind of a pattern of thinking that I'm never going to do something, and then doing it." Even though Gilroy, like so many Canadian actors, is now based in the United States, she still very much identifies as Canadian. "I'm talking about Canada, probably ad nauseam to all my American friends," she says. "They're aware that that's what makes me who I am." She adds that, working in Los Angeles, she can often tell who's a fellow Canuck. Canadian entertainers, she says "have their own flavour," which comes in part thanks to a different approach to the industry. "I've made a lot of friends [in L.A.] who were child stars or were plugged into the entertainment industry when they were really young, in a way that I just don't think Canada has… we don't have that like toxic energy that sometimes I think American kids, unfortunately, can fall prey to," she says. "That's like, 'My baby's a star. She's going to be in a dishwasher commercial.' If you didn't live in Toronto or Vancouver, you probably didn't even know [working in TV] was a possibility for you growing up. And that's something that I experienced in Edmonton." As a result, she says, Canadians are more inclined to be "creative just for the joy of creating," even after they head to the States. "There's a lot of pure creative energy in Canada that isn't hinging on, like, 'I'm going to start booking TV shows when I'm 14 years old… it feels unfiltered in that way," she says. For her, the Canadian Screen Awards is an opportunity to celebrate that creative energy, as well as our shared cultural identity. "I just think it's a really cool time to be celebrating Canada," she says. "I feel like national pride is in a swell right now, and I couldn't be more excited to be present in the country for that, celebrating at this time when we're having to tell other countries that we're not for sale. I think it's kind of cool when push comes to shove that we're [having] this national pride party, and I'm here for it."
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
This might be the funniest TV show you'll ever see – and it's not Fawlty Towers
Last One Laughing, a series recently released on Amazon Prime, might be the funniest thing I've ever seen. The schtick, if you haven't seen it or its endless clips on Instagram, is simply this: ten comedians are stuck in a room for six hours, trying not to laugh. That's it. I mean, it can't be the funniest thing I've ever seen. I've seen Fawlty Towers. I've seen Some Like It Hot, Airplane! and Groundhog Day. I've seen Eddie Izzard doing live stand-up comedy in the 1990s, I've seen Dame Edna host a chat show. An anonymous media source of my acquaintance, often quoted in this column, is the funniest person I've ever met and he's not in this series – so how could it be? It's not painstakingly crafted; it's a studio show which covers a single day and is broken into six half-hour bits. And it's broadly improvised! How could any of that result in the funniest thing I've ever seen? And yet its bang-for-buck, laugh-per-minute rate seems unbetterable; I have laughed without cessation through every episode. And that's speaking as someone ageing, tired and sleep-deprived, juggling children and pets and National Insurance (which I really wasn't when I saw Eddie Izzard doing live stand-up comedy in the 1990s) with a global backdrop that is bleak and riddled with horror, and I'm still laughing without cessation through every episode. So it certainly feels like the funniest thing I've ever seen. I should make it clear: the comics assembled for the series aren't trying not to laugh as a collective. That would be too easy. They are in competition. If anyone chuckles, they're knocked out. So the job of the contestants is simultaneously to make each other laugh while remaining totally impassive themselves. It's a very, very funny idea for a programme. Even if the comedy bits weren't funny in themselves, the importance of their onlookers not laughing would immediately render them so. It brings a wave of the ghastly hilarity we feel when someone whispers a joke during a funeral, or passes you a secret cartoon of the maths teacher. It takes me back to my days at the Edinburgh Fringe (often in the company of some of the people who make this programme), when tickets for everything were about £3 so you could see ten shows a day, finding ourselves reasonably diverted by the comedy acts but only made helpless with painful, unconquerable merriment by amateur opera, or fiery political tub-thumping, or inexpert contemporary dance. The only thing in the world that's funnier than trying not to laugh, or watching someone else trying not to laugh, is someone who's genuinely unamused for reasons of disapproval. 'This is no laughing matter' is one of the funniest sentences in the English language. And that's why the cultural era we're living through, while no doubt the most puritanical and purse-lipped it's been for over a century, is also, in many ways, the funniest. With that in mind, the show is tremendously well cast. It's hosted by Jimmy Carr, the court jester of our age, who has survived attempted cancellation so often that his whole self is a counter-argument to 'This is no laughing matter'. He just stands and stands and stands for the principle that everything is. The contestants are perfect for the game in hand, including some (Daisy May Cooper, Richard Ayoade) whom you'd particularly credit with the ability to keep a straight face, and some (Bob Mortimer, Joe Wilkinson, Judi Love) who are so deeply, naturally hilarious that it's hard not to start giggling before they even speak. This makes for a magnificent tension as the competition gets underway. We see Bob Mortimer putting on a magic show, alive with patter and veils. Lou Sanders performs a piece of expressive mime with someone who may or may not be her mother. Rob Beckett explains the role of a proctologist ('Have you ever had a check up the bum?', he asks; 'A Czechoslovakian?' replies Bob Mortimer, puzzled). Each comedian in turn is obliged to sing Lovin' You by Minnie Riperton, with its high rippling falsetto – and all of it through the prism of fellow contestants twitching and fidgeting as they desperately try not to smile. And then, somehow, the funniest thing of all is Joe Wilkinson delivering an impromptu factual lecture on the 200th anniversary of the RNLI. We all know what it's like to try and quell a laugh that comes when it shouldn't. In a customs queue, just as you've been asked whether you packed your bag yourself. During a work meeting, as you're being told that everyone's being made redundant. In a school assembly, while a guest speaker describes the challenges of their disability. I don't think that comes from the bad part of us; quite the reverse, I think it's a physical reaction to an overdose of empathy. It requires full understanding of the gravity of the scenario; a sociopath wouldn't be tickled at all. It is the very confrontation with humanity that is, sometimes, our undoing. But this wonderful series has found a way to bottle that hilarious resource, the laugh-that-must-be-stifled, without having to lean on cruelty or bigotry or anything off-colour at all. It's not about 'saying the unsayable' or 'jokes you can't make any more'; in fact it demonstrates how the most powerful weapon in the comic armoury is simple silliness. Without spoilers, that is what must and does triumph in the end.
RNZ News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Taking improv competitions into the workplace
culture arts 39 minutes ago For most people, the concept of getting up on stage for improvisation is the stuff of nightmares, let alone doing it at work with your colleagues. But Covert Theatre's founder and artistic director Wade Jackson has been making it his mission to take the fear out of improv and focus on the connection. He started doing improv at university in the '90s and has been taking theatre into corporate spaces for 32 years. Five years ago, despite being in the height of the pandemic, he started Office Comedy Clash; an inter-office improv competition. Wade is also an author, speaker and high performance coach and speaks to Culture 101 about taking theatre into workplaces, encouraging senior leaders and executives to play and not be afraid to show their humanity.
CBC
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Srutika Sabu graduated medical school. Then she became a clown
Srutika Sabu didn't set out to be a performer. Originally, she set out to be a doctor. The Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist describes herself as a "generation 1.5" immigrant. Born in South India, her family immigrated to Canada when she was a child, landing in Brampton, Ont., before relocating again to the United States when she was in high school. "My parents decided the 2008 financial crisis was the right time to move to New Jersey to work in banking," she says. "I graduated high school there, I went to undergrad there, I went to med school there. I kind of followed this, like, very typical, very model minority, very South Asian excellence sort of path." In November 2019, shortly after finishing medical school, she felt like she needed a year off to "find herself" before starting her residency. So she moved back to Toronto temporarily to decompress. Then COVID hit — which she says, caused her to have "an existential crisis, like, I need to do something else in my life." By the time COVID restrictions had lifted, Sabu found herself stuck in Toronto, away from her family, with an expired U.S. visa and in need of some friends. So she took an improv course. From there, things quickly snowballed. In 2023, she took a clown class. Then she took a drag king class with performer Deanna Fleysher. She started working with Sweet Action Theatre Company, which she describes as "basically a clown cult," but also a place where "people from all backgrounds and all points in their artistic journey come and, like, incubate shows and ideas." And by the summer of 2024, she had a show in the Toronto Fringe Festival. She says that while she found performing therapeutic in a lot of ways, clown wasn't an immediate fit for her. "It was going against a lot of my programming," she says. "If you grew up in a certain, specific type of Asian household, you have to do things the right way. You can't fail. You have to keep up appearances. And what's so liberating about clown, in particular for me, was that literally the whole point of it is to fail, acknowledge the failure, and that's how you bring joy to the audience. And I was really bad at it for that reason." Her first show, 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go: Tosh Finds His Groove, starred her drag king/clown alter ego, Santosh Santosh — a self-proclaimed "tech bro, thought leader and second-hand Tesla owner." Sabu describes the character as a "beautiful love letter to South Asian masculinity." "He's a drunk uncle at a wedding, and also at the same time, he's incredibly optimistic, [always with] a bunch of business ideas," she says. Despite her medical education, Sabu says she was always an artist at heart. As a kid, she loved drawing and writing and music. Her parents encouraged her pursuits — but only up to a point. Once she started trying to make it a career, they were less enthused. "The reason my sister and I are the artsy kids we are is because my mom gave us so much free time, indulged us [in] any sort of artistic pursuit that we wanted, encouraged us, had so much feedback for us, and paid for piano lessons and all this sort of stuff," she says. "But I think it got too real for her, where, you know, she's like, 'Oh, I think I gave my children too much freedom, because now they're making a decision that I cannot imagine making.'" In addition to getting ready to do a remount of 1 Santosh Santosh 2 Go in Vancouver, Sabu is also about to debut a new show Neptune's with a Fish, a musical comedy which she describes as "a semi-autobiographical journey told through magical realism and a talking egg." "[It's about] trying to interrogate who's allowed to be an artist and what does being an artist mean, philosophically and spiritually. Also, like, how is that connected to our migration history?" Sabu says that the children of immigrants are often discouraged from pursuing artistic careers, in part because their parents were "traumatized by the points-based immigration system." Her parents were allowed to immigrate to Canada, and subsequently to the United States, because they had chosen particular career paths and "studied the right thing at the right time." If they had been artists, she adds, they probably wouldn't have been allowed to come. That said, in some ways, it was her parents' practicality which allowed her to walk away from a career in medicine to pursue one in clown, she points out. "They sort of attribute their ability to provide their children with a sense of safety and options [to having] made certain choices at the expense of what they might have wanted to do," she says. "But those choices allowed the future generation to have more options than they did."
CBS News
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
"SNL" comedian actor Tim Meadows comes to Denver stage in improv show
Some of the world's best improvisers are coming to a Denver stage this month. Tim Meadows, known for the title role in "The Ladies Man" movie and "SNL" skits, will be joined by Matt Walsh, Brad Morris and Joe Canale. The show is called Bluebird Improv, and Meadows says it's the best improv you can see. CBS "We were trying to do the math, and I think between the four of us we have like 100 years of improv experience," Meadows said. "So we never have bad shows. Our shows are always good because we enjoy making each other laugh, we love entertaining each other." Bluebird Improv will be on stage at the Garner Galleria Theatre May 16–18. A limited number of tickets will be available for every performance at $40 each through a digital lottery. Otherwise, tickets are available now on the Denver Center for the Performing Arts' website.
