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Comedian and SiriusXM radio personality Ben Miner knows Canada and he knows comedy, and with the heart of Montreal’s Just for Laughs Festival about to kick off, it was the perfect time to check in with Ben about Canadian comedy.
Ben has been a part of SiriusXM’s Canada Laughs channel since day one. Actually, he told me he’s been there before the official Day One. Ben explained, ” I used to work for a comedy booking company called Yuk Yuk’s up in Canada. And the founder, Mark Breslin used to be the program director at Canada Laughs under a different name back then, it was Laugh Attack when it first launched. And he had asked all his comedians to write a letter in support of satellite coming to Canada, to write that letter to our version of the FCC which is the CRTC. And I was the only comic to write a letter in support and then ask to speak before the judging committee.”
A passionate advocate for erasing barriers to sharing comedy globally, Ben gave a speech before the committee, and it was funny enough that the New York Times did a story on him. That was 2004.
Now Ben hosts Comic Stripped for the Canada Laughs channel, and he’s going to be hitting up Montreal’s Just for Laughs for his 11th festival this year and broadcasting his show from JFL this week. “We’re going to be broadcasting my show, Comic Stripped is going to be doing some recordings there, we’re also going to be doing some stuff with Ward & Al over on Canada Talks and the Todd Shapiro Show which also airs on my channel so we’re going to have a really good presence there. And not to mention all of our friends from the states are going to be there doing some stuff. Bennington is going to be there doing some big interviews too. So yeah, SiriusXM is going to be all over that festival.”
Miner’s home base is Toronto, and he’s a big part of the comedy scene there. He told me that Toronto is experiencing an amazing surge of outstanding comedy right now- one that he compared to the Boston scene at its height. “You’ve seen ‘When Stand Up Stood Out’, that documentary? That’s a doc about the Boston scene and how it blew up once Steven Wright got discovered.And the doors blew off on the Boston scene, and everybody started getting booked from there. And I really feel like Canada and Toronto in particular right now is living that. It just needs to be…someone needs to come in and scoop up all this talent. Because in 17 years of doing stand up, I can’t say that I’ve ever seen it this deep- it’s stand up, sketch improv, the scene here is incredible.”
Rebecca Kohler is one of the performers Miner singled out. “I think she is one of the best comics I’ve ever seen. She’s a great writer, great performer. Doesn’t wuss out on subject matter; she tackles stuff that not every comic would go after. She’s really smart and funny. I think she’s absolutely everything a stand up should be.” Ben also recommended checking out Jon Steinberg, a clean comic, with dark material. “He doesn’t swear or anything,” Miner said, “so if you find yourself offended at it, you’re getting offended at technically clean comedy. It just happens to be super dark, incredibly well written. He’s entirely his own thing, and very very funny.”
If your tastes run lighter, Ben suggests Sara Hennessey, Chris Locke or Mike Little, who he says is both silly and carefree on stage. “He absolutely smashed it on Conan O’Brien’s show”, he said about Little. “These are all comics you could watch and not leave afterwards thinking, wow the world is shit. They really do a good job of doing their own thing and it doesn’t have to be dark, its just really well written. It’s fun stand up. It makes me forget that I’m a comedian. I watch them and I’m like oh yeah, I do this too. Cool!”
“I look at a product like LetterKenny right now that Bell Media put out. It’s just ridiculous. It’s so funny and I think that Canadian comedy as a whole has become more accessible because it’s a lot cheaper to shoot stuff and get it out there for mass consumption.”
New technology and the internet has made it easier for Canadians to export their comedy, Ben said. “It’s a lot easier to get your stuff out there and I think you see- stuff like the Flight of the Conchords that comes out of New Zealand and maybe start to realize that you don’t need to have two hundred million people in your country in order to have something that is internationally viable.
If you’re coming to Montreal, Ben will be recording his show, Comic Stripped at the festival (check hahaha.com for days and times) and the schedule of guests is TBA but there is one guest he is hoping he can grab- Tom Green- who he compares to Andy Kaufman. “I’m really hoping that he comes by and sits in on my show. I used to work on Tom’s show for two seasons back when it was on The Comedy Network here in Canada. If you want to look at it in a broader sense, he’s kind of this generation’s Kaufman. There’d be no Jackass, Viva La Bam, there’d be none of that if it wasn’t for Tom. Even look at something like YouTube where his comedy is still inspiring people to go out there and do whatever and put it online and hope that something happens.”
While at the fest, Miner plans to check out The Nasty Show– “it’s always one of my favorite shows to check out”, and this year he is especially looking forward to checking out the Midnight Surprise show. “I’m really looking forward to the Midnight Surprise hosted by Blake Griffin of the Los Angeles Clippers. I guess he’s been doing funny poems at comedy clubs in LA for the last little while and I’m a huge basketball fan so I”m very very curious to see what Blake’s show is going to be like. I’m sure its going to be amazing.”
By the way, Ben’s favorite living stand up performer is Norm Macdonald, and he is hoping to get to meet Roseanne this fall at the Toronto Just for Laughs Festival. “If I get to meet Roseanne, I might cry. There’s a very good chance that I cry. I think she’s wonderful and I look back at her show, and it was the first sitcom that didn’t feature an idealized family, it wasn’t a doctor and a lawyer, it wasn’t somebody who owned a hotel, it was a family that had blue collar jobs for the parents, and kids struggled in school and had issues and difficulties and there were always dishes in the sink. It was a real family. To me that was the first time we ever saw a true family depiction on TV. The transition from her Carson set about being a domestic goddess and to her TV show, I can’t think of a another stand up who has ever taken their act and adapted it to a sitcom better than her.”
If you want to see more of what makes Canadian comedy so great right now, Ben says you should check out SiriusXM’s Top Comic competition. “It’s a gigantic thing here for comedy in Canada and something that we’re really proud of,” Ben said. This year the grand prize is the winner gets booked at Just for Laughs in Montreal for a TV taping, they get an hour at JFL 42 in Toronto, and then they get booked at JFL Northwest in Vancouver and in addition to that they get $25,000. The online vote starts August 1, with 18 comics to check out. According to Ben, all 18 are phenomenally talented and any one of them could win this thing.
And come on down (or up) to Montreal this week, and check out Comic Stripped with Ben Miner, but if you can’t make it, just tune in to Canada Laughs on Mondays at 8 pm EST, Tuesdays at 12 am EST and Saturdays at 7pm EST.
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