In Blueberries Are Assholes, writer-performer TJ Dawe explores the weirdness of everyday life
The Vancouver Fringe Festival stalwart goes for laughs this time out, inviting stand-up comedians to open his solo show
TJ Dawe, Blueberries Are Assholes
The Firehall Arts Centre presents Blueberries Are Assholes from October 19 to 30
WHEN STIR CATCHES up with Vancouver writer and theatre artist TJ Dawe, he’s about to do a one-on-one coaching session based on the Enneagram. Derived from the Greek word for nine, it’s a system that describes personalities in terms of nine types, each with its own motivations, desires, and predictable behaviour patterns. Dawe leads workshops for artists and non-artists based on the theory, which he says contributes to enhanced self-understanding and a better understanding of others. The personality typology also has a profound influence on his creative process.
“The Enneagram is an intrinsic part of how I create, how I work with people, and how I am actually sane and not huddled in some basement suite somewhere resenting the rest of the world for not thinking I’m as wonderful as I really am,” Dawe says with a wry laugh. “The reason to learn it is to understand how I get in my own way: What do I get caught up in? What’s my favourite flavour of self-sabotage? That has helped me immeasurably in getting out of my own way and learning to recognize when I’m self-sabotaging. One of the ways my personality loves to self-sabotage is exclusion, by believing I don’t belong when I actually do, and by not asking for help when help is available and it would be just fine to get.”
Dawe drew from his knowledge of his personality type for the making of his newest work, Blueberries Are Assholes. It’s a departure for the dual U.S.-Canadian citizen; his 18th show, it’s the first that isn’t an autobiography. His past works (such as Tired Cliches, Medicine, The Slipknot, Operatic Panic Attack, and One Man Star Wars Trilogy) have been stories—emotional, sad ones, he says—that have mined his own pain and trauma. This one, by contrast, is pure comedy, “joke after joke after joke”.
In Blueberries Are Assholes, which was a 2022 Vancouver Fringe Festival Pick of the Fringe, Dawe sends up the everyday, in all its bizarreness, with a particular focus on the English language, the human body, and food culture. He lays out the theme at the outset: what we perceive as regular reality is in fact unimaginably weird; we’re just accustomed to it or conditioned to accept it, he explains. For instance, why don’t we pronounce the “k” or the “gh” in the word knight? As he puts it, “We just accept that that’s a normal way to spell a word. There’s all kinds of things like that. Why do we say ‘Bless you’ when somebody sneezes? And why is it considered rude if you don’t?
“I always had some comedic riffing in my shows; even with my darkest jokes, there would be this idea of ‘Hey, this is a weird thing we all take for granted,’” Dawe says. “Then it just hit me: Wouldn’t it be fun to do a show that was nothing but that?’ I had been exploring all these anomalies, inconsistencies, and absurdities, and pretty soon I had a 60-minute script. I was really following an inner light. It wasn’t part of a grand plan or a chess move with my career. It just felt right.”
A shadow of his personality type crept up once the show first rolled out, however. Blueberries Are Assholes toured five Fringe festivals this past summer, and at the beginning, things were going well, but not as well as Dawe had hoped. He admits his ego reared up at first along these lines: “It’s my show! I wrote, directed, and performed it because I’m a genius and I’m unique!” But then “another, more rational part of me said ‘This show could be better, and you know somebody who could help you make it better.’”
That person was Ian Boothby, a Vancouver writer, performer, podcaster, and “joke machine”. “He’s one of the funniest people on the planet,” Dawe says.
Dawe has worked with Boothby in the past on pop-culture parody shows that he writes and directs. Boothby sweetened the Blueberries Are Assholes script with jokes; Dawe picked the ones that resonated with him and spent the Edmonton Fringe Festival integrating and rewriting them and making them his own. “Then it clicked,” Dawe says. “By the time I hit Vancouver, the show was firing on all cylinders, just like I always wanted. And it was a huge victory for me, given that I’m not accustomed to asking for help.”
In the show, Dawe dives into his fascination for the English language, the “twisted history” of words, and the way the human body does things like sneeze. “It is strange that we say ‘Bless you.’ I think it’s also strange that we don’t think it’s weird and horrifying that we sneeze in the first place. We scream and explode waste materials out of our face several times in a row, and it’s not a faux-pas. People don’t run; they stand where they are and say ‘Bless you.’ All of this is supremely bizarre, and we do this everyday as if it’s the most normal thing.”
The rise of “foodie” culture is another topic of intrigue for Dawe, with his favourite morning drink leading to the show’s title. Hint: check your teeth in the mirror after downing a blueberry smoothie and see what you find. “It’s kind of horrifying,” Dawe says. “Why does spinach get so much blame? Blueberries are way worse.”
The motivating factor behind Dawe’s probing of so many random bits of ridiculousness was to touch on the universal. Everybody sneezes, we all get things stuck in our teeth, and we’ve probably all stumbled over a nonsensical spelling or pronunciation at some point in our lives.
“I was going for unifying material,” Dawe says. “What’s something that’s going to bring people together and just help us laugh? I think the world is so fraught with anxiety and trauma from the last few years and longer that one of the best things anybody can do for people is to give people a belly laugh. It’s purgative, it’s cathartic, and it brings people together.”
To provide audiences with even more laughter, Dawe has invited four standout stand-up comedians to take turns opening each show: Charlie Demers, Yumi Nagashima, Patrick Maliha, and Dino Archie. (See here for who’s appearing when.) Dawe says he’d like to see more such crossover, given that theatre and comedy have so much in common.
“The skill to engage an audience is the skill to engage an audience,” Dawe says. “Some might do it with jokes, some might do it with drama, some might do it with dance. We’re all in the same business, ultimately.
“I love good standup,” he adds. “I love the idea of bringing comedy audiences to theatre, and theatre audiences to good stand-up comedy. Vancouver has an abundance of talent. I’d love to see this happen more often.”
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