Pi’s Phucking Phunny Celebration of Comedy highlights a scene that's regenerated and raring to go
Standup Kwasi Thomas hands mic to emerging and veteran comics in evening capped off by Tightrope Impro Theatre’s F*ck Marry Kill
Kwasi Thomas
Pi Theatre presents Pi’s Phucking Phunny Celebration of Comedy at Little Mountain Gallery (110 Water Street) on May 4
CONTRARY TO RECENT well publicized statements made by Jerry Seinfeld, comedy is in rude health after the last few years of escalating “culture wars” and political turbulence.
Kwasi Thomas is bent on proving this with the bill he’s curated for Pi’s Phucking Phunny Celebration of Comedy, presented by Pi Theatre at Little Mountain Gallery on May 4. He’s in the position to know. One of the city’s brightest regulars on the standup scene, Thomas has been around long enough to see local comedy reconfigure itself after the bruising closures of lockdown.
“We’re in a cruising altitude. A lot of the comedy clubs that were around before the pandemic, they’re gone now. It was adapt or die,” he tells Stir. “The comics have taken things into their own hands and created their own rooms, their own scene. Which is great. Everyone’s their own agent. In a good and bad way, the monkeys are running the zoo right now. But it makes for a more genuine experience, if you ask me. We’ve all been under the thumb of some showrunner or club owner, and we all have a version of how we’d do it better.”
In addition to that, Thomas notes that comedians are willing to take a few more risks after a delicate period of self-censorship driven by turmoil in the social field. “When we were in the thick of things there definitely was an attempt to keep things a little more p.c.,” he says. “But if you have a point of view that you believe in, that goes against the norm, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you ask me, that’s precisely what standup comedy is for. If your intention isn’t to harm, if your intention is to disrupt, then I don’t see a problem with that at all.”
Funny is funny, in other words, which is an ironclad law of nature. In Thomas’s case, he’s unquestionably very funny, although acting came first—he’s actually on his way to an audition when Stir reaches him by phone—but standup galvanized him.
“I saw it as part of my education. A friend took me to a show and it was a lightbulb moment,” he recalls. “I pretty much started doing standup the week after the very first time I saw it live.” At the time, Thomas was 19 and living in his hometown of Montreal. From the way he recounts it, the DNA of his act was already there in his first attempt—along with brazenness, a self-destructive streak, and the arrogance of youth.
“It went, unfortunately, really well,” he laughs. “And don’t get me wrong, to this day I still get my ass kicked on stage here and there. But you mention the arrogance of youth: I’d jotted some things down, but by the time I got onstage I threw away my set and just talked about the bad day I had. I just treated the audience like they were my close circle of friends and I went off. And because it was relatable—everyone’s had a crappy day!—it went very, very well. I tapped into something that I later had to learn how to do on purpose.”
Over 20 years later, Thomas is eager to sponsor the next generation, and the first half of Pi’s Phucking Phunny goes to three of Vancouver’s best emerging talents. Eden Kaminski opens the night with what looks like a Hannah Gadsby-style interrogation of our evolving social norms. In Kaminski, Thomas sees a blossoming talent ready for exposure. “I’ve been watching Eden work for three or four years and she’s one of those comics where every time you see her, it’s just better and better,” he says. “You can see the work she’s putting in and the dedication to it. I think it’s high time people get more familiar with her.”
Sahara Bayley is harder to pin down. Visit her YouTube channel and you’re confronted with a natural wellspring of offbeat humour who slays whether she’s alone on a stage or part of an improv group. Thomas says he tapped Sahara for the “energy”, which should set things up nicely for headliner Sean McDonnell. He looks like he isn’t old enough to drive, but McDonnell is a known quantity with 10 years of work and a number-one album on iTunes behind him (All in My Head). “Sean’s a bit of a ringer,” Thomas admits. “He’s been around and I’ve been dying to put him in a show. He should be headlining big, big stages.”
The second part of the evening is for Thomas’s “brothers and sisters in the game”. Gavin Clarkson and Katie-Ellen Humphries are both familiar from festival appearances along with radio and TV work, while Ryan Williams is perilously close to outgrowing the clubs and smaller rooms like Little Mountain. “It’s like watching dynamite do comedy,” is how Thomas characterizes his ferocious headliner. “In terms of the energy of each act, it makes for a really nice escalation,” he says.
This is already a gluttonous night for the audience, but stick around and Pi’s Phuckin Phunny Celebration of Comedy continues with the Tightrope Theatre Impro hit, F*ck Marry Kill, a longform comedy improv piece featuring Jeff Gladstone, Ashlee Ferral, Brent Hirose, and Jennifer Tong. As its title implies, F*ck Marry Kill promises a murder in the last act, which is a nice way of rounding out a solid night of killing by Thomas and his phriends. 
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