DESJARDINS, DURANTE DESTINED FOR BIG TIME
They come from completely different backgrounds: she hails from Winnipeg and her previous career entailed covering sports; he comes from Montreal and his CV is littered with odd jobs. But what Chantal Desjardins and Gino Durante do have in common is comedy.
After a few years of plying their trade on the local scene, both are on the cusp of breaking out. Desjardins’s material is heavily personal and veers toward the naughty side; Durante’s shtick involves characterizations of life in this culturally diverse city, and he is a natural at an array of accents.
“I had been doing comedy for a few years, but that pesky day job kept getting in the way,” Desjardins cracks. “So now I’m doing it full time.”
The pesky job she refers to was hosting a national hockey show for Sportsnet covering the Canadiens, from which she received a pink slip last year. Prior to that, she covered sports on CJAD, CHOM, Virgin Radio and CTV.
The comedic edge comes naturally to her.
“I started the year on such a high note, and I ended the year doing standup on stage for seven people in Cornwall. It’s been quite the year.
“Now I have to be careful about one-night stands,” she adds. “I used to hand them all out a toothbrush. And it is only used once. But it’s a $4 toothbrush. And at the rate I’m going, I’ll be bankrupt. I have no TV job to fall back on. I guess I can always hold out hope of getting a sponsorship from Colgate.”
Durante studied theatre at Dawson College, with the intention of pursuing acting. But he got sidetracked doing open-mic nights at local clubs and developed a hankering for standup.
“I do ethnic humour, cultural diversity,” says Durante, who proceeds to slip into a dead-on Mexican accent, assuming the role of a flustered hotel concierge trying to deal with irate American tourists complaining about the noise in their room.
“We have no other rooms available … I don’t know what to tell you. … Maybe you should just build a wall around your room.”
My wish for 2017: Hopefully this will be the year that Montreal’s master blues guitarist Shane Murphy finally breaks out on the world stage. Murphy slayed once again last year, morphing into Muddy Waters at November’s Last Waltz tribute concert at the Corona Theatre.