Small-town humour works everywhere, comic finds
Comedian Derek Edwards has one goal when he takes the stage. “I’m not trying to change your mind politically or your outlook on the world. I’m going for the gut laugh, and the more, the better,” he said recently.
Edwards’ tour “Alls I’m Saying ” is making 17 stops across Western Canada, including three shows in Saskatchewan: University Theatre in Regina on June 6, Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon on June 7 and the E. A. Rawlinson Centre in Prince Albert on June 8.
He said the title of the tour brings back memories. “If that doesn’t
ring as Canadiana, I don’t know what does,” he said. “It’s certainly a phrase I heard a lot growing up in northern Ontario.”
“I just figure I’m not really saying anything important so I might as well use it as a title,” he added with a laugh.
Edwards sells out concert halls across Canada, and is a regular at the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal.
His biography describes him as having “award-winning rural humour.”
“I’m not much of a city slicker. I try to relate to people from small towns like myself.” That style of humour has got him a lot of mileage.
“The first few times in Toronto, just speaking plain-spoken, how-you-doin’ type verbiage, and the thing is there’s so many people displaced from little towns living in the city that they were absolutely on board,” he said. “There’s no true definition of what a city person is, anyways,” he added. “Most of them are just regular folks. Takes them longer to get to work.”
It’s not the community that makes the difference in the type of crowd as much as the venue. Edwards likes performing in theatres as opposed to, say, “between frames at a bowling alley.”
In a theatre show, “almost invariably that leads to a real sociable, easygoing, kind-hearted group, regardless of the size of the place,” he said. He’s performed across the Prairies numerous times, enough to see that people are much like the ones he knows from his hometown of Timmins.