Mr. Dee absent; Gerry Dee present at hilarious Kelowna stop

CBC television sitcom star Mr. D. was marked absent at Kelowna Community Theatre on Monday night. Instead, stand-up comedian Gerry Dee was present and had a sold-out crowd laughing from beginning to end.

Mr. D was created by, written by and stars Dee based on his experience as a high-school teacher. It’s clean fun. It is CBC after all.

Gerry Dee, on the other hand, drops F-bombs and takes extreme pleasure in presenting gross humour — his wife’s bowel movements while giving birth, for example. It was definitely the B side (or Dee side) of his dual personality.

His monologue is a mix of pacing back and forth interspersed with witty exchanges with audience members. And he is quick.

One of his funniest routines was about attending a wake for his mother and realizing he didn’t have many photos to contribute to a Memory Wall. So he began taking multiple photographs of his father so he would have enough for two bulletin boards and best his siblings. His father caught on and started posing. Then his sister revealed she was doing the same thing in preparation for their father’s wake.

Dee admitted he doesn’t usually start his shows focussing on death and switched his attention to his wife of 10 years (or 87,000 hours): “I love her but there are so many pretty women out there,” he groaned to laughter.

Of course, that produced a series of jokes on monogamy and socalled ‘hall passes’ when a partner can do anything he/she wants with whoever.

Add humour about his children, age nine, seven and four, especially the four-year-old who consistently repeated his demands for a certain treat despite every threat.

Even a serious subject like pedophiles got the Dee treatment since they all have moustaches and “Tom Selleck" becomes the codeword every time someone with one appears too focused on children.

And Dee admitted he had “AIDS for a weekend” after a telephone message from his doctor who wanted to discuss a mislabelled blood test sample.

One of the best moments was an exchange with an audience member who identified himself as a former gymnast with Team Canada and former Cirque du Soleil performer. After making fun of him — “Cirque du Soleil Kelowna chapter?” — Dee invited him on stage where the former athlete proved he still had those skills by doing a backflip (to cheers from the crowd).

“If I tried to do that right now, I’d be paralyzed. With AIDS,” Dee quipped.

Even Rutland schools made it into the act when the principal of Rutland Elementary asked how teachers deal with students using profanity. That led to Dee’s funny recollections about how he dealt with it (R-rated) and the horror of his school’s administrators.

“I like small humour. I don’t like big humour. I like awkward humour,” he reveals on his website (gerrydee.com). “But my favorite humour is where you’re saying things that people wish they could say, but no one does. That’s the humour I grew up on. That’s very Scottish. Very subtle.”

If not for his television fame and longevity, Dee was almost overshadowed by warm-up comedian Mayce Galoni who didn’t resort to F-bombs or gross humour, but his own inherent nerdiness for laughs. An up-andcomer to watch.