Hanging tough in the comedy game
Gerry Dee credits his athletic past for helping him navigate career as a funny guy
When a standup comic walks onstage, it’s rarely to an audience member shouting out, “Hey! An athlete!” Indeed, the art form predominantly attracts those quirky souls on society’s periphery. Their wardrobe, their posture, their bodies often echoing their, um, uniqueness. And then there’s Gerry Dee, whose new tour has him playing the Burlington Performing Arts Centre Wednesday, Dec. 6. Dee was a high-level athlete throughout his adolescence and into university. Onstage, his Joe Everybody body type may not scream it. But his body language does, as does much of the jock-fuelled material mined from his tenure as a high school gym teacher. Sure, that background helped fast-track Dee’s comic voice and quickly established a strong confidence every standup longs for on stage. But Dee says elite-level sports also prepared him to navigate — survive, even — all those offstage low points that beat down so many of his colleagues.
“Standup is gruelling,” says Dee, on the phone from his home in Toronto. “It’s a lot of (people telling you), ‘No! You’re not good enough.’ It’s a lot of bombing. But I was used to defeat ... I was used to competition.”
And Dee says he competed often in his near 20-year standup career: The customary local Funniest Person with a Day Job, Star Search and NBC’s Last Comic Standing — the latter in which he placed third but had many in the industry arguing he should have won.
“I just felt sports helped me get through that because I was used to getting cut (from a team).” Indeed, Dee seems bemused at those standups who wallow in the setbacks that are almost a daily job description. “Nobody is going to cry for you. You just gotta bounce back up.”
Such a proclamation may seem cavalier coming from a comic who regularly sells outs theatres across the country and stars in a sitcom he created, “Mr. D,” that’s the darling of the CBC, now in its seventh season. The average Canadian can likely name only a handful of standup comics from this country; Dee would be one of them.
But in standup, like any job, success is relative.
“Yeah, that was over and done pretty quickly,” says Dee, who’s married with three kids under 10, about a proposed partnership with actor Will Arnett a few years ago to bring Mr. D to America. “It was a stressful time in our lives, family-wise ... there was so much hope of getting a show on big, massive America.”
While he speaks of short windows of opportunity to crack that lucrative American market, Dee, 48, says he’s content to “take a step back” and wait for the right moment — while insisting any leap comes with conditions.
He’s not, for instance, prepared to play rinky-dink venues.
“I could go there and play clubs galore, but make little money,” he says. “But what do I tell my wife and kids? They’re going to miss their hockey and their dance ...” Here, his voice trails off before he concludes, “I’m not interested in that.”
But his tone isn’t smug or entitled. Rather, Dee, who says he’s still very driven, seems more content and grateful with what he’s already achieved. “I grew up a lot in those two years,” he concedes, referring to the demise of the Arnett deal.
Here, too, his background at high level sports — he played hockey and golf — boded well.
“That’s where I learned to win and lose. And win and lose graciously.”