Ron James brings his comic panoply to PAC
Still giving audiences an honest bang for their buck
Look, comedian Ron James knows what a pain it is going to the theatre some nights. The time, the parking, the cost. It’s more comfortable watching him at home. If you scroll the stations, you’ll probably find him right now.
So he never, ever takes it for granted when people show up. Which is why his shows can go on for two, sometimes 2½ hours some nights.
The way James sees it, if you make the effort to go, he owes you more than the minimum.
“I like to give the audience an honest bang for their buck,” he says from Owen Sound, where he’s playing the second of five consecutive nights. “I like to give them what they paid for in a marketplace increasingly glutted with acts. I mean, everybody is stringing a trapline.
“Not just comedians. It’s musicians, it’s public speakers, there’s an awful lot to draw a person’s wallet towards a ticket. And then, of course, you’re competing with the fracturing of the entertainment industry and the myriad number of options you got to stay at home.”
Exhibit A? Netflix.
“That’s a digital crackhouse. You sit down to watch a show and 73 hours later you’re stuck to the La-Z-Boy, stinking in your own filth, bleeding from the eyes. Then the (options) come up … ‘Maybe you’d like to watch “The Hunger Games?’” “The Hunger Games”? I haven’t eaten since last Tuesday!
“I remember watching “Band of Brothers” in a single sitting … by the time it was over I was collecting a veteran’s pension.”
For many Canadians, James is ‘that’ guy — a face they instantly recognize, thanks to nine CBC comedy specials and frequent appearances with the Just for Laughs festival. It seems like he has been doing stand-up forever, but he came to it late, after his acting career stalled in Los Angeles. During one particularly bleak stretch, he caught a stand-up special by Scottish comic Billy Connelly on TV one night. He was awed by Connelly’s free-wheeling approach, and decided to try and conquer Canada with it.
Twenty-five years later, he’s one of the country’s most celebrated comedians. Certainly one of the hardest-working, doing marathons each night for months on the road. James says he has about 45 actual minutes of material — the rest is pulled from headlines, strange encounters and whatever pops into his head that night.
For his latest tour “Full Throttle,” which brings him to FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre for the first time on Thursday, James has a buffet to choose from. Between Trump and Trudeau and now Doug Ford, it has never been a better — or scarier — time to rip politics.
“It’s become very visceral,” he says. “I teed off on Jason Kenney when I was in Medicine Hat and got a lot of heat online. ‘Know your audience!’ It’s not my job to ride the apple cart, it’s my job to rock it.”
Asked if he worries about blowback, James laughs it off.
“I know if there’s one thing I land on they don’t agree with, there’s going to be something else they do,” he says. “I think it was Norm MacDonald who said years ago, ‘You’ve got to try out new material, and if you’re not hearing quiet, you’re not working hard enough.’
“I don’t know, hearing 2,000 people going quiet at once is the loudest thing a comedian will ever hear. I don’t like quiet, I like people to be laughing. I have a simple mandate — if the ushers aren’t wiping the seats down after I’m finished, I haven’t done my job.”