STANDUP & MOVE UP with Kate Barron
Brassy prizewinning local comedian has many rungs to climb but a lot of momentum going into Sunday’s Just for Laughs Festival Showcase
It’s a Wednesday night at an unremarkable bar that, like so many, struggles to transform itself into a semblance of a comedy club one night per week.
Patrons pay varying levels of attention to men doing varying versions of fairly typical young-man standup — my lifestyle is disturbing, my roommates are disgraceful — with varying levels of success. Then they cede the stage to someone with a rather different energy.
The sunnier vibe coming from blond, smiling Kate Barron as she ascends changes the mood in the room, but it becomes clear she’s not letting the crowd have its (slightly indifferent) way: she grabs the mic and leans into the audience, loud and emphatic.
The precise moment she wins them over is probably when she recalls scorning a friend’s young son who spontaneously declared that she was his best
friend. “You want to be my best friend, kid? Here’s the test: can you deadlift me out of an Uber and carry me up to my apartment at 4 o’clock in the morning, and then take me for brunch the next morning and not say a f--king word about it? ’Cause that’s the job.”
Two and a half years after her first open-mic night, the 34year-old Barron has been climbing the ranks of local standups lately, having been crowned the champion of the city’s vast Comedy Brawl showdown last year.
She takes another step with this Sunday’s Just for Laughs Festival Showcase at Comedy Bar; after that is a show at the John Candy Box Theatre on the 24th that the organizer had to be dissuaded from calling Kate Barron and Friends. The Vancouver native knows she’s not a “name” yet, but that doesn’t mean she lacks in self-belief.
“I think I’m a confident person,” she says some days later over a pint. Recently, she auditioned in front of Mark Breslin for a gig at Yuk Yuk’s in Toronto — another significant professional advance, potentially — and psyched herself up proper- ly: “I was like, I just came back from a great five-show weekend in Ottawa. I killed, I met great people … I owned that stage; I felt so comfortable up there and this is no different. It was mine to lose and I went into Comedy Brawl sort of the same way.”
It’s not that she has no respect for peers and rivals, but she says her work ethic drives her forward; while the other Brawl hopefuls were having a beer and socializing before the final event, she was alone, pacing and rehearsing.
The extra maturity probably helps onstage as well. Her jokes about dating and adventuresome personal life are not miles removed from those of her peers, but there’s no hint of selfloathing. Here I am, she seems to say, take me or leave me.
The audience took her at Comedy Brawl: a marathon of competitions to winnow down more than 400 entrants, with the crowd picking the survivors. That performance “really jumped out for me as she was able to dispatch several highly skilled and likeable performers who have more experience than her,” says Ian Atlas, the event’s organizer, in an email.
As she explains it, she grew up in Vancouver one of three kids in a slightly crowded home, an- gling for adults’ attention and stumbling upon her first comedy idol: Roseanne Barr (who, incidentally, performs next month in Brampton).
From there it was discreet, age-inappropriate savouring of Eddie Murphy’s mammoth standup specials Delirious and Raw — and then she did nothing, for years, thinking that actually becoming a comic was “not something normal people just decide to do.”
“I don’t think I even really believed that comedy was an option (professionally) when I was younger” — in fact, when a male acquaintance said he was going to try it, “I said, ‘What are you crazy? You don’t just be a standup comedian.’ ”
Past her 30th birthday, she finally tried for the first time at an open-mic night at the Ossington and the climb began and, though she’s keeping her day job at Second City for now, the ascent continues.
She got that Yuk Yuk’s gig, for example, and so joins the roster of the venue’s pro-am Wednesday lineup. “Not only is she very funny, she brings a level of confidence and life experience which is different from anything we currently have on our roster,” says Yuk’s vice-president Kyra Williams, citing her “great stage presence.”
Sunday’s show sees Barron and an armload of other local comedians auditioning for spots in this summer’s Just for Laughs festival in Montreal — a reminder that no matter how hot she’s been of late, there are an endless number of rungs on the showbiz ladder looming over her. (If she becomes, for example, a working pro touring the Yuk Yuk’s chain, that would be a big advance professionally, but it’s hardly a recipe for fame.)
But at the moment, she’s got a lot of momentum, a new podcast — A Positive Spin, with her writing partner Sara Starkman — and all sorts of ambitions for things beyond standup.
For one thing, her phone and her Google Docs are clogged with “lists and lists and lists” of “ideas I have for Baroness von Sketch, ideas that I have for This Hour Has 22 Minutes, ideas that I have for characters for Saturday Night Live.”
For now, it’s standup, which allows for straightforward personal anecdotes like the longago malaprop that scored with the Comedy Brawl crowd.
“When I was in Grade 7, my mom asked me if I was gangbanging a girl in my class,” she said to roars. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna need you to repeat the question.’ ”
The Just for Laughs Showcase, featuring Andrew Barr, Kate Barron, Adam Delorey, Craig Fay, Tracy Hamilton, Hisham Kelati, Meg MacKay, Chantel Marostica, Anna Menzies and Joe Vu is at 7 p.m. at Comedy Bar, 945 Bloor St. W. Tickets at comedybar.ca