Laughing at what’s missing
Courtney Gilmour is a surging local standup talent scoring with material about being born without limbs
Courtney Gilmour is the next big thing in Canadian comedy, and if you pay attention at all, it is only a matter of time before you will be seeing, hearing and laughing at more of her jokes.
The co-winner of last year’s Just For Laughs Homegrown competition has no problems making people laugh, and is very busy, co-hosting her own monthly standup show, So Fresh N’ So Clean, constantly slinging jokes at plenty of local and road gigs and also writing on a few projects. The 33-year-old is past the up-and-coming stage, definitely in local-highlight mode, usually headlining or close to it on most bills, and as for what’s next, well, we’re nowhere near the punchline.
Gilmour does usually need a hand grabbing the mic before performing her sets of jokes, because, well, she doesn’t have any.
Born without multiple limbs, when Gilmour does standup, the night’s MC usually slides the mic into an elastic band around her arm, or she’ll use a mic stand. Funnily enough, she’s less likely to bring it up in a smaller comedy club, as opposed to a bigger theatre.
“I think a lot of people really have a misconcep- tion that a comedy crowd is just full of hecklers in an angry mood. Starting out, that definitely like crosses your mind,” says Gilmour during an interview in a Queens Quay cafe.
“Bigger crowds can be better, because people are more comfortable laughing at the girl with no hands in larger groups than when they’re in an smaller club, which is like seven people looking around thinking ‘Is this OK?’ With a larger group, they are all laughing collectively, and they feel there’s more of a comfort level.
“I mean, I’ve been treated pretty favourably, but I’ve had some mixed reactions where people think that it’s like almost inappropriate of me to be making fun of myself, which is weird but OK.”
But as with everything in her life, it is fodder for jokes, and one she busts out in February at an all-female showcase is the exact kind of joke that she uses to break any tension: “People ask me if I wish I had hands. I mostly just wish you guys didn't have hands.” The set kills.
“Courtney has an exceptional wit, but it’s tempered with remarkable kindness,” says local comedy producer/promoter Ian Atlas, whose agency Evergreen Talent represents her. “Her warmth and enthusiasm brings people on board with her performance, and that allows her to tackle serious topics while still connecting for big laughs.”
Watch a brief Gilmour comedy-club appearance on YouTube and you see that she gets plenty of laughs out of her disability, scoring with, for example, a joke about the hazards of moisturizing her arms and then trying to use them. Then she does something that might surprise some viewers: she moves on. “I made the move of deleting all my dating apps … Everything I was using to meet men on — Tinder, Bumble, UberEats — all gone.”
That joke and the rest of her set kills.
Born in Sarnia, Ont., Gilmour was raised in Waterloo and went to school at the University of Windsor. She says she likes to think that she was always funny, but being raised in a fairly strict Christian home, she says she was mostly exposed to British comedies such as Keeping up Appearances and Monty Python, as well as the Christian comedy circuit.
“I knew who Chris Rock was, but Doug Stanhope and all those people, they were in the periphery,” she says. “You know, church standup comedy is where it is at! Whenever I say that, people ask ‘that’s a thing? What is that?’ ”
By the time she got to university, where she studied English literature and communications, she was becoming a big comedy fan, and lucked into her first gig by organizing a fundraiser and bringing in comics from the U.S. A problem turned into an opportunity: There were no local comics to open, so she got the job.
“That was cool. It was a very cushy first introduction of doing comedy, because usually you start off in some dingy basement with, like, two barflies but this was like a big fundraiser event and all my friends and family were there.”
She came to Toronto as a writer, mostly working for lifestyle sites, and got her first taste of the comedy scene here by taking a Second City comedy-writing class. She says she still thinks of herself as a writer first, but at this point, she has let her freelance-writing day job dry up; her comedy career is now full-time.
Talking to her, it is easy to see that the one-time selfdescribed comedy groupie is now a total professional, breaking down which jokes work and which don’t, and what she is good at. Winning (along with D.J. Mausner) the Just For Laughs Homegrown competition — the Montreal festival’s annual competition between eight to 10 rising Canadian comedians — is absolutely her career highlight, but she says that it also played to her strengths: it was a big room.
“I wasn’t really that nervous. It was like whatever happened, I had already felt like I had won … no matter what I could say, ‘Hey, I’ve done Just For Laughs now,’ ” she says. “I do a lot of club shows and road gigs, and the biggest challenge of testing your material with smaller crowds is being able to do crowd work. Like asking someone in the front row their profession and riffing on that for 10 minutes. That’s something that I’m still developing. But I tend to do very well with bigger crowds because my jokes are really polished. I’ve got a bunch of jokes that are set, punchline, bam!”
These days, Gilmour is working on material for her upcoming Comedy Network special, which was the prize for winning Homegrown, and she’ll return to Just for Laughs again in Montreal in the summer. She is busy touring and is working on a script for an animated CBC web series, along with writing partners Christophe Davidson and Aisha Brown. Beyond So Fresh, So Clean, the monthly clean comedy night that she runs at Toronto’s Comedy Bar with Nour Hadidi, she is on bills there and far beyond — she recently filmed her set for the Winnipeg Comedy Festival and was then headed out to the Halifax fest to also do a taping.
Along the way, she also is trying to do something more serious — albeit in a somewhat funny way.
After her old prosthetic leg snapped months ago while she climbed the subway steps, Gilmour would like to raise awareness about just how expensive prosthetics are. She has started a Gofundme page where she is raising money for what she calls the “Maserati” of legs, which costs $100,000.
“There’s no government funding for it, and there should be. Amputees across Canada are either paying out of pocket, or relying on charities like the War Amps to cover very basic, barebones legs, that I have found in my experience have easily broken in half on me,” she says.