LANGUAGE OF LAUGHS
James returns to Windsor
Ron James is trying not to sound too opinionated. It’s not really working.
“Some people have allegiance to strange things. I remember when I used to make fun of Tim Hortons doughnuts. You could hear a pin drop in the room,” the veteran Canadian comedian told the Star.
“Come on. It’s a roll of fat with a hole in the middle. You know, the soldiers didn’t make ’em when they took the hill on Vimy Ridge.”
Set to bring his Full Throttle! tour to Windsor’s Chrysler Theatre on Friday, James can’t help but expound on any of “the eclectic buffet” of topics that cross his mind.
But after 25 years in the standup business and nine television specials to his credit, does James worry about running out of material?
Not at all. “Just read the newspapers. There’s material everywhere,” James explained. “I’m getting so much information — I don’t know what’s going on, buddy.”
From climate change to the shifting entertainment industry to the clash between Ontario teachers and the Doug Ford government, James said he has “everything ” on his plate these days.
“I land on a lot of bases,” he said. “It’s the comedian’s job to rock the apple cart — not ride in it.”
“It’s the comedian’s job to make sense of the chaos while walking through it in the language of laughs.”
Despite having so much to express, James has grown wary of doing so on Twitter (which he describes as “a cesspool”) and Facebook (he calls Mark Zuckerberg “the most anti-social automaton the planet has ever seen”).
“That’s where you’ll find things are very polarized,” he warned. “(It shows) how fractured the entire world has become.”
TYLER BROWNBRIDGE
Perhaps social media just isn’t the right medium for James’ verbose style. He fully admits to having a love of language and a penchant for obscure references.
And if educated turns of phrases are out of fashion in the current era of online hype, James said he’ll happily “stay irrelevant.”
“I’ll let people think I’m relevant when they buy a ticket to the show.”
Lately, James has also been channelling his way with words into literary form: All Over the Map, published by Random House, should be on Canadian bookstore shelves in October.
“I like the way words trip off the tongue and tickle the ear as well as the funny bone,” James said.
Fans can expect plenty of James’ unique sense of humour in his debut book. And he does believe there’s such a thing as a Canadian sense of humour.
“I don’t think it’s quite as aggressive as American humour,” he said.
James’ theory is that there are fundamental differences between a nation like Canada that was “never an empire” and a nation like the U.S. that was “sired through the smoke and fire of revolution.”
“Just remember that 60 million people south of the border believe that Donald Trump has something intelligent to say,” James quipped.
“I don’t play the States, so I don’t give a rat’s ass what they think of me.”