Comedian Ross Dauk spends more than an hour each week just writing and creating the event description for Jokes Please on Facebook. More than just a means to remind people about the recurring Main Street comedy night, Dauk also uses the social media platform to riff on everything from his fellow co-hosts to hot tubs to bears.
It’s his little gift to the supporters of Jokes Please – something to genuinely chortle at as he, and all your other friends, fill your Facebook feed with tedious event invites. But, be warned: just because the event implies it’s a night of all bear jokes, doesn’t mean it’s really a night of all bear jokes.
“My phone number is the Jokes Please phone number on the Internet, right? And people call it two or three times a year, maximum,” explains Dauk. “The day of the bear [post], three people called me asking, ‘Hey, do you have a bear comedy show tonight?’
“I’m like, ‘Uh yeah… 100 per cent bear stuff,’” he deadpans. “And none of them came! I went on stage asking if anyone called the Jokes Please number and it was none of them. So three weirdos called the Jokes Please number thinking, ‘FINALLY! Finally the bear show is happening,’” he laughs.
And those bear-loving no-shows would have definitely missed out. Jokes Please, a standup show taking place every Thursday at the charmingly drafty and decrepit Little Mountain Gallery on 26th, truly lives up to its hidden gem status. If you didn’t already know about the show, or see the brightly-lit sign in the window declaring that it’s a comedy night, you might think it a hole-in-the-wall meeting of some nihilistic hipster clan.
But take one step inside the front door and you’ve entered a figuratively warm and literally welcoming space – a place where newcomers can sit in the well-worn theatre seats or luxurious folding chairs provided, and sip $4 beers as a curated lineup works out their bits and pieces in peace.
Every night opens with about 20 minutes of fresh material courtesy of the host, or hosts, who are never far away – jogging back on stage between sets to poke fun at their friends, chat with the audience, or help segue into the next act. Some of it is prepared but a lot of it is improvised crowd work, between which a selection of comedians from far and wide take the stage for their short, snappy sets.
The night we attended recently featured top-notch regulars Brent Constantine and Jane Stanton, as well as sometime-host and Matt Damon look-alike Ivan Decker, who brings his own brand of national (near-international) cachet to the show.
Meanwhile, rotating guests have included the team behind popular Canadian satire website The Syrup Trap, as well as local legend Graham Clark, who is known – among his Laugh Gallery nights at Havana, Wilderness Man exploits, and enchanting beard paintings – for his comedic readings of the phone book, which he worked on for a number of weeks out of Jokes Please.
“There were a lot of people there every week who saw Graham talk about the phone book like, five or six weeks in a row, and it was pretty fascinating,” Dauk recalls. “Some people still bring it up, like, ‘Oh, is that phone book guy going to be here?’ And I’m like, that’s an amusing way to think of Graham Clark, multifaceted comedian.”
The guests may change but Dauk remains the centre of the Jokes Please universe. Between touring, opening for Todd Glass at last year’s Northwest Comedy Fest, and being ranked as one of the city’s best local comedians in the occasional public poll, the polite, Saskatchewan-born artist has his own standup career to take care of. However, he, and friends like part-time co-host and current Vancouver-Islander Andy Kallstrom, have also dedicated the last three years to making Jokes Please a place where the comedy is so fresh it belongs in a French bakery.
“There’s sort of a premium on new material,” Dauk explains, “so it feels more alive than some shows.”
“You can come back every single week if you wanted and it would always be different,” adds Decker, seated next to him at a busy, plant-lined Gastown café.
Jokes Please (pronounced the same way you would ask the waiter for the cheque) also has the distinction of being the only weekly standup show at Little Mountain Gallery, which comes with the bonus of being surrounded by some of the best monthly sketch, standup and improv shows in the city.
Managed by beloved local actor and improviser Ryan Beil, the room was rightly dubbed the “clubhouse of Main Street’s comedy scene” by Exclaim last year, and boasts a legacy of innovative programming in a town where you can now actually shake a stick at a plethora of other buzzworthy comedy nights (think Hot Art Wet City’s Come Draw With Me with Alicia Tobin, Sara Bynoe’s Cottage Bistro and Emerald nights, Patrick Maliha’s movie roasts at the Rio, and Beil’s other outlets, The Sunday Service and Rapp Battlez at the Fox Cabaret).
Like the events at Little Mountain Gallery, those shows succeed – and often sell out – largely because they strip away the structured comedy club clichés, and the expectant audiences that come with them.
“People go to a comedy club in the same way that they take a kickboxing class on a Groupon,” laments Decker, before deftly mimicking the airs of a stuffy, scowling suburbanite: “‘Oh, I’ll try this out. Maybe I’ll like it. I’ll probably hate it… I want to hate it, because that’s a more interesting story. To go to work and tell everybody I hated something.’”
“[Jokes Please] is a very fun, cool environment,” he counters, switching back to his regular, carnival barker-style voice. “You get to see a lot of the best comics in the city in an environment where they’re a little bit more free.
“As a person who tours a lot, it’s a way to come home and not have to do the jokes I’ve been doing on the road,” he continues. “You get pretty tired of your act after having done it so many times. I mean, it’s good, but you want to try to work out new stuff.”
So, if you wanted to see an entire standup routine about bears, it wouldn’t raise any eyebrows among this crowd – the night swings from casual to experimental to straight-up weird in the time it takes for the theatre’s dish heater to complete a single swivel. And Dauk and Decker would probably try their best to oblige you, just for the shits of it. But only if you remember to say Please.
• Jokes Please runs every Thursday night at 9pm at Little Mountain Gallery (195 E 26th). Admission $5 at the door. Facebook.com/pleasejokesplease/
