Best Comedy/Improv Group:
The Sunday Service
TheSundayService.ca
Sundays are about rituals. If there’s one day of the week when we always do that one thing, it’s Sunday.
For some, it’s laundry. For others, it’s daytime drinking at the pub and British dramas on PBS.
Some people even go to church.
For one diligent group of comedians, Sunday is the day they hold court in the hallowed house of worship that is the Fox Cabaret. Their ritual involves a live improv show that keeps attendees coming back for more games, sketches, and absurdity each and every week.
The group and their live show are interchangeably called The Sunday Service. Their members include Ryan Beil, Caitlin Howden, Kevin Lee, Aaron Read, Taz VanRassel, and musical director Emmett Hall.
The Sunday Service began ten years ago at a now-defunct vegan fast food café, says Beil in a recent phone interview (“We’ve been saying ten years ago for about two years, so we’re really loose with the time,” interjects Howden, who is also present on the call).
Exact date aside, back in those early days, the group was a duo – Beil and VanRassel – performing an improv show on a very tiny stage for youth and “people who were there for the vegan pear sandwich.”
As the group has added to its numbers, and changed venues a couple of times, they’ve never deviated from their particular strain of high-energy improv comedy.
“It’s a fun, safe place to be,” says Beil of the weekly shows. “It’s welcoming you into our collective imagination while we fuck around with each other on stage in front of you.”
They’ve racked up numerous Canadian Comedy award nominations in the process, and even had Nov. 18, 2011, proclaimed Sunday Service Day by Mayor Gregor Robertson.
“We’re not really politically charged,” adds Howden, who joined the group in 2011 after moving out here from Toronto. “We don’t have a big agenda that we feel the need to push. We barely read the newspaper.”
“We barely read,” clarifies Beil.
Each Sunday Service member has their own distinctive comedy style, which Beil and Howden chose to explain using boy band terms.
Read is “the cute one who’s also insane,” says Beil, and Howden describes Lee as “the strong boy” (“with good reading retention,” adds Beil). Taz is “the 38-year-old who’s in a boy band and smokes,” says Howden.
“I’m kind of the Paul McCartney,” says Beil. “I’m the gentle genius with soft eyes. The Everyman.”
“For the sake of the article, let’s just say that I said that,” says Howden.
As for Howden: “I’m more of a Charlotte/Miranda/Carrie,” says Howden, ditching the boy band analogy altogether. “Ooh! We forgot Emmett, who is our musical director. He’s like the Larry David of the boy band.” She pauses. “This isn’t helpful, is it?”
The Sunday Service regularly shares the stage with visiting comics – like Paul F. Tompkins, Chris Locke, and DJ Demers – who “know that to come and do our show, you’re going to be guaranteed a full house with a great audience and a really fun vibe,” says Howden.
Speaking of the full house and fun vibe: The Sunday Service has enjoyed plenty of both since moving their show to the Fox Cabaret in 2014.
The two-hour improv extravaganza regularly attracts a mix of devotees and nervous newbies.
“Every week, we poll the audience and say, ‘Who’s here for the first time?’ And it’s half the crowd that is trying this new show that they heard about from a friend,” says Howden. “So they’re taking a pretty big risk, and you can tell within the first five minutes when they figure out what the show is, that they’re having a good time.”
The ticket price has remained the same since the beginning: the otherwise unheard-of low sum of $7.
The Sunday Service is hard at work on a sizzle reel for a television series pitch, based on the improv show and also “a hyperbolized version of our lives where we’re playing ourselves but a bit more interesting and quirky for the television audiences,” says Beil.
But that’s down the road. Until then, you can find The Sunday Service every Sunday at 9pm at the Fox Cabaret (2321 Main).
