Touring show pairs tropes about healthy living with stand-up comedy
A Thai restaurant, an ATM lighting the stage, and an audience of 12: it could have been a page out of any entertainer’s memoir.
A group of Montréal comedians made a stop in Guelph with their show Healthy Living in Comedy at the Red Papaya on Feb. 17, featuring Toronto’s Mike Rita as the headliner.
When these comedians were deciding where to tour with their show, someone must have told them that Guelph is an up-and-coming hotspot for comedy. While “hotspot” might be a bit of a stretch for Guelph on a good day, this troupe seemed to stumble into town during a particularly soggy patch.
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While the show was intended to focus on the tropes surrounding healthy lifestyles, as 9:30 p.m. rolled around and only a handful of people were scattered throughout the dark restaurant, host Walter J. Lyng kicked off the show with another theme that would continue through the rest of the evening: poking fun at lack of attendance.
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When Chris Venditto walked on as the first act of the night, he established his own style of self-deprecating humour right off the bat. He began by telling the audience of the time his friends and family held an intervention about his weight only to serve cake at the end of the night. With an unapologetic tone, Venditto noted that, as a 26-year-old man who still lives with his Italian mother, he therefore only has “mom jokes” and “fat jokes,” which were both well received by the audience.
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Lawrence Corber was up next, presenting a set that was much less focused on his own pitfalls, but rather the pitfalls of Québec’s roadwork, homophobic Home Hardware customers, and his aging parents. Corber’s use of physical humour while explaining his claim to fame in his local newspaper kept the audience’s energy high and the laughs rolling.
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Reese Turner, originally from Mississauga, used his own tendency to be forgetful to make use of callbacks, tying together his nonchalant jokes about sex, drugs, and sleepwalking. While Turner’s leisurely pacing seemed to bring the audience’s energy down, this would soon be remedied by a bit about the “change diet”—a diet in which, according to the comedian, junk foods can instantly become healthy just by changing their names to vegetables.
Headliner Mike Rita, who has made quite the name for himself among the Toronto comedy scene, took to the stage boyband-style, sitting backward on a chair, dimly lit by the restaurant’s ATM. Rita’s crowd work formed the basis of his set, taking jabs at Guelph’s small-town feel and lack of diversity.
Between these mostly improvised rants, Rita showed off his storytelling skills, entertaining the audience with stories of birth certificate mishaps, childhood delinquency, and getting his dad into technology by showing him porn. Rita’s use of impressions and dialogue during these anecdotes kept the intimate audience thoroughly engaged.
While the show wasn’t exactly a success in terms of ticket sales, each of the comedians used the situation to their advantage, often trying to coax passersby from the evening’s Storm game to join in on the fun.
Photos by Dana Bellamy/The Ontarion.