Sep 24-27. Wed-Thu 8:30pm; Fri 9pm; Sat 8pm & 10:45pm. $6-$15. Absolute Comedy, 2335 Yonge. 416-486-7700. www.absolutecomedy.ca
If he had to, if he really had to, Barry Kennedy says he could give up comedy. He spends more time acting and writing books these days anyway, and guesses that stand-up takes up only about 15 per cent of his time.
Not like back in the day, when the former fighter pilot was doing a couple hundred shows a year, building a second career after he was discovered, more or less by chance, at a Vancouver club in 1985.
"I could, under pressure, give up stand-up or acting," he says, on the phone from Regina where he's shooting a small part in the final episode of Corner Gas. "But writing — I can't grasp the concept of not writing."
Maybe that sounds like something an airy-fairy art-school undergrad might say. But Kennedy, 55, is no noodle-eating rookie and talks about his work with matter-of-fact dispassion.
"That's what happened in my family — we're prairie folk and, on my dad's side, Newfoundlanders. We told stories," he says.
Kennedy headlines this week at Absolute Comedy and, between gigs, is working on his fourth novel, which touches on his relationship with the aforementioned dad, who happens to be Cancon mainstay Gordon Pinsent. Pinsent and his mom split up when he was five, and the two were not re-introduced until some 25 years later — when Kennedy "borrowed a jet" from his squadron and flew down for a meeting at Vancouver's regal Queen Elizabeth Theatre. It's an event he is mining for the book.
"When I do stand-up, it's my desert," he says.
But not a very sugary one, by the sounds of it: "My take on comedy is that it's such an integral part of life [that] it can't be separated from tragedy," he says. "I'm astonished how many good, wonderful, otherwise intelligent and feeling people actually believe that tragedy and comedy should sleep in separate beds."
He adds that, "it's essential that funerals should be recognized as equals with weddings. At least equals."
Despite the demands of novel-writing and presumably better paying gigs on TV, Kennedy has stuck with comedy because of its unique challenges. He loves the psychological process of testing out material, he says, even if something flops and flops repeatedly.
All comics, he notes, "have that one bit that we love and it just won't fucking work, no matter how it gets tweaked, no matter what the crowd is like. It's intriguing, even though it bruises the ego to think you know what's funny and to be proven wrong by an audience."
"Stand-up is difficult like everyone says," he concedes. "But is it the toughest job there is? I don't know. But even if I thought it was I'd never say so out loud to a coal miner."