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Vancouver is funny, there’s no doubt about that. Whether you’re talking about our geographical inconsistencies (East Vancouver is the east side of Vancouver, but West Vancouver is the west part of the North Shore), or the fact that the Burrard Bridge is named after a man (Sir Harry Burrard-Neale) that never stepped foot in the city, it’s somewhat inarguable.
But as MRG Group gets ready to host Vancouver Is Funny, its second annual month-long celebration of the city’s comedy scene, the festival’s name begs the question: can the city’s comedians make you laugh?
The many shows taking place across town will feature international headliners like Brennan Lee Mulligan, Marc Maron, and Hannibal Buress. But they will also employ a range of local comedians, with something on offer for every kind of audience member. We caught up with five Vancouver-based standups at the Biltmore in late August. Here’s what they had to say. You be the judge.
Lindsay Elliott
AS I’M CHATTING with my fellow Straight employees at the Biltmore, getting ready to interview the group of comedians who have started to assemble in the dark room, Ola Dada approaches me.
“I like your laugh,” he says plainly.
It makes sense, one supposes, that a comedian like Dada, who has performed at venues across the country, puts stock in different kinds of chuckles and guffaws.
“There are specific laughs I just love,” he explains. “Most people laugh the same kind of laugh, but when you hear a different one, it stands out in a room, even when there are 1,000 people. You hear a different one, and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ ”
He’s been finding laughs for a while now. Dada is from Fort McMurray and originally came to Vancouver to go to school to become an accountant. He picked up comedy as a hobby. Then it started taking up more and more of his time. He’s been a full-time comedian for the last five years, made the semifinals of Canada’s Got Talent, and has headlined Just For Laughs Toronto.
“It was almost like an accident,” he says of his break into the industry.
Dada describes himself as a clean comic.
”The stuff I talk about is clean, but I do cuss a lot,” he says. “I don’t know why—when I worked at the bank, I never cussed at all. Now I’ll be doing a joke about a pigeon, and I’ll just go ‘fucking pigeon’. I’m trying not to do that as much.”
Part of that is perhaps related to his connection with God. Dada is open about his relationship with Christianity. He was raised in a religious family and at first rejected it.
“The moment I got a chance to live by myself, I was like, ‘I’m done with Christianity,’ ” he says.
During COVID he started reading religious texts.
“I read the Quran—I actually thought about becoming Muslim for a while—and I read the Bible,” he shares. “I also did some research, and based on my worldview, it brought me toward Christianity.”
Asked if that’s isolating for him in an industry that isn’t exactly known for saving Sundays for church, Dada rejects that notion.
“No, it’s not that in any way,” he says. “What I will say is that it gives me an opportunity for people to ask questions and for us to have an honest conversation. For a while I did think about quitting standup because I thought I couldn’t be Christian and do it. But now I feel like it gets people to see that I’m just here trying to be the best version of who I am. We’re not trying to be holier than thou. The goal is to come as you are.”
Silly laugh and all.
Lindsay Elliott
JESS LUPINI HAS been doing comedy for a long time. Just not professionally.
“It’s always been the tool that I’ve used to reduce tension in social situations,” she says. “My family would joke around all the time; I feel like I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
She started doing improv before COVID hit but realized that, afterward, a lot of the people she was doing shows with had moved away. A friend asked if she had ever done standup, and she ended up initially taking the stage at Slice of Life art gallery just off the Drive.
“To be totally honest, I kind of blacked out that first time, the first few of them really,” she says. “You have a sense of what you want to say. But I get pretty bad stagefright before shows. I get really nervous and shaky. Once I’m on stage, it goes away.”
A few months after that first show, Lupini broke out in a major way after a joke she made during her set at Trans Girls: Raw and Uncut went viral.
“I did a bit at that show that I hadn’t done before. It was very much geared toward trans people, especially trans women,” she says, referring to a joke about things that gave her gender dysphoria. Those included things like liking Steely Dan, going to Mission: Impossible movies, and not worrying about taking a piss in the woods.
“People loved it; it was really fun. And Pride weekend was just after that, so I shared that clip, and it just exploded. Millions and millions of people saw it, which boggled my mind. I suddenly had a bunch of people following me.”
That newfound fame brought both good and bad things.
“Social media has definitely made it easier for comics to get involved and noticed, whereas we used to have to grind it out for so long,” Lupini says.
Sometimes, though, Lupini feels judged for having such a quick ascent up the ranks of the industry.
“I get self-conscious because I see it in people’s eyes. They’re like, ‘Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s doing.’ I’d rather just show people what I can do.”
Lupini, who grew up in Victoria, sees Vancouver as an ideal spot for a comic to ply their trade.
“I think we’re really lucky to live here,” she says. “Vancouver gets a bad rap for a lot of things, and I think people often rightfully complain that some art spaces don’t receive enough funding. That can be difficult to deal with. There are a lot of things that need to be improved in Vancouver when it comes to the arts. But we’re really lucky that we have a super exciting, dedicated, diverse comedy scene and that there are a lot of clubs that can support the number of people who do want to come.”
Lupini is also a member of the popular Dungeons & Dragons group BlackwaterDnD, which streams weekly games on Twitch. The group has thousands of followers on social media, and Lupini was picked to feature in Brennan Lee Mulligan’s Endless Dungeon shows at Queen Elizabeth Theatre on September 10.
“I’m a huge fantasy/sci-fi nerd,” Lupini says, showing off her Star Trek tattoo. “There’s something about the fantasy spaces—they’re often the safer spaces for a lot of weird, kind people. Without that, I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to go to an open mic and do standup.”
Lindsay Elliott
IN 2018, SEAN McDonnell was starting to become a fixture in the Vancouver comedy scene by performing at open mics and hosting his own events at Charqui resto-bar in Kitsilano. One night at the old Yuk Yuk’s on Cambie Street was a lot like every other night. McDonnell told some jokes about Vancouver weed and about working at a daycare. The crowd gave him some big laughs. He probably thought that was that.
And then, five days after the set was posted on YouTube, it was reposted completely out of the blue on Twitter by none other than beloved Canadian comedian and former Saturday Night Live star Norm Macdonald.
That tweet helped McDonnell nail down a record deal with 604 Records, and it massively increased his social media following. But mostly, it gave him confidence.
“This might sound a bit gross and egotistical, but once you have that vouch, everyone else’s opinion kind of becomes nulled out,” McDonnell says. “If someone’s like, ‘I don’t think you’re funny,’ I’m like, ‘I truly don’t care.’ ”
McDonnell never met Macdonald, who died in 2021, but they did often exchange messages.
“I was kind of surprised by it, because I felt like I would send four or five texts and two weeks would go by and he would just send these massive letters,” he says. “He was a very sweet man, very calm.”
Like Macdonald, McDonnell can sometimes get close to that invisible line of going too far that comedians often flirt with.
“Honestly, there hasn’t been that much support from a lot of the industry up until the last two years,” says McDonnell, who is originally from North Van. “I do tend to talk about stuff that’s a bit darker, for sure. If someone’s asking about me and they go, ‘Hey, what’s that guy’s big joke?’ Well, there’s one about British people and there’s another one about people with Down syndrome.”
That latter one has over 375,000 likes on Instagram.
Your mileage on McDonnell will depend on how comfortable you are with that invisible line. After all, his sophomore comedy album, released last year, is called Apologies in Advance.
A 2024 appearance in the semifinals of the Seattle International Comedy Competition also served to show McDonnell where that line might be, at least when it comes to the gatekeepers of comedy.
“I had been doing all the material that I thought would make me place, that I thought the judges would like,” he recalls of his ascent up the competition’s ladder. “And so for the semifinal set, I just said, ‘I’m going to do the jokes that I want to do.’ The audience reacted warmly, but the judges hated it—I came in dead last.”
Good thing he doesn’t need their vouch.
ORIGINALLY FROM ONTARIO, Mark Thomson was in Chicago, going to school to get a PhD in philosophy, when a friend recommended improv as a community-building tool.
“At first I was terrified—I hated it,” Thomson says. “But I was like, ‘I gotta be social. I’ll keep going.’ ”
Some seven years later, Thomson had developed that community and was thriving in the Windy City’s improv scene. But when COVID hit, Thomson and his husband, who was eyeing Vancouver grad schools, decided it was the time to make the move north. Thomson himself locked down a professor job here, and around three years ago, he entered Vancouver’s standup comedy scene.
There has to be some sort of link between being a professor of philosophy and telling jokes on stage, right?
“Yeah, you would think so. And the answer really is yes, but not in an explicit way,” he says. “I don’t talk about doing a PhD or whatever, but I do think that kind of logical analysis and contextual thinking comes in a lot. I teach philosophy of gender and sexuality, and I’m queer myself and grew up in an evangelical Christian family. So that does naturally make it into my material.”
Thomson’s comedy career saw a major milestone last year when he opened for one of his personal heroes in American actor and comedian Kate Berlant at the Bend Comedy Festival in Bend, Oregon.
“It was amazing; I was really happy with how it went,” he says. “I’ve been a fan of hers for so, so long.”
On stage, Thomson is energetic and somewhat sardonic. For instance, he has bits about skinny women (“We don’t need to be told that you’re cold—we assume it until told we’re otherwise”) and kids being annoying (“Why do I even know what it sounds like when a child cries? I don’t work in a daycare. I’m not friends with a child. I should hear that sound and think paranormal activity”).
Off stage, he’s more toned-down and seems genuinely interested when he asks about my own kids. Perhaps the puppy that Thomson and his husband recently adopted has changed his attitude toward small beings that need taking care of.
Thomson has also become quite involved with Vancouver politics despite his relatively short time spent in the city. He’s more than happy to dish out takes on Ken Sim and AI data centres when asked.
“When I was in Ontario, I had zero interest in politics,” he says. “And then when I lived in the U.S., the way people reacted to things was really inspiring. They were calling local representatives and senators when the Black Lives Matter protests were happening—people were very active, and I found it inspiring. So when I moved here, it felt like Vancouver was a small enough city that you could have an impact by protesting city council and canvassing and things like that in a way that federal politics was out of reach.”
In other words, small things that need taking care of are worth it sometimes.
THERE PROBABLY HAVE been bigger fish out of water stories than Emily Woods leaving her hometown of Red Deer after high school to head directly for the esteemed East 15 Acting School at the University of Essex in England, but we haven’t heard of many of those.
It didn’t take long for Woods to discover that reciting Shakespeare on the hallowed grounds of Mike Leigh wasn’t for her.
“I realized that I didn’t really like acting, and I wanted to tell my own stories and didn’t want to tell the stories of old men,” she says with a laugh.
So she started trying her hand at comedy, hitting open mics in the U.K. as a teenager. “It was the time of my life,” she says. “I was 18, smoking cigarettes, going on stage telling jokes, and then going to school at 8 a.m. the next day to do monologues.”
Woods graduated right before COVID hit, but the pandemic forced her out of the country and back west. “I kind of had to restart over here,” she says.
She ended up finding a home in Victoria, where she lived for a few years before moving to Vancouver about a year and a half ago.
“Victoria is my favourite place I’ve lived,” she says. “I just ran out of stuff to do there. I got to chase my dream—I recorded my special at [comedy club] Hecklers. There wasn’t much else to do career-wise.”
Woods’ goals in Vancouver are fairly simple: “Do as much comedy as I can and as I want. Have fun, be dirty, be loud, and uplift women in comedy.”
Some of Woods’ raunchier comedic sensibilities were not always well received on the Island.
“I did a show one time in Sydney, opening for this fantastic comedian at a theatre full with about 200 people,” she recalls. “The entire audience had white hair, and they crossed their arms and shook their heads all 20 minutes of my set. They were disappointed in me.”
There have been good shows too. Woods points to an appearance on CBC’s The Debaters earlier this year in which she argued with Ivan Decker about why massages are actually good.
“Sure, I could go on some app, meet up with Tyler and leave even more unsatisfied than I started, or I can book an appointment online with a man named Michal,” she told the crowd.
The audience called it a draw. The U.K. would be proud.
You can catch Ola Dada, Jess Lupini, Sean McDonnell, Mark Thomson, and Emily Woods at Little Mountain Gallery on September 27. Tickets to Vancouver Is Funny here.