Tale of farm boy turned comedian offers up plenty of laughs

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This article was published 06/04/2015 (4210 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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There’s something both upsetting and comforting about a Canadian showbiz “success” story that ends with an appearance in a John Deere tractor commercial.

And that’s where the road to fictional comedy stardom eventually takes Colin McLeod, the central character in HA!, a one-man play starring former Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie member Wes Borg. The 80-minute production, a heavily rewritten update on a story created by Borg and collaborator Chris Craddock some 15 years ago, had its Winnipeg Comedy Festival debut on Monday night and will have a second performance on Friday (7:30 p.m., Gas Station Arts Theatre, tickets $18 at www.winnipegcomedyfestival.com).

It’s an extremely labour-intensive exercise for Borg, who plays more than a dozen characters — often in rapid-fire conversational scenes requiring quick shifts in voice inflection and physical mannerisms — and divides his time between dramatizing McLeod’s comedy-career climb and taking audience members inside fictional comedy clubs from Saskatoon to Toronto to Thunder Bay to Kelowna to sample the standup of Colin and his road-weary tourmates as they grind their way toward that one big break they all seek.

The good news is that Borg is comfortably up to the challenge, making each of his characters credible and delivering behind-the-mike snippets of standup that are actually strong (and funny) enough to give the play the comedic heft required to make the overall narrative believable, too.

There were a few technical hiccups in Monday’s show, but they were made easier to forgive by the fact Borg predicted them in a brief pre-show warmup chat with the 100-strong crowd at the Gas Station Arts Theatre.

The play itself follows a linear and largely chronological path, starting with a visit by McLeod — a good ol’ Saskatchewan farmboy on the verge of enrolling in the University of Saskatchewan’s agriculture program — and girlfriend Gail to a local comedy club, where their late arrival lands them in front-row seats, leading to a heckle-and-slapdown exchange between Gail and the Toronto-import headliner.

After the show, the comic challenges Gail to enter the ​amateur night he’s hosting the following evening; she balks, and volunteers Colin for the open-mike challenge instead.

The rest is very fast — and therefore very fictional — Canadian showbiz history, as Colin gets big laughs at the amateur night by telling a story about a sheep-castration mishap; he’s invited back to perform again, and the soon-to-depart host tells McLeod to look him up if his fledgling comedy career ever takes him to T.O.

Colin is pumped by what has happened; “I made strangers laugh,” he giggles to Gail, who in turn suggests there might be a bigger pool of strangers to amuse in The Big Smoke. They agree that Colin should forego his university studies, and therefore his future in agriculture, and give full-time comedy a try. Telling the parents, of course, isn’t easy; his grumpy-farmer dad is furious, offering the stern observation that his starry-eyed son is “never going to be Brent Butt.”

Maybe not, but he soon makes a name for himself as Colin McLeod, comedian — thanks to a few breaks that are lucky for Colin but not so good for other comics (he lands a Yuk Yuk’s tour gig after headliner Elvira Kurt gets hit by a truck; later, he finds himself on the Just For Laughs roster after Gilbert Gottfried drops dead on a nightclub stage).

One of the small quibbles with Borg’s otherwise inspired performance is that his story — perhaps because of the limited time available to tell it — includes no real struggles or setbacks; for McLeod, it’s one lucky break after another on his way to Canadian comedy “stardom,” and even after he becomes a drug-dabbling alcoholic road comic who’s neglectful of his pregnant at-home wife, Colin is presented as a rather sympathetic figure. Even after an acid-trip vision prompts him to blow up his big chance at Just For Laughs by going completely off script and delivering a rant about the temptations of the road, everyone (almost) seems pleased and/or impressed by what he’s done.

And when the moment of career-break truth arrives, he takes the easy out, does the right thing and thereby remains the same good ol’ Saskatchewan farmboy we met at the play’s beginning. In the end, the story is less than fully satisfying, but the energetic and committed manner in which Borg tells it is both impressive and highly entertaining.

HA! succeeds by giving its audience plenty of reasons to recite its title out loud, over and over and over again.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @BradOswald