A funny thing happened at the war-crimes tribunal…

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This article was published 05/04/2016 (3441 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are a lot of different paths one can follow on the way from regular goof-around life to the professional standup-comedy stage. But not many of them take a detour through a war-crimes tribunal at The Hague.

That’s the decidedly unconventional route followed by Montrealer Jess Salomon, who spent five years practising law — including a stint as a war-crimes prosecutor for the United Nations — before deciding to shift the focus of her life from justice to just being funny.

Interestingly, it was the environment and the people associated with the UN’s international crime tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that jolted Salomon’s funny bone and sent her spinning in a different — and very funny — direction.

“What happened with comedy is that while I was working in The Hague, I realized that I didn’t really love working with the law,” recalls Salomon, who is scheduled to appear in four shows at this year’s Winnipeg Comedy Festival, including Thursday night’s Born This Way gala (7:15 p.m., Pantages Playhouse Theatre; tickets $37 at Ticketmaster).

“I was in the best possible law job you could be in — I didn’t have to bill hours, I didn’t pay taxes, and the part of the UN. I was in was a really great environment… and I was working with people from all over the world who happened to also have really great senses of humour. And it was while I was there, meeting all these people with a very dark sensibility, that I saw a lot of comedy in my workplace and realized that I didn’t want to work in law in the long term.

“I started taking a lot of notes about what was funny around me, and was fantasizing a lot about turning my work experiences into a comedy; I think that’s when my brain shifted into comedy, actively seeing humour around me and thinking of how I could turn it into something.”

Salomon decided to take a couple of years off from her legal work, so she could focus on writing a screenplay or a sitcom script. During that time, she enrolled in a standup-comedy class run by fellow Montrealer Joey Elias, and the rest, as they say…

“I thought (standup) would help with my writing, and that maybe it would be an interesting thing to try,” she recalls, “but I didn’t really picture myself doing standup. But after the first time I got up on stage, that was it. It was a done deal — I couldn’t imagine going back to law.”

Eight years after embarking on that two-year writing sabbatical, Salomon is fully focused on standup as her profession (though she also has a few ongoing screenplay projects in the works). Her material ranges from intensely personal issues (coming out as bisexual, struggling to balance career and long-term relationships) to random pop-culture observations (why mattress companies advertise their products as being great for everything but the one thing — sex — that interests people most), and she’s constantly revising her act as her life experiences evolve.

“Most of my comedy is autobiographical,” she says. “I do draw on politics and popular culture and those kinds of things, but the primary point of everything comes from my own background and experiences. When I do try to write an observational joke, I feel like it’s harder for me to sell and it’s harder for me to feel there’s anything unique about it.

“Everything has humour in it; it’s just a matter of where you are in your life and what occurs to you to be funny. For example, when I first started doing comedy, a lot of my jokes were about bisexuality because I was in my first relationship with a woman but I’d still had all these dating experiences with men, so I felt like I had to broach the topic and find a way to talk about it. Now, six years later, especially if I’m playing progressive rooms, I don’t really feel like I have to explain myself any more.”

You can sample Jess Salomon’s comedy at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMhxJCQhAws

You can also catch her act at:

Coast to Coast Comedy — Friday, April 8 at 8 p.m., Club Regent Event Centre; tickets $20

“BLT” Comedy Show — Saturday, April 9 at 10:30 p.m., Gas Station Arts Centre; tickets $15

The Debaters — Sunday, April 10 at 2 p.m., Club Regent Event Centre; tickets $30

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @BradOswald