Yukkity yuk and do come back Comedy chain set to make triumphant return to city By: Alan Small Posted: 7:00 PM CST Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023

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Yuk Yuk’s return to Winnipeg and the Fort Garry Hotel becomes a laughing matter Thursday night.

That’s when the Toronto-based comedy-club chain opens its doors in the basement of the 110-year-old hotel on Broadway, welcoming comedian and actor Shaun Majumder to grace its new stage.

It took only a coat of paint and new lighting and fixtures that are conducive to a humorous mood to transform a basement banquet room and meeting space into the new Yuk Yuk’s, which will have a capacity for 150 people.

The comedy club is the latest project at the hotel. In December 2021, it opened the Oval Room Brasserie after restoring the former Palm Room, which had suffered water damage to its ceiling after a sprinkler mishap.

The new room fits the comedy-club mould, says comedian Lara Rae, who emceed an evening of local comedians Monday night for hotel staff and friends that served as a test-run for Thursday’s debut.

”Yuk Yuk’s traditionally are always black and they’re always in a basement and for 40 years that’s what I’ve thought of thought of as a comedy club,” says Rae, who is booking acts at the Winnipeg club. “At the Fort Garry it’s not going to be like that entirely. It’ll be in the basement but a beautiful showroom.”

Rae should know. She began her standup career in the 1980s when she was in her late teens with Yuk Yuk’s in Toronto, so booking acts for the new Winnipeg nightspot, as well as performing occasionally, like she did Monday night, is a welcome return to the company.

Winnipeg becomes Yuk Yuk’s 17th location across Canada.

“That’s where I started in comedy so this is very full circle for me. I’ve known Mark Breslin, who owns the club for how many years that is,” she says. “I made the joke like in The Godfather (Part III), ‘Just when you think you’re out they pull you back in.’ “

Yuk Yuk’s, which had a franchise in Osborne Village during the 1980s and ’90s, joins a vibrant Winnipeg comedy scene, which includes Rumor’s Comedy Club, which opened in 1984 and hosts standup acts from around the world Tuesdays through Saturdays at its venue at the Tuxedo Park Shopping Centre.

The Handsome Daughter club on Sherbrook Street and the Wee Johnny’s Irish Pub on McDermot Avenue in the Exchange District also hold standup nights every week.

“Specific to Rumor’s, we’re on other sides of the city and I think we’ll eventually find our own crowds,” Rae says. “We’re hoping to capitalize on our tourist and hotel business and create an opportunity for local comics and touring comics.

”We have an open environment now where comics can work everywhere and I think different clubs and different rooms have different styles and expectations for comics and I think it will open the local scene up to as many different voices as we can find.”

Rae, who co-founded the Winnipeg Comedy Festival in 2002 and helped arrange lineups for the annual joke fest for 19 years as its executive director, will be doing the same with the Winnipeg Yuk Yuk’s, with an additional focus on finding stage spots for Winnipeg comedians to follow in her footsteps.

“We have paid opportunities for comics to grow to the point where they can make some income travelling around the country,” she says. “I really felt when I was 18, 19 years old when I started at Yuk Yuk’s in Toronto during the beginning of the comedy boom this was a comedy university… You got on a plane, you got to a club and you just got to play in almost every city in Canada.

“I’m a different person for the experience of going on tour with Yuk Yuk’s in the 1980s.”

Rae has worked with social-services agencies in Winnipeg for the past several years but has geared back recently after what she described as “several close calls.” She still volunteers with the Mutual Aid Society, which organizes and delivers food to those in need, as well as the Bear Clan Patrol.

“I loved it but I had to tap out,” she says. “I was dealing with PTSD and compassion fatigue. It’s just gotten so rough out there that I needed to look after myself for a while.”

Rae expects her new job will keep her close to Winnipeg, but she has a goal of recording a comedy album, even though she recognizes she’s swimming against comedy’s tide of reaching a younger demographic.

“In this world of identity politics, maybe my transness trumps my age?” she says with a laugh. “You get one (point of view) from one column and one from another.”

Alan.Small@freepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall