Calgarians want website to be comedy destination

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This article was published 14/04/2010 (5648 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT’S a goofy name for a list of funny people, but its creators are hoping it doesn’t turn out to be a silly idea.

Two Calgary-based comedians have launched a website called Comediapedia, which is intended to become a comprehensive database for comedians, event listings and comedy history in Canada.

"Comediapedia aspires to be the first complete living record of everyone who has ever dared call themselves a Canadian comedian," co-founders Cory Mack and Donovan Deschner said in a release announcing the site’s startup.

At present, the website (www.comediapedia.ca) is quite rudimentary, with 161 comedians in its listings, along with a month-by-month calendar of comedy events and a Canadian Comedy Timeline that runs from 1869 (humourist Stephen Leacock is born) to 1999 (Norm Macdonald hosts Saturday Night Live 18 months after being fired from it).

Winnipeg Comedy Festival artistic director Al Rae called the new website an interesting idea.

"I support anything that gets standups’ names out there," he said. "I haven’t looked at it too closely yet… but I assume that it’s like Wikipedia, in that people will add to it as it goes along."

Rae pointed out that much of the historical and biographical information Comediapedia hopes to provide is already available elsewhere online.

"It’s a great idea, but the problem is that you can do a lot of it on Wikipedia — you can basically subcategorize all the way down to Winnipeg comedians who live south of the river," he said. "But I think any tool is useful, and if it’s still around in six months, I’ll certainly be checking it out."