Veteran improv comic takes on standup comedy in one-man play

Opinion

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This article was published 02/04/2015 (2782 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a big difference between writing and performing standup comedy and writing and starring in a play about a standup comic.

Wes Borg has figured out a way to do both.

Borg, best known to comedy and fringe-theatre fans as that wild-eyed, red-haired guy from Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, is bringing his standup-inspired one-man play, Ha!, to the Winnipeg Comedy Festival for a pair of performances (Monday, April 6, and Friday, April 10) at the Gas Station Arts Centre.

It’s a show, he says, that was inspired by the characters he encountered during standup comedy’s boom period in the late 1980s.

“When we doing the Trolls, we started out at Yuk Yuk’s in Edmonton, where we were the middle act on Thursday nights, going on just before the headliner,” he recalls. “We met all these comics, from Jebb Fink to Howard Busgang to Mike MacDonald and Norm Macdonald, who were all at the beginnings of their careers, and I was always fascinated by how awful the lifestyle was.

“I was in a sketch troupe, so I was in the trenches with my buddies, and when we toured we were a unit and it was like I was with my family. But the standups were touring alone, and every year they’d come back looking a little more haggard and a bit more worn out by the lifestyle. It was fascinating to me.”

Ha!, which Borg co-wrote with Chris Craddock (playwright of the Dora Award-winning play BoyGroove), examines the life and career of Colin McLeod, a fictional comedian who rises from humble roots in Saskatoon and tries to reach the top of the Canadian comedy business.

Writing the play presented a unique challenge, because it demanded the solid dramatic narrative of a stage play but also required credible injections of stage-ready comedy.

“We had to have standup that works in the show, so I’ve been going to all the comedy nights in Victoria and testing out the jokes and the material,” he explains. “There are also some jokes that are intended to fail, to show how you build an act, but the actual standup has to work or the whole play will fall apart.

“The way I look at it is that if you can write comedy, you can write drama — drama is just comedy without any laughs. I come from sketch (comedy), so we were always acting in scenes. It’s really fun to write.”

One of the things Borg and Craddock poke fun at with Ha! is the elusive nature of Canadian celebrity — if there even is such a thing.

“In Canadian showbiz, you can win a Juno Award or a Gemini Award or whatever they call those awards in Canada now, and most Canadians would have no idea who you are,” he says with a laugh. “That’s Canadian celebrity. But if you do one sitcom in the States, everybody in Canada knows who you are.”

Borg’s own story is testament to fame’s fleeting nature north of the border — as a member of Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, he was part of the most famous Canadian sketch troupe not called The Kids in the Hall; when that group disbanded, however, anonymity awaited.

“There wasn’t an Internet to speak of, and certainly no Google, when we were doing (Three Dead Trolls); after the group broke up, Joe (Bird) and I continued to do amusing-song things.

“But then Joe died (in 2009, of a sudden heart attack at age 41), and I moved to Victoria, and I was done. I didn’t want to do it anymore; I was a sad mess of a man having a mid-life crisis. But then, gradually, I found myself getting back into it. There’s a troupe out here called Atomic Vaudeville who are the best I’ve ever seen at what they do, and I kind of fell in with them…. There’s kind of a (comedy) incubation thing happening here in Victoria, and it really has revitalized me.”

You can also see Wes Borg at:

WCF: The Upper Deck — Monday, April 6, at 10 p.m., King’s Head Pub

TV Dinner: A Multimedia Improv Show — Wednesday, April 8, at 7 p.m., Metropolitan Entertainment Centre

Hot Thespian Action Uncorked — Thursday, April 9, at 9:30 p.m., Gas Station Arts Centre

CBC’s The Debaters — Saturday, April 11, at 2 p.m., Club Regent Event Centre

The Alternative Show — Saturday, April 11, at 10:30 p.m., Park Theatre

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @BradOswald

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Brad Oswald
Perspectives editor

After three decades spent writing stories, columns and opinion pieces about television, comedy and other pop-culture topics in the paper’s entertainment section, Brad Oswald shifted his focus to the deep-thoughts portion of the Free Press’s daily operation.

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