The last laugh

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This article was published 29/04/2019 (2546 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Lara Rae will be taking a final bow at this year’s Winnipeg Comedy Festival. 

After 18 years with the festival, the co-founding artistic director has decided to leave her post to focus on other creative endeavours.

“I’ll probably enjoy comedy much more after I’ve stepped back from the festival a bit because it’s not a job anymore,” she said. “I was a comedy fan before I was a comedian.”

Rae, 55, was born in Glasgow, Scotland and moved to Toronto with her family as a youth. She broke onto the stand-up scene out of high school with musical comedy show that travelled across North America. She came to Winnipeg in 1994 and has called the city home ever since. 

She and CBC Radio colleague Tom Anniko brought the first Winnipeg Comedy Festival to life in 2002 through a partnership with the Gas Station Arts Centre. They sold 5,000 tickets during that inaugural year and gala themes like What’s Up with Bedtime? and Prairie Comedy Celebration graced the first program. 

“The first year was a great success and we were quite happy with it,” said Rae, who lives in West Broadway. “But I did not imagine that this would be the next 18 years of my life. My golden years were spent on this project.”

Along with career highlights that include taking the WCF on the road and bringing comedy greats like Saturday Night Live’s A. Whitney Brown to the stage, the festival has been a big part of Rae’s personal journey as well. 

Four years ago she made the decision to transition from male to female and in 2016 she performed in a televised gala at the festival for the first time as Lara. 

“That was my national coming out, I guess you could call it,” she said. “In some ways that was a hard part of my transition because you’re new in a way — there was a lot of material I could no longer do because it was kind of gendered.”

Doing stand-up as a transgender woman has not only changed Rae’s material, but her approach to being onstage. 

“I’ve got to the point now where I’m just comfortable not being funny onstage,” she said, explaining that she no longer relies on deflection to tackle difficult subject matter in her act. “It’s not like I don’t think that you can be funny about painful things, it’s just that I no longer feel like I have to do that. I can explore and tell my story in different ways and that was a very liberating thing.”

For Rae, the audience’s reaction to her new work has been an interesting thing to take in. 

“Over a dozen strangers have reached out to me and said they were fans of me, but they liked my comedy better now. They think it’s more approachable and compassionate,” she said. “I was very unhappy, so I channelled some of that unhappiness into a kind of cynical comedy.”

After this year’s Winnipeg Comedy Festival wraps up on May 4, Rae will be passing the reins to local comedian Dean Jenkinson, who has been involved in the event for years. 

“It’s going to be very difficult and the people who work there are like my family,” she said, adding that she hopes to focus on writing, teaching and theatre in the future.

Rae is hosting a goodbye show, titled Lara & Friends, at the Gas Station Arts Centre (445 River Ave.) on May 1 at 7:30 p.m., featuring a cast of longtime comedian colleagues and friends. Visit winnipegcomedyfestival.com for a full lineup.