If Brent Butt is not a household name where you live, you should probably move. He worked for years, becoming one of Canada’s top stand-up comedians. He starred in and created one of the most successful comedy shows, Corner Gas, which was set in Saskatchewan. On February 21st, he performed at the Vancouver Playhouse for a triumphant stand-up show to help celebrate JFL Vancouver’s tenth anniversary.
Here is our conversation with Brent Butt.
HNMAG: Let’s start at the beginning in Tisdale, Saskatchewan. When did you first realize that you had an interest in comedy?
Brent Butt: I was always interested in comedy, but when I was twelve years old, that’s when I first saw a stand-up comedian. I’d always seen sketch comedy and sitcoms, which I always liked. There used to be an afternoon talk show that actually came out of Vancouver. It was called the Alan Hamill show. It went on to become the Alan Thick show later. I was home from school on summer holidays. The TV was on in the afternoon, and the show started. I stopped to like watch the intro. I’d never seen it before. It seemed very showbizzy, and I was always fascinated by show business. They were saying who the guests were going to be, and one of the guests was comedian Kelly Monteith. I’d never heard that word comedian before.
HNMAG: Really?
Brent Butt: I could tell it was comedy-related. So I watched the show, and that was the first time I’d ever seen somebody come out and stand there talking, being funny, and It just made all the sense in the world to me. I was like, oh, I didn’t know this was an option.
HNMAG: How?
Brent Butt: So I went and told my mom that I wanted to be a comedian. I was twelve years old.
HNMAG: What was her reaction?
Brent Butt: Well, I often joke. I say, I told my mom I wanted to be a comedian, and she said, go do it outside. But uh, in reality, it wasn’t that. In reality, she said, oh, why do you want to do that? And I talked to her about it. She didn’t treat it like it was some lunatic pipe dream or something. She was just, oh why do you want to do that? And was interested in it. And it sort of gave it a validity to me. It wasn’t treated like something stupid. I always think how lucky I was to grow up in that situation with parents like are open about that.
HNMAG: That’s great. And did you ever meet that comedian or see them in person after that?
Brent Butt: No, I’ve never met Kelly Monteith, but he knows. There’s a comedy biographer, you may know, whose name is Kliph Nesteroff. He’s the world’s leading authority on comedy history. He’s written a number of books about the history of comedy. Performers like Woody Allen, Steve Martin go to this guy. His name is and he’s originally from BC. He told Kelly Monteith. He said, you know, comedian Brent Butt? He said you were the first comedian he saw. You inspired him to be a comedian. So Kelly was aware of that.
HNMAG: When you finally pursued a stand-up career, did you move to Toronto?
Brent Butt: I started stand-up in Saskatoon. If you don’t count high school. I did it a couple of times in high school.
HNMAG: That’s fun.
Brent Butt: Like a variety night, drama night, that kind of thing. It went well enough that I was encouraged to pursue it further. When I was twenty, there was a club in Saskatoon that had an amateur night. And so at twenty-one, I made my debut for the first time in front of strangers. The first Thursday in February, 1988.
HNMAG: Were you still living in Tisdale, and you just made the trip to Saskatoon?
Brent Butt: No, I moved to Saskatoon.
HNMAG: Okay.
Brent Butt: A buddy of mine and I were publishing a comic book together. He was in university in Saskatoon. He’s a guy I grew up with in Tisdale, so he was home for the summer holidays. I told him this idea I had for a comic book. We started trying to put it together. We ultimately did end up starting a publishing company.
We put up two issues of this comic book, but he was going back to Saskatoon to go to university, so I moved there, got a job, selling advertising for a magazine, and we worked on the comic book together at night. That became my opportunity to actually go to a comedy club.
HNMAG: How long did you do that in Saskatoon in terms of stand-up?
Brent Butt: Not very long, like a matter of months, and then I actually went to Calgary next. I was crashing on the couch of another comedian that I met there, named Andrew Carr. He and I became very good friends. He said, you know what, we should move to Calgary because that’s the center for Western Canada booking for comedy. He knew a couple of gals who had an apartment with a spare room. I was in Calgary for maybe five months. There was a comedian out of Edmonton named Jamie Davis. He called me up. I had met him just briefly, one day at a comedy competition. We got along great. He called me up out of the blue, and he said, listen, I’m, I’m driving to Toronto. I know you don’t have any money. You don’t have to worry about gas, but you should come to Toronto with me. Just hop in my vehicle. I’ll take you to Toronto. You need to be seen by the people who book out of Toronto. I hopped in the vehicle with him and ended up going to Toronto. That was late 1988.
HNMAG: How long did you stay in Toronto?
Brent Butt: I don’t think it was quite five years. That’s where I learned the craft. I was able to hang out with some really high-level, top-drawer comedic talent and watch and learn.
HNMAG: You became a headliner in Toronto?
Brent Butt: Yeah.
HNMAG: Why did you move to Vancouver after that?
Brent Butt: I actually didn’t.
I moved from Toronto to LA, briefly, but I didn’t have the proper paperwork to stay in LA.
HNMAG: You were kind of what ICE would be looking for right now.
Brent Butt: Yeah, I guess so. But I wasn’t really working in LA. I would come up to Canada and do my work, but my girlfriend at the time was a dual citizen. We were down in LA, and I would just kind of spend my off time down there. The idea was to pursue show business.
HNMAG: Right.
Brent Butt: A point came where I had to make a decision. Am I going to try to get the paperwork? In all honesty, I really didn’t like it.
HNMAG: Yeah.
Brent Butt: So I thought to myself, I don’t need to make the decision right this very minute. I had a bunch of work lined up. I was playing a couple of clubs in Vancouver, up in the Okanagan, and over on the island, I had a run of shows booked. So I thought, you know, I’ve never spent any time in Vancouver. It always seems like a great city. I fly in and play at a club and fly out, you know? I never spent any time here, and it’s gorgeous, and I got some buddies here. So I thought, listen, I’m gonna hang out here for like three months. I got an apartment in the West End where I didn’t have to sign a lease. I could just go month to month.
I was in that apartment for ten years. I was in that apartment till Corner Gas.
HNMAG: Were you in that place month to month for ten years?
Brent Butt: Yeah.
HNMAG: Wow.
Brent Butt: I was in that one-bedroom apartment from early 1993, when I first got to Vancouver, until we started doing Corner Gas in 2003.
HNMAG: Before you made your TV series, you worked as a stand-up comedian for ten years in Vancouver. That was longer than all the other places you honed your craft put together.
Brent Butt: I just never felt the need to leave. One of the reasons that I stuck around was that I loved it. There is nowhere else in Canada where the temperature is above freezing in February.
HNMAG: How did you start working in television?
Brent Butt: I was down in LA. I’d sort of made inroads with a couple of prominent talent managers down there. One of them was Jimmy Miller. He went on to manage Jim Carrey and a bunch of the SNL guys. There was a Vancouver TV producer named Michael French who used to do projects with Jimmy Miller, and he would get Jimmy Miller to book talent for him. So he called Jimmy, he said, listen, I got a bunch of footage that I’m trying to turn into a TV show, and I want to hire a comedian to review the footage and sort of come up with an idea for a show. What comedian should I get to do this? And Jimmy said, well, it’s funny you ask, because a really funny comedian just landed on your doorstep. He’s a Canadian, and he’s in Vancouver right now. His name is Brent Butt. Here’s his number. Give him a call. Michael French called me. We met. I reviewed the footage. I came up with an idea. He liked and he hired me to write the show. That went well. It was a local special, and then he had another idea right away. He said, I want you to do this with me too, and hired me to do that. And next thing you know, I was writing and producing television here with this great producer, Michael French was fantastic to work with. He became a mentor to me, and he let me pick his brain like crazy about how to produce television. I learned how to edit and all that kind of stuff.
HNMAG: Did he help you get Corner Gas together, or was that just from that experience?
Brent Butt: No, he had nothing to do with it. How that came about was from a director from Ontario named David Storey who directed an episode of a TV show that I was on.
HNMAG: What show was that?
Brent Butt: It was called Comics. It was on CBC, and they would feature a different comedian every show. He directed the one that I was on.
He came out to Vancouver. He was actually in the process of moving to Vancouver. He called me up, and he said, listen, meet me for coffee. I want to talk to you about something. So we went for coffee down at the old Bojangles on Robson and Denman. That was the first place that Corner Gas was discussed with anybody. He basically said to me, I’ve been pitching TV show ideas to the network. They don’t like any of them, but they said to me, hey, you know Brent Butt, right? Does he have any TV show ideas, because I was sort of on their radar. I’d been nominated for a stand-up special that I did on their network.
HNMAG: That was a different show than Comics?
Brent Butt: Yeah, it was a different one because this was CTV. I wrote a treatment for a show about a gas station in Saskatchewan, but I can’t imagine they would be interested. I told him about it. He liked it. I showed him the paper I had on it. He talked to them about it, and they were interested, which was much to my surprise. CTV wanted to start meeting about it.
HNMAG: Perfect. At that time, you were running a highly successful comedy night with Jamie Hutchinson at the Urban Well.
Brent Butt: Yeah, we started that in 1997 or so. Jamie Hutchinson and I were producing live shows together. The opportunity came to try a comedy night there. It became the best place where all the comics would gather. We would put through thirty comedians on a Tuesday night sometimes. I would MC the shows and get very drunk and have a million laughs.
HNMAG: Why did you guys decide to produce your own comedy show night?
Brent Butt: One thing was, Punchlines was closing down in Gastown, which was a great club. Jamie and I, neither of us had anything to do with Yuck Yuks at this point. We both started in the Yucks chain, but left with a bunch of other comics. There was no place for comedians to try out new stuff, really. Even at Punchlines, if you were doing a spot, you were expected to bring your A game.
Where do you have room to bomb? We would do these little comedy nights where the crowd paid $5 to get in, and there’d be thirteen people in the crowd or whatever, but the comedians would come down and try out new bits. Kind of experiment, socialize, and have a few drinks. We were doing that here and there. Then the opportunity to do it on a regular basis at the Urban Well came to us. They started to take off there, and we were selling out, and so we wanted to do another night of the week, but the owner of the club didn’t want us to do that. He didn’t want to give up two nights of the week. But he said, why don’t we do two shows on Tuesday. We were selling out both shows. We were turning over the room on a Tuesday night. It was a blast.
HNMAG: This was like Largo is in LA.
Brent Butt: Yeah, it’s just a place where it’s as much a social thing as anything. Comedians go hang out, but they experiment and try new material. It’s important that comedians have that space.
HNMAG: You were working with David Storey on Corner Gas. How did that get cast initially?
Brent Butt: It was just auditions. I had people in mind for all the parts, but ended up hiring none of them.
HNMAG: Wow.
Brent Butt: We went through a really wide casting call. I didn’t know most of the actors beforehand. I knew who Nancy was. We were having trouble finding somebody nailing Wanda. I’d written the character of Wanda to be a little bit older, and the casting director said, would you be willing to look a little younger? And I said, yeah, sure. And she said, because you know who I think would be really funny is Nancy Robertson. And I knew who Nancy Robertson was from her improv.
HNMAG: At Theatersports.
Brent Butt: I said, yeah, she’s really funny. Let’s see if she’ll do it. And so she auditioned, and she was great. And then we had her do a callback, audition again, with the executives and stuff. So she got the part, and that’s how I really got to know Nancy, just from doing Corner Gas with her. I knew who she was, but I didn’t really know her.
HNMAG: Where did you shoot Corner Gas?
Brent Butt: We shot it in Saskatchewan. We would use the sound stage in Regina, and then on location about forty minutes south of Regina in a little town called Rouleau. That’s where we built that gas station coffee shop set.
HNMAG: Did your family ever operate a gas station?
Brent Butt: No, but a buddy of mine, his family owned a gas station in town, and we always hung out at the gas station, and we were always going for coffee. That was sort of my life. I worked at a grocery store.
HNMAG: It was one of the most successful narrative comedy shows in Canadian television history.
Brent Butt: I remember seeing in an interview with Mark McKinney from Kids in the Hall, said that Canadian TV should always be dissected as pre-Corner Gas and post-Corner Gas because he said that the show changed everything.
HNMAG: With that dissection, there are more shows being set in Canada.
Brent Butt: It sort of killed the narrative that we can’t really do half-hour comedies in Canada. It was just not something that people pursued because it wasn’t something that was already successful. And then Corner Gas came along, and it was huge, and immediately people were getting meetings with networks that they could never get before.
HNMAG: You’ve also written a novel now. A fictionalized horror comedy called Huge, which is also a big success. What made you decide to switch to literature?
Brent Butt: Well, I always knew that it was something I wanted to try when I was very young. I made a list of things that I wanted to try when I grew up.
Professionally, I’ve been able to do most of them. Stand-up comedy, comic book, TV, Movie, and the other two on the list remaining were novels, and to write a stage play that gets produced professionally. When COVID came around, I thought, if I’m going to write the novel, if I don’t do it now, when I can’t go anywhere, then I’m kidding myself. I am never going to do it.
HNMAG: Right.
Brent Butt: I sat down to see if I could do it. I started, and I had this idea that I formulated many years ago on the road. Sometimes you get booked when you’re first starting out, and you don’t get to choose who you work with. They assign you somebody to go on the road with. 99.9% of the time, it’s terrific, but now and then, you’d get saddled with some clearly unhinged maniac.
HNMAG: Right.
Brent Butt: I remember being on the road, looking out at the vast Canadian tundra, thinking, wow, there are a lot of places to hide my body if this goes sideways.
HNMAG: Exactly.
Brent Butt: I just always thought that was an interesting premise for a story to be in that situation where it’s you and this other person who’s clearly unhinged, and the more you get to know them, the more dangerous they become. He seems to be, but also you’re dependent on him because you’re in his vehicle and he’s your only ally on the road. It’s that sort of being dependent on somebody you don’t trust at all. Isolated in Canada. Driving between small towns, I thought that was a good creepy premise for a show. And so that just stewed in my mind for a long time. I thought that’d be a good story. And so when it came to writing the novel, that’s what I went with.
HNMAG: Jamie Hutchinson came up earlier. You had a little nod in the book to him as well.
Brent Butt: Yeah, I had him getting bumped from a run of shows.
HNMAG: That was a funny inside joke. Are there any plans to adapt Huge into a feature?
Brent Butt: There’s no plan right now, but I like the idea of it. There have been a couple of people who talked to me about optioning.
My manager wants me to write a feature script based on the novel. So I might do that.
HNMAG: You’ve written for TV, so this is another option. Have you written a theatrical piece yet?
Brent Butt: No, that’s the last thing that remains on that initial list. I wrote as a little kid. I wrote a play in high school. And it’s something I’m very interested in doing. It’s just, you know, you also have to look at. You know, there’s only so many hours in the day and only so many projects you can get going at any given time.
Writing a play isn’t something that’s going to put a lot of dollars in my jeans, so it keeps getting shelved behind things that might be more lucrative.
HNMAG: A Broadway musical could take off. It worked out for Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Brent Butt: Craig Northy and I have often talked about doing a musical where he does the music.
HNMAG: Huge is all about stand-up comedians. A word that always comes up in that type of performance is kill. I had a killer set. Wow, I just killed.
Brent Butt: Yeah, it’s all violent terminology, right? Kill, bomb, destroy, slay!
HNMAG: It’s exciting that you are doing a big show at the Vancouver Playhouse for the tenth anniversary of Vancouver Just For Laughs (JFL).
Brent Butt: I’m pumped because I don’t do big live ticketed public shows very often in Vancouver.
HNMAG: This is your first time performing at Vancouver JFL?
Brent Butt: Yeah, the first time doing Vancouver, but I’veI done the Montreal festival a lot of times.
Brent Butt is a hilarious stand-up comedian who has gone on to become a Canadian household name as an actor, writer, and producer. He has put in the work, and it has paid off. His TV show Corner Gas has proven that quality comedy that is set in Canada does have a universal appeal. It’s opened the doors for more high-quality Canadian comedy shows like Letterkenny, Kim’s Convenience, Schitt’s Creek, and many more. His novel Huge is a very entertaining read, a #1 National Bestseller, and was named to Indigo’s list of Best Books of 2023. We hope he listens to his team and gets to work on the screenplay, even before that big Broadway Musical, Book of Barley. We are also happy that he is still performing stand-up comedy, and his unique style and voice have not changed since he was killing it at the Urban Well in the 90s.