Laughter is still the best medicine and no organization knows that better than Just For Laughs. Their new stand-up series New Wave of Standup premiered on CBC Gem March 29, 2022. Each comedian is given a shining light to perform their best 10 minutes of gut splitting, laugh out loud, tear gushing, pop spewing comedy. There is magic in laughter and a chemistry that acts like new spark plugs for the mind. You just feel so good after a good laugh. JFL is the doctor and we are all lining up for our prescription. This is the second season of the show, following an incredibly successful first season.
The new season was filmed during the 2022 Just For Laughs VANCOUVER festival and aims to showcase an entirely new group of Canadian comedians on the cusp of breaking out. Abdul Aziz, a comedian and producer who has a critically acclaimed D&D Improv-Fantasy podcast, Spout Lore joins Maddy Kelly, who is best known for her performance on The Standup Show with Jon Dore. Andrea Jin, a Shanghai born stand-up and writer, who was recently selected as a New Face at JFL Montréal. Tin Lorica, co-host of Millennial Live, a live comedy and poetry series, Steev Letts who performed at JFL VANCOUVER and the Grindstone Comedy Festival, and whose debut album Burger Queen is available online. Each of the 12 featured Canadian comedians will bring their absolute A-game to the stage in a 10-minute set. Other comedians include Hisham Kelati, whose debut comedy album Tigre King was nominated for a 2022 Juno for Comedy Album of the Year; Allie Pearse, a writer on the award winning show Letterkenny and the 2021 winner of JFL’s Standup & Pitch competition; Nick Nemeroff who appeared on TBS’ Conan, and whose debut comedy album, The Pursuit of Comedy Has Ruined My Life, was nominated for a 2021 JUNO Award for Comedy Album of the Year, plus many more including Juliana Rodrigues, Maddy Kelly, Hoodo Hersi, Steev Letts, Janelle Niles and Marito Lopez stacks the deck.
Canada is rich in diverse talent and an opportunity to perform their best comedy on television is a win for everybody. We need laughter more than ever and JFL always delivers, like an old family doctor. The New Wave of Standup is executive produced by Bruce Hills and Heather Wallace, produced by Heather Wallace with consulting producer Zoe Rabnett, and directed by Trish Neufield. Supervising Producer is Anton Leo. JFL is providing a national stage for up and coming comedians to showcase their strongest material and keep us wanting more.
Abdul Aziz was my guest today and he filled me in on the life of a stand-up comedian. He also has a D&D podcast Spout Lore where he and other comedians use improv to tell their hilarious enchanting stories from the perspective of comedians. It’s quite cool and entertaining if you’re a D&D enthusiast or just need another excuse to laugh.
I spoke with Abdul about all thing’s comedy. He was incredibly gracious and honest with his journey and the life long friends you make along the way. It is a marathon but you can’t have great comedy without being a student of the world and observing a few things along the way. Roll the tape!
HNMAG “You’re on the new series airing March 29th,. It’s presented by JFL, and the idea is to shine a light on new up and coming comedy talent. When did you start doing standup and how did you arrive at this juncture?”
ABDUL “I started doing comedy in Victory in late 2012. I was lucky to start with a very good group of comedians. There were 6 or 7 of us that started at the same time. In a sense it was a pressure cooker, where every week – one of us would come up with a great bit and the rest of us would have to work to catch up. It was a great environment to start in because the stakes were so low – it was Victoria. There was competition but it was positive competition. I still think those guys are the funniest guys I’ve ever met. I think I’ve carried that mentality through to my comedy career, finding the right comedy that will entertain my friends is fun to do on stage. It’s always funny when I can make my friends laugh. It’s served me pretty well. “
HNMAG “Considering that you’ve been doing comedy for almost 10 years, have you developed a certain brand or subjects that you like to address in your comedy?”
ABDUL “I tend to gravitate toward religion quite a bit. I think a lot of people just take it for granted, that ‘it’s just the way it is.’ I moved around a lot as a kid, so I’ve always had an outsiders’ perspective on things. My parents are from Egypt and I immigrated here. Any cultural conventions that people take for granted, I’ve had the luxury of seeing it from an outside perspective, which has allowed me to question it and find the humour in it. I tend to talk about religion a lot, combined with the cultural convention while coming at it from an outsider perspective and adding depth.”
HNMAG “How far in advance would you know, how much time you’re allotted on stage to be able to tailor your act?”
ABDUL “Usually when you get booked, you’re told how much time you have. It might be 7 minutes, 15, 30 or 45, so they’ll tell you. For sets, it’s more exploratory and for discovery. I would build it with 60 percent new material and 40 percent old material to test out new bits that I might be able to reuse in the future. For a longer 30-minute set, you’re using honed material and getting paid for it. You want to bring your A game to those shows. I always try to do something new in every set, to keep myself interested and engaged in it.”
HNMAG “On the show, New Wave of Standup, you only have 10 minutes to wow the audience. How long does it take to put a 10-minute act together?”
ABDUL “It really fluctuates – sometimes if the conditions are right, you can come up with 10 minutes in a couple of sets. Sometimes, there’s a 10-minute chunk that you’ve been working on for 10 years. You’re always working on your jokes, it’s not like a song – after writing it, you’re done. With comedy, you’re always honing it. You’re editing it down and building it back up. Times change and a joke that you wrote 2 years ago won’t hit as hard as a joke you wrote a week ago. The best comedians are always honing their jokes. Sometimes you can knock it out of the park the first time and within two sets you have it locked in. Other times, you can work the concept for months and people still aren’t getting what you’re trying to say.”
HNMAG “Can a bad night be chalked up as a bad crowd or wrong location?”
ABDUL “It can, but it can be a crutch to comics where they’ll say, ‘it’s not working because it’s the wrong crowd’. I try to own it and say it’s not working because I did something wrong. I think it’s a better perspective to take. If you’re less dependent on a certain crowd, then you can perform in front of anyone. Half the battle is communicating what’s in your head – into the audiences head.”
HNMAG “At the Oscars on the weekend, Chris Rock was slapped by Will Smith for making a joke about his wife. What is your impression of the incident?”
ABDUL “With regards to Will Smith assaulting another person on live television, I don’t think he should’ve done it because assault is illegal. In regards to the joke, it’s not that funny. I don’t have a strong opinion – one way or the other.”
HNMAG “After your show, what do you want audiences left with/to walk away with?”
ABDUL “I think from an ideological perspective, I’d like everyone to take life a little less seriously. The undercurrent of my comedy is that nothing is that serious. There are some things that are important to me, such as my core values but I try to poke fun at everything to communicate to everyone – none of this matters that much. We can all take it a little easier on stuff. If 10 people walk away feeling less stressed, that would make me happy. I just like to make people happy – there’s a group of people coming to a show tonight and I have the opportunity to make them a little happier in their lives. For me, it’s a gift that I get to do that. I want people to walk away feeling that everything is ok and better than they thought, when they first walked into the room.”
HNMAG “In the series, New Wave of Stand-up, did you know any of the comedians prior to the show?”
ABDUL “Oh yeah, the comedy scene in Canada is quite small. Many comedians tend to gravitate toward other comedians and there’s a real sense of community. I was friends with a good chunk of them before the taping. It was so cool to meet up with them again. They’re all rad performers and it was a great chance to interact with them.”
HNMAG “Earlier in your career, have you ever had stage-fright?”
ABDUL “I would say so. In the first few years, I had some pretty intense anxiety. At the time I was doing my PhD in neuroscience. It was 18-hour days and not a very good lab environment. I ended up with an anxiety problem to the point that I ended up leaving that lab and going in a different direction. I remember being so anxious from that experience that I couldn’t start conversations with strangers. What’s interesting, despite that, I kept doing stand-up. I started going to this room in Toronto called Sugar Marmalade, where comedians would get together and workshop jokes and do their 5 minutes of material. We would all give them tags and because I was too scared to go on stage, I still loved to write, so I’d write for other people. I had a lot of fun doing that and made a lot of friends that way. That room and that stage was a great way to deal with that anxiety. I was eventually able to start performing again in a more confident capacity.”
Abdul also thanked his fantasy podcast, Spout Lore, which is comics playing D&D. He founded it in 2017 and it played a big role in getting him back on stage. In a room where he felt safe and surrounded by friends, he was able to rebuild his confidence enough to believe he was good and funny. He says, “Through doing the podcast, I learned more about myself and who I am on stage from a comedic perspective, as well as who I wanted to be. I was able to take that to a live performance. Since then, my comedy has evolved quite quickly. I know who I want to be and what kind of jokes I want to tell. It was so important in helping me to find the fun in doing it again. I recommend doing improv to any comedian that has stage fright. I also recommend starting an independent project, something unrelated to stand-up but still related to comedy. You get to work on your skill set in a different way, while building up your confidence.”
HNMAG “If you could go on the road with any comedian, who would it be?”
ABDUL “The first thing that comes to me, is going on the road with all my comedy friends – I think they’re the funniest people in the world. If there’s a future where we’re all successful and can all go on the road together, that would be a dream. If we’re talking about famous comedians, it’s Zach Galifianakis. It would be so cool to see him perform and be on that tour. Jason Mantzoukas – I’m not sure if he does stand-up at all but I think he’s one of the funniest people in the world and it would be so cool to hang out with him. Nick Kroll and John Mulaney have made it big and are both so funny in so many facets of comedy – improv, stand-up, they’re such good writers and their character work is great. Tim Robinson’s Netflix series is so funny and he’s a great character. (Laughing) I would love to hang out with him, he’s so interesting. Melissa Villaseñor is probably one of the funniest stand-ups I’ve ever seen. She is so amazing at impressions but her stand-up is on another level of magnitude, it’s enormous. That would be the list of famous people but if there was a genie in a bottle that would grant me one wish, it would be to go on tour with my friends. That would be a dream.”
Thank you Abdul and thank you CBC and Just For Laughs for recognizing laughter and comedy as a prerequisite for being human. The world is currently bruised on all sides and a little laughter, poking fun at ourselves and sometimes sharing our pain in an outrageously funny scenario, can heal, can add oxygen and sometimes turn a negative into a positive. It’s all in the perspective!