Ian Boothby is a writer of many mediums, mainly sketch comedy and comics. Recently I found out about his involvement in the comedy show, Canadian Content. As detailed at its site: “Canadian Content is a video and live sketch comedy show featuring Vancouver’s top award winning comedic talent. What can an audience expect from Canadian Content? It’s smart. It’s loose. It’s funny. And it may not contain actual Canadian content.” Canadian Content recently was named Best Sketch Group from the 2008 Canadian Comedy Award. In addition to Boothby, Canadian Content includes Toby Berner, Chris Casillan, Diana Frances, Nathan Clark and Drew McCreadie. My thanks to Boothby for the email interview.
Tim O’Shea: How did Canadian Content originally form?
Ian Boothby: Canadian Content is a spin off from Urban Improv which has been doing weekly sketch style improv for 13 years in Vancouver. We still perform every Monday at Chivana. There was a Vancouver Sketchfest show happening and we wanted Urban Improv to attend but the other groups were adamant that the material had to be scripted. So we wrote some sketches based mostly on characters we’d done on our Monday shows and called ourselves Canadian Content.
Most of the performers in the group have actually had sketch television series in Canada but we never really thought about doing sketch regularly live before this. Since then we’ve got on to do the Chicago and San Fran Sketchfests and the Vancouver ComedyFest. We’ve gotten to work with most of our sketch comedy heroes from Kids in the Hall and Mr. Show. If it all ends now we couldn’t complain. Okay, we clearly would complain but…
O’Shea: Do all the performers also write sketches for the show? Are there any comedy writing teams in the group?
Boothby: Everyone brings ideas to the group and we’re very open about fleshing out a concept and seeing where it goes. Everyone has a strong sense of what’s funny and we try to trust that. Some sketches are direct lifts of improv scenes we’ve done on Mondays, some are built up from a loose idea and others are fully scripted and brought to the group. There’s really no set way a sketch gets done. What I’m saying is we’re unprofessional.
O’Shea: You all have already recorded a pilot for CBC radio, any idea when that will air?
Boothby: That’s up to the CBC. This is one of the nice things about doing our CDs, we have no waiting time before we can get those out there. The CBC show is more structured than the albums but we’re happy with both. Don’t make us do a Sophie’s Choice of which we love more.
O’Shea: While the name of the group is Canadian Content, you definitely do not target a Canadian audience only–in fact you’ll be doing a run of shows in London for the month of August. Will the group try to write sketches and material to capitalize upon current events in London.
Boothby: We’ll have to see if anything hits us. The name Canadian Content is of course based on requirements to broadcasters to play a certain percentage of Canadian material. It was entertainment that was forced upon us and while some good has come from it, it still leaves a bad taste in the mouth. We’re trying to take the name back!
I’m sure we’ll have some references to London, both England and Ontario.
O’Shea: What kind of material is included on the new CD, Canuxsploitation, which is being released this month?
Boothby: Sketches about magicians who don’t understand how their tricks work, sex offenders, a broke Batman, a fight at a party between Dracula and the Wolfman, how to deal with a beached whale, a radio talk show that has 300% too much talk and why you should never order crazy bread at a pizza place.
O’Shea: According to the group’s website, the group is the “bastard step-child of Urban Improv and much of the sketch material comes from Urban Improv shows”. Why form Canadian Content, in addition to Urban Improv?
Boothby: It’s like our improv show but in concentrated form. Like taking frozen Minute Maid orange juice and not adding the three cans of water. Which frankly sounds terrible and has turned me off of seeing our show.
O’Shea: How is it different to write a sketch for a visual medium (video/youtube) versus writing for CD or radio?
Boothby: You have to dress better and I feel worse about my weight when it’s on video. Also it’s more work for Drew McCreadie who directs all of our videos.
O’Shea: Ian, at Facebook you recently linked to a Roger Ebert essay on comedy. It in he includes the anecdote (from the Aristocrats documentary) about Gilbert Gottfried telling a 9/11 joke too soon (for some) after the tragedy. Are there taboo subjects that you try to avoid for fear of crossing a line?
Boothby: No, we try not to do material just for shock value but also if usually have a couple of things per show that scare us a bit. I am always surprised what the audience is game to laugh about. If you don’t try new things and push it a bit then people might as well be watching TV. Not that I don’t enjoy TV. It’s swell, but live theatre especially should take you some new places.
What I don’t like as an audience member is when you see a sketch and once you get the hook to it you know pretty much how your next 3-4 minutes are going to go. My hope is that with our sketches you don’t skip ahead mentally and if you do we’ll be taking you someplace different. That might come from the improv background where we never know where a scene is going to end up and we’ve tried to bring that sensibility to sketch. Or maybe we just don’t know how to end scenes. Once again we’ve pretty much all had sketch series on television, notice we don’t still have them.