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…

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