All Joking Aside: Yet another sad drama about comedy that really does leave the jokes aside

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C

As “hack” as the sad-clown trope is, it isn’t entirely untrue. I’ve covered comedy most of my life, and too many suicides I knew were from that world (and that’s not even counting the victims of lifestyle suicide).

But writers of films about comedy succumb to this ironic narrative a lot.  And they miss a lot in the process. There’s electricity in the art of making people laugh, which is why both fans and practitioners get addicted to chasing the serotonin dragon. Any realistic movie about the experience of an up-and-coming comic should be an emotional roller coaster in which no good mood goes unpunished. But bring on the good mood first.

Raylene Harewood is Charlie, an open maker whose desire to do stand-up is complicated

Though it’s well informed on a lot of the mechanics of stand-up comedy, the Canadian drama All Joking Aside – currently on Super Channel - steers hard toward sad clown territory and stays there. It’s the kind of movie where what passes for a happy ending is that someone you expected to die didn’t.

It’s not as if All Joking Aside is an isolated offender. Its plot, a rookie female wannabe being tutored by a pro, evokes the 1988 Sally Field/Tom Hanks movie Punchline. Neither had a lot of laughs. (Although, to be fair, a one-liner in All Joking Aside – “Did you hear about the dyslexic who walked into a bra?” – did make me chuckle).

Directed by Shannon Kohli and written by James Pickering, All Joking Aside stars Raylene Harewood  | as Charlene Murray, a grocery clerk, who apparently is intent on a career in comedy because her late dad wanted to be a stand-up. “Charlie” also carries baggage from being a tentative cancer survivor and is estranged from her mother. 

At an open mike, Charlie has so little confidence, an electron microscope couldn’t find it. Off-stage, she’s a mouse. She is atypical of the kind of person who covets the microphone.

At that first open-mike, Charlie is brutally heckled off the stage by a grizzled barfly who turns out to be Bob Carpenter (Brian Markinson), an erstwhile comedy legend who supposedly once did a thousand gigs in a year with new material each time.

Markinson has his own issues, including an angry ex-wife and a daughter who’s out of his life. Somehow, Bob and Charlie connect as tutor and student.

Harewood and Markinson do have easy chemistry together, and with a more finely tuned script – juiced by stand-up performance scenes that pop – All Joking Aside could have come a little closer to the soul of one of this country’s most personal live art forms. The best people doing it are, to my mind, poets.

Mark Breslin, the founder of the Yuk Yuk’s comedy chain, is an associate producer of the film. And his participation may be why so many technical things ring true – parallel thinking, finding your personality, finding humour in the mundane, using the stage. 

But the movie isn’t up to reproducing what happens on that stage. The closest there is to a “villain,” a one-dimensional misogynistic jerk named Paul (Graeme Thompson) is so clumsily written for the year 2020, it’s as if he’d been coached by Andrew “Dice” Clay. There is indeed still misogyny onstage these days, but the practitioners are a lot more sophisticated about it.

I get why people want to make movies about comedy that make you cry. But making you laugh first – I mean, really laugh – would make for a potent combination indeed.

All Joking Aside. Directed by Shannon Kohli, written by James Pickering. Starring Raylene Harewood and Brian Markinson. Currently playing on Super Channel FUSE and VOD.