Live! From his living room! Comedian Ron James creates an all-new ticketed event with virtual laughs
By Jim Slotek
On New Year’s Eve, 2020, some 3,500 fans of comedian Ron James said goodbye to a benighted year by paying $20 to see him perform live in his living room.
The consummate comedy road warrior admits he’s suffering cabin fever as much, or maybe more than most. But at least he ended the year with a ray of hope that he can still ply his trade.
It obviously wasn’t a typical comedy experience. All live performance was crippled in a year when everything played at a home theatre near you.
If all the world’s a stage, Ron James’ living room fits the bill just fine.
But where a musician’s exchange with the audience involves playing a song and then hearing applause. A comedian needs to hear laughter at every stage of a performance to know it’s going well.
“I’m not going to lie, your comment is on the money,” says James, who is repeating the experiment with a live virtual show, Live from My Living Room: Spring Loaded at 8 p.m. Sunday, March 21 (tickets available at ronjames.ca).
“A comedian needs an audience all the way through. Otherwise, you’re just some dude talking to yourself. It kind of feels like you’re sending dispatches back to fellow Earthlings from a capsule you’re in orbiting the Nebulon galaxy.”
So, James takes pauses where he assumes the laughs would be. In that earlier special, the pauses themselves often made me laugh.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
“Yeah, it was weird. Yeah, you’ve got to leave spaces for the laughs. But after 25 years in stand-up, I’ll be damned if COVID is going to scuttle my calling. And I began to visualize the audience laughing in the spaces I began to leave.
“And not hearing laughs? That’s life coming pretty much full circle, because that’s the first couple of years of my stand-up career in a nutshell.”
The Maritime native, who these days calls a downtown Toronto condo home, is a Canada-only treasure, having given up Hollywood dreams early (and immortalizing three years of L.A. struggle in a successful one-man show called Up and Down in Shakytown). Since then, he’s traversed the nation repeatedly and entertained with tales of getting to a gig in Prince George, B.C. on bald tires in a white-out, and other adventures. As he puts it, “I want to be able to say, ‘I ate some muktuk in Tuktoyaktuk by an inukshuk,’ and have people know what I’m talking about.”
He’s also become more politically outspoken in recent years, a development he believes had something to do with the end of his series of comedy specials on CBC. Viewers of his live-streamed New Year’s special got to hear some of his more barbed Donald Trump jokes that were previously cut by the network.
James did try to work with local protocols and play for small live audiences last year, where allowed. One was in Nova Scotia, and another was at the October opening of Toronto’s renovated, storied El Mocambo, for the distanced crowd of 50 that was allowed then before Ontario’s second wave. (The Bay Street crowd – “coked-up brokers and their botoxed butt bunnies” – didn’t appreciate his Trump jokes and James got to revive his heckler-fighting skills.
His initial thought for New Year’s was, “I was going to shoot it down the road in Belleville at my buddy’s theatre, the Empire. At that point, in Belleville, you could still have 50 people in the audience. I was very close to doing that. And then you’re thinking of the expense of lighting guys and sound guys, and I thought, ‘Let’s do it from my living room.’
He got “a push from my 32-year-old daughter, these millennials try to keep you to the right side of history. I work with an IT wizard named Keith Tomasek. We had a camera guy here, a young fellow just out of Ryerson a few years ago, and his buddy doing sound, and Keith on the computer.
“And I collaborated with by buddy (comedy writer) Paul Pogue who did the last few specials with me, and (stand-up) Chris Finn, consummate professionals.”
If Sunday’s show doesn’t match his previous viewership, what are the options? Comedians like Bill Burr and Jim Gaffigan have played drive-in shows, with horns substituting for laughs. “I remember reading Steve Martin’s book Born Standing Up. And he tells that story about having to perform at a drive-in with people honking their horns.
“I remember thinking, ‘How horrible!’ And now a lot of people have done it.”
James, by the way, has a book of his own coming out in the fall. All Over the Map is a follow-up to his earlier The Road Between My Ears.
“I’m trying to honour people and place from the past and the present,” he says of the book.
“There’s my three-year sabbatical in L.A. chasing the sitcom dream, moments in a world that was, that I’ve shared with the people where I’m from. It’s those family camping trips we took to Cape Breton Highlands National Park in 1969. Some Americans pulled their color TV from their Airstream so we could watch the moon landing.
“It’s comedians who influenced me, like (the late) Mike MacDonald. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him. Or Billy Connolly at Just For Laughs. I was very impressed listening to Keith Richards autobiography, and I love how musicians pay deference to their influences and to people they admire and who they saw at the top of their game.
“But mostly, I dedicate the book to those people who fly below the radar, who just started talking to me in coffee shops or food courts or hotel lobbies or restaurants, and they would just start telling me their stories.
“This was before social media put us all face first in an iPhone screen. My head has always been up looking around instead of down.”