Darrin Rose has found his way into a lot of the comical corners of Canadian culture. But he has never found himself on the streets of the quintessentially Canadian northern city of Prince George. To correct this error in his nationalism, he arrives at the end of the month packing a well-seasoned comedy show. He knows it's a two-way street. He can't learn the ways of urban-rural and modern-traditional interconnection without sharing a little of himself, too.
He confessed that as a lifelong Torontonian, who goes each summer to Halifax to shoot the hit TV series Mr. D, then off to a swath of comedy festivals and standup comedy tour circuits, he didn't get a chance to study the geography of Western Canada very much. He knew about Vancouver, but it wasn't until he did some comedy festivals in Victoria and Kelowna that he understood the depth of what he didn't know of B.C.
"Canada is an enormous place," he said. Discovering Victoria and Kelowna, and thus triggering a hunger for what more he didn't previously know of, "made me wonder why everyone wasn't talking about these places. It should be common knowledge for all citizens. We have to get Victoria and Kelowna into the curriculum, and now we're going to add Prince George as well."
He knows exactly how to mess with the minds of young Canadians. He's part of the jocular Mr. D antics each week, in his role as the irresponsible bartender roommate of the irresponsible teacher in the title role. It's a deliciously awkward suite of scripted circumstances.
"This is our sixth season, coming up, so that's great, it's a rare story in Canada," said Rose.
But he is used to long television runs by now. In 2012, Rose was named by The Comedy Network as the host of an all-Canadian revival of Match Game, a game show with two permanent panelists (Sean Cullen and Debra DiGiovanni) with a revolving door of weekly guest celebrity contestants. A lot of them were standup comedians.
"Match Game was such a nice outlet for the comedians of Canada to be on TV, because we needed so many panelists. But we had a good run, we made 120 episodes," Rose said.
That's over now, but the creative flow doesn't stop. Television is a difficult medium in which to form a project, said Rose, because it takes the backing of a broadcaster to make the effort and expense worth it. It is getting easier and easier to find a quality broadcaster, with all the internet-based and cable-based networks now instead of just the big three in the U.S. (NBC, CBS and ABC, with PBS a smaller option) and two in Canada (CBC and CTV). However, it requires exponentially more marketing to get noticed by the public.
He has a new idea percolating with The Comedy Network, which, he said with a guffaw, just means he said it out loud and they didn't say no to his face. He also has a pilot show in development for a sitcom on CBC and that has more structure, but nothing is ever certain, he said.
So is the plot of the pilot still a classified file?
"No, no, it's not a secret," he said, saying it was basically his life's biggest ups and downs distilled into a sequence. "My brother and I were raised by my dad so there were three guys in the house growing up, and me being the creative black sheep - my brother is an ironworker, my dad's a tough guy who sold steel for a living - I had the soft hands." It was splendid fodder for funny.
He hopes it leads to the "champagne problem" of having multiple shows on TV as well as a healthy standup schedule to maintain. Getting out on stage is still his favourite part of show-biz.
"With standup it's just me and my thoughts and that's very exciting, to go out there and connect with people. When we shoot something for TV, it doesn't come out for another six months, and with standup you know right away if something was funny or no, that was not funny. It's more of a high-wire act," he said.
It's also more social. He called the annual comedy festivals "summer camp for comedians" because of all the mutual joy the continent's cadre of comics brings to one another when they get to meet up at the big extravaganzas.
It's a puzzling fact, though, he said, that most of those events are in the United States where standup comedy has a different place in the culture than north of the border.
"Canadians pride ourselves on being funny, but there are very few Canadian fans of comedy. I'm in Las Vegas right now, I'm playing the comedy club at the MGM Grand and I've been on tour in the States and there are tonnes of comedy fans. People line up to meet me afterwards, and I have been on television exactly three times in America: I did Craig Ferguson twice and I did Last Comic Standing like seven years ago. But people there want to come talk to me after the show. In Canada, up until about three years ago, nobody wanted to talk to me after the show. In America, everyone thinks you're an inch away from being famous so they want to say 'I knew him when...' In Canada everyone goes 'I'm going to wait it out until he's famous.' Canadians are less obsessed with celebrities than Americans are."
He added a world view to how Canada looks to him on foreign shores, and how Canadians behave compared to others around the world. He went to countries as diverse as Singapore and Ireland, Scotland and Hong Kong, to deliver his act. He has left a trail of sell-out signs and all sorts of awards in his wake. He even got written up by GQ Magazine, which called him "one of the hottest comics in Canada right now, who stormed the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival."
Well finally he storms into Prince George. He will be at the P.G. Playhouse on April 30. For tickets call 250-563-8401 or buy online at www.ticketfly.com.
