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Corner Gas star to perform at local comedy club

It doesn't matter what corner you have to stand on, Brent Butt will have a gas with you.
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Brent Butt, creator and start of Corner Gas, will appear at Sonar Comedy Club April 20 and 21.

It doesn't matter what corner you have to stand on, Brent Butt will have a gas with you.

Just because he's the star of two television shows - one of them a legendary franchise that's still pumping out the material - doesn't mean he's not keen to come meet the public and have some laughs in person.

He will be live and only a few feet away at the Sonar Comedy & Night Club in a couple of weeks.

Butt, for those new to Canada or melting out of the permafrost, is the creator and star of the mega-hit sitcom Corner Gas. It lasted six seasons, the re-runs are still in heavy rotation, you can watch it on the Crave viewing platform, a feature-length Corner Gas movie came out in 2014, and now there is an animated series about to hit the airwaves.

In between times, Butt also created and starred in the TV sitcom Hiccups which also (like Corner Gas) co-starred his real life wife Nancy Robertson. It aired for two seasons on CTV and The Comedy Network.

In all that time, amongst all those successful projects, Butt never stopped doing the other job that got him into show-business in the first place. That's what's bringing him to Prince George.

"You have to get up into a spotlight in front of an audience. You can only be so funny at your kitchen table at two o'clock in the afternoon," said Butt in a recent phone call to The Citizen.

He said his process hasn't changed in the decades he's been doing this unique kind of work. He will jot down "the principal funny notions and then getting up on stage in front of people and hammering it out there. To me, that's where the bulk of the build is."

Which means the material is often off the mark. To him, that's ok, it's a marathon not a sprint, but the mere notion of getting schlock-blocked is scary to a lot of people contemplating live standup comedy, and utterly terrifying to a whole segment of the population. Public speaking is still considered one of society's biggest fears, let alone high-octane public speaking.

"It's not like a giant pit opens up dropping you down to the sharks if it's not working," Butt said, dampening the sense of bravery around the profession. "You kinda get blank stares, is all. If you can't handle people not laughing at your jokes, if that's a nightmare, then comedy's not for you. A vice cop in Toronto once told me 'I would never have the nerve to get up on stage like you do.' Didn't you kick in the door to a crack house today? If my day goes bad, I don't get a shotgun blast to the chest, y'know? I've just got to go home and re-work my jokes. That's not the worst nightmare I can conceive of, certainly."

Life has been more dreamlike for Butt, even compared to most Canadian comedians out there. He's had years of pop-culture acclaim for the Hiccups and Corner Gas projects, and the latter just keeps pumping. The first episode of the brand new chapter of the franchise, Corner Gas Animated, launched this past weekend.

"We're not animating old episodes, we've written all new stuff," said Butt. "The show lends itself to be animated really well, I could not be happier with the final product. It feels just like Corner Gas."

Sometimes the creator of a franchise pushes the production companies to take on more and more spinoffs to their beloved brainchild, but in the case of Corner Gas Animation, it was Butt's phone that rang and The Comedy Network executives who did the dialing.

"We first started talking about it after the Corner Gas movie because the success of the movie made the network call us up and say there was obviously still an appetite for Corner Gas so would we be interested in doing more episodes? But we didn't necessarily want to go back and just do more of the same. We started thinking about how we could do it but with a fresh new angle."

The new series will run over 13 episodes. It stars almost all the original cast reprising their roles, just this time in cartoon form. That familiarity will not be tarnished by any wild fluctuations in the plots. It will still be a similar atmosphere to the original show, no flights of unusual fancy just because there are no creative constraints in animation.

"We always had, in the live-action show, the fantasy sequences built in where you could see what someone was imagining," Butt said. "That allowed us to do some pretty crazy stuff. But in the real world you're still kind of limited to what you can get away with doing whereas with animation you can take it farther. But our reality stays our reality. We are keeping the same kind of rules of reality that we had in the live-action show."

The question in front of Butt, co-writer David Storey, and the all-star cast is will there be more than this 13-episode string? Should Butt be aiming his creative talents at new Corner Gas Animated shows or should he be writing that movie script he's been noodling away on in the background?

"I'm always writing stuff down," he said. "My brain is kind of a sack of jumping beans, so there's always a lot of activity but it's not all worth pursuing. I have a lot of things that distract me throughout the day, and some are worthy of writing down and looking at in greater detail and a lot of it is really stupid crap. The trick is trying to wade through the crap to pick out the jewels."

It took him and his team about two years to build all the story structures for this season now on the air, but a second season would take much less time, he said.

What will never be affected, if he can help it, is his constant return to the live stage. He didn't halt his standup act even during the peak of the live-action Corner Gas version. It's his default personal expression space.

It has been that way since Sept. 20, 1976. That's when he was a kid watching TV in the family home in Tisdale, Saskatchewan. It was the debut of a new program on CTV, The Alan Hamel Show, and one of the first guests was comedian Kelly Monteith. When little Brent Butt saw a performer walk out in front of the camera, microphone in hand, and tell a set of jokes for the instant edification of a live audience and the people at home, the light in his head flashed. Butt lived in a funny home, with older siblings he strove to make laugh, but Monteith single-handedly demonstrated to him that there was such a thing as a standup profession, and he wanted in.

It's not an easy profession. On top of the efforts required to build a good set, there are also the business realities of being a freelance contractor for hire, having to travel widely, having to balance the often slim paycheques with the costs of bouncing around Canadian comedy circuits, constantly angling for television appearances, festival inclusion, opportunities in other countries, and if you're really lucky your own long-running television show.

Butt knows now that the whole industry looks daunting to the eyes of the realistic and easy to the eyes of the naive. But it is a profession like any other, with its practicalities and its insider machinations.

There is even a mutual respect among Canadian comedians, a sense of camaraderie more than competition.

"Yeah, if you're funny," Butt clarified. "What it really comes down to is, if you are funny, everyone will support and back you. And if you're not, it's not the friendliest place in the world. It's weirdly pure in that way. You can get by if you're not funny and a really nice person, or you can be incredibly funny and an absolute asshole and get by. The only thing you can't be is an unfunny asshole. When I first got into it I thought it was going to be cutthroat, a bunch of lone wolves, everyone out for their own interests - I did not expect the level of support people give each other. If you're funny, people have each other's back."

Butt brings his veteran talent - years of proving his funny - to Sonar on April 20 and 21 (two shows per night). For more information, visit the www.sonarcomedyandnightclub.com website. Tickets are $35 each (plus service charges).