“Here’s what we can do,” Stacey McLachlan looks to her co-interviewee, “we can just do every other word when answering his questions.”
Colin Sharp, my other interview subject, takes the idea and runs with it: “this.”
“Is.”
“Going.”
“. . . Badly.”
The jocular interplay between Sharp and McLachlan makes for a difficult translation to print, but in-person the pair riff off of each other like they’ve been doing it for years. Their chemistry makes sense though, given their similarities and history together. Aside from a brief stint as roommates, the two are both involved with the Vancouver comedy scene, and both also bear the illustrious title of former Humour Editor for The Peak. I’m in good company.
McLachlan and Sharp also share one more thing in common: they’re both co-hosting The Peak’s 50-year reunion on August 14. While the event is still several weeks away, I ask what the co-hosts have planned for the event.
“The extent of my knowledge,” says Sharp, “and what I want us to do is me and Stacey and a few other notable Peak alumni who are in the comedy scene, just doing a fun set.”
“Some goofing,” adds McLachlan.
“Some goofing, some spoofing. I’m leaning more goof-heavy.”
“Okay, you take goofs, I’ll take spoofs. It’s perfect.”
The interview is hard to balance, because McLachlan and Sharp represent two fairly different entities. McLachlan was Humour Editor for two semesters back in 2008, and is currently an associate editor for Vancouver’s Western Living magazine; she’s been dabbling with stand-up comedy for just over six months now. On the other hand, Sharp held the Humour Editor position for three semesters back in 2011 and is now a copywriter at an advertising agency, Invoke Media; he’s also been doing comedy for four years now and is the co-curator of King’s Head Comedy, a weekly comedy show at King’s Head Pub that just celebrated it’s one-year anniversary.
Both are Peak alumni, and both are very funny.
Unsure of how to approach a two-person interview where both subjects lead such different lives, McLachlan and Sharp take charge and spend much of our time together asking questions back-and-forth, some strictly humorous, others genuine. Read on to learn about how McLachlan is handling the shift from writing to performing, what role comedy plays in both of their lives, and why Sharp calls the thought of an ultimate goal in comedy, “gross.”
Stacey McLachlan: Colin, how do you feel things have changed in your personal comedy stylings since you began this wonderful journey?
Colin Sharp: The big difference is when you transition from saying things you think are funny into saying things that have some level of cohesion. I had a couple one-liners when I started that were objectively funny jokes, but who cares? They were just made up scenarios. My early stand-up was a real hodgepodge of trying things out and seeing what got a laugh. Now when I’m on stage, there are still little one-liners, but they’re framed within the context of something bigger. My jokes no longer start with me thinking, “Oh, that’s funny.” Instead, they start with, “I believe this.” That makes it sound like I’m getting political. I’m not. I mean, I have a six-minute bit about how stupid I think the Gastown steam clock is. It’s not political, it’s just an opinion I have.
Stacey, you’re new to comedy, but you’ve been writing for a while. What do you feel about the shift between writing and performing?
SM: One of the things I’m working on is cutting things back, much more than I want to. I’m having a really hard time writing jokes and not writing them too ‘writer-ly.’ There’s a huge difference between someone reading something on a page and someone hearing something live. It’s been tough, but good. The hardest part is being concise. Like how right now, I’ve been going on and on and I could’ve said all this in a single sentence.
CS: I’ll give you the one sentence that was passed onto me by 20-year pro Kevin Foxx, on the note of condensing your material: the setup is everything you need to know to understand the punchline and nothing more. If something doesn’t make the punchline funnier, get rid of it.
Peak: During your reigns as Humour Editor, is there anything you wish you’d done but didn’t have the chance to do?
CS: One thing I was bummed about not getting to do but then the next Humour Editor, Gary Lim, ran with it in a big way was Petter Watch. It was very inspired by The Onion’s coverage of Joe Biden, making him into this ridiculous character, and I thought we should do something like that for Petter. I wasn’t the Humour Editor anymore, but Gary was stoked on it and it ran for years.
SM: I feel like I got the chance to do everything I wanted to. When I was running the Humour section, no one would submit anything ever, so every week it was just me deciding what I wanted to do.
During the summer there were camps up on campus, so one of my favourite things that I did was get the kids to write their own comics and then we critiqued them. Somebody’s arms would be at a weird angle, because they’re obviously children, and so we’d say comments like “How could they possibly be catching that ball?!” Or reinterpreting things like, “The artist is trying to make a discussion on the human nature of melancholy. It’s beautiful,” and it’s a picture of a dog or something.
CS: I started running comics from a guy who does stand-up in town, Jacob Samuel. This isn’t me taking credit, because he’s the talented one, but it’s cool to think I ran comics from him and now he’s been published in the New Yorker three times. He used to just send me a bunch and I’d print my favourites.
P: What would you say is comedy’s role in your life now?
CS: My entire sense of self-worth. I work as a copywriter at an ad agency and my job is to be clever at a desk all day. It’s not always strictly speaking funny, but clever. Most advertising that’s not funny is just clever.
SM: I don’t know if you get this a lot, Colin, but people always ask me “Why are you doing comedy? Why are you doing stand-up?” It’s such a weird question to ask, because you wouldn’t ask someone why their band is performing or why they’re playing a soccer game. Doing things in public is how people are validated for what they think they’re good at. It’s such a self-conscious question to answer: “Well, I want praise. I want people to praise me for something I think I’m good at.” That’s what I want.
Did you get people asking you why you wanted to do comedy?
CS: I didn’t get that one as much. I hate when things just go to stereotypes, but for women starting in comedy, you’ve probably heard praise from your friends before, but I bet it wasn’t super common for you to meet someone at a party and have them say, “You should do stand-up,” whereas I got that a lot. People just have this inherent sense of what a stand-up comic looks like.
SM: Colin, what is your ultimate goal, comedy-wise?
CS: One of the great slash frustrating things with comedy is that every time you reach a goal, there’s a new goal right there. That’s kind of the appeal of it: you could always be doing more, you could always be writing a new joke, so just the concept of an ultimate goal is gross. The simplest I can put it is to have comedy as my job.
Stacey, you’re about six months into comedy. Do you yourself have comedy career aspirations?
SM: I love my job as editor at a magazine, so I don’t want to not do that. But I’m enjoying comedy very much as a side project. My ultimate goal is I want to be on Stop Podcasting Yourself, I just want to sit down with Graham Clark and have a conversation with him where I don’t sound like an idiot. Just have to put that out there into the universe. And I’d like to be more concise.
Aside from co-hosting The Peak’s upcoming reunion, you can catch Colin Sharp at his weekly show, King’s Head Comedy, at King’s Head Pub every Tuesday, while you can next see Stacey McLachlan perform as part of a sketch group on August 5 and 26 at Little Mountain Gallery.
