Live From the Middle of Nowhere... by Mike Hammond
The only thing I can guarantee you is that you’ve probably never heard of me before. I don’t have half the time put in as the other columnists of The Comedy Tribune, but the thing that contributes most to my obscurity is that I live in the middle of nowhere. I live in St. John’s, Newfoundland, a dumb little island isolated in the middle of the North Atlantic where our main tourist attractions are nature and alcoholism. We don’t have Uber, or trains, or decent Thai food, but what we do have one of the hardest working comedy scenes in the country.
St. John’s boasts a modest 50ish active comedians with an abundance of weekly mics, a comedy contest with a $3000.00 grand prize, a local comedy festival, 3 monthly shows, regular shows across the province, and more and more one-offs happening every year. And it’s all run by the comics. Our comedy club closed down in 2016 and honestly it may have been the best thing to happen to Newfoundland comedy. The people who didn’t LOVE comedy fell to the wayside and all that was left were a handful of maniacs who wouldn’t let anything stand in their way of making people laugh. We started putting off our own shows, making plenty of mistakes along the way. But a funny thing happened… people started coming out.
It didn’t happen overnight, of course. It took a dumb amount of work by some pretty incredible people, and after a while, those that were left over from the club era became a family. A weird, broken, little family. We celebrate each other’s successes, and bond over our crippling failures, but something that has held up over the past 4 years is the mentality that we’re all in this together. We’re not looking to step over each other, we’ve learned to prop each other up because we realize when one of us does well it just makes our scene stronger.
Like any community we face our fair share of problems. Although the club closing lit a fire for many of us, we also lost the road comics coming to town giving us advice, making connections, and setting expectations as professionals. We don’t have the grizzled vets to help guide us up-and-comers, so the community is flying blind trying our very best to help one another with what little we’ve picked up along the way. We also lost a steady stream of work. To get a club gig now, I will spend $500.00 and fly a couple of hours to Halifax to make $300.00 and pray to the comedy gods that the investment pays off.
The other obstacle we face is, “well if you were good enough you would have moved to Toronto by now.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. Newfoundland has this weird self-loathing about its artists where they don’t believe anything amazing can come out of our province (insert your own Newfie jokes here). Often times, you won’t be taken seriously unless you’ve lived somewhere else. And that means a lot of our talent moves away. Now there’s nothing wrong with moving away for work, that’s a time honoured Newfoundland tradition. But for those of us that choose to stay to try and make a career, it’s a punch in the gut every time. For those of you who say, “you got to move where the opportunity is,” I get it. But we’ve done the seemingly impossible in that we’ve created our own opportunity. We may not have a club, or agents, or good Thai food, but we have an incredible scene that’s on the rise, and trust me when I say it’s worth staying for.
So why bother write this article? Simply… COME TO MY ISLAND! Add St. John’s to your tours, meet the people, share your wisdom, and enjoy the nature and alcoholism. We may not have a club anymore, but we have a hungry scene that will welcome you with open arms.
