Comedy in words, pictures

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Among the performers at the Ignite! Youth-Driven Arts Festival at the Cultch May 6-11 is the very talented and funny Jacob Samuel.

Despite publishing a successful book – which has a couple of illustrated trees on the cover and bears the title I Can’t Believe We Had to Die Just to Make This Pointless Book: Funny Cartoons About Life, Death and Unpaid Internships – despite writing and drawing the webcomic The Daily Snooze (which is anything but a snooze) and despite being a professional stand-up comedian, Samuel refers to himself as a “hobbyist comedy writer.”

“When I was at McGill, I majored in economics,” explained the Toronto-born and -raised Samuel, who is currently doing a master’s in the environment department at Simon Fraser University. “For two years, I learnt about all these economic theories that supposedly explained how the world functions and then, in my third year, in 2008, watched as the global economy melted down – showing firsthand that most of what my professors had taught me about economics was more or less useless. I think this was when I started getting more interested in writing comedy.

“I refer to myself as a hobbyist comedy writer because it’s true. While I did make a profit on my book and have made a little money from stand-up shows, it is very challenging to make a living in comedy when you are starting out,” he said. “I use the word ‘hobbyist’ because if you tell people are a ‘comedy writer,’ they will reply, ‘Oh, what do you write for?’ Then you say, ‘The Internet, you know, blogs.’ By that point, she’s already started walking away across the room towards the accountant.

“So, my dark secret is that I’m a graduate student and a researcher on the side. I don’t really talk about it that much though because it’s not the most relatable thing for a general audience: ‘So, you know that feeling you get when you realize you’ve used the wrong citation method?’ I found it painful just typing that sentence, let alone saying it.”

Samuel had what he called “a very liberal, ‘progressive’” Jewish upbringing. “I went to public school my whole life. I attended afternoon Hebrew school twice a week until my bar mitzvah and went through the Canadian Young Judaea summer camp system, where, like many Jewish youths, I had many of my first sexual experiences.

“I like to refer to my family as ‘New York Times: Sunday Edition’ Jews. We belong to an egalitarian synagogue, attend a lot of film festivals, and are full members at the Art Gallery of Ontario. That kind of assimilated cultural style of Judaism is the one that feels the most familiar to me. All of my grandparents were born in North America, so there isn’t a strong connection in my family to eastern Europe or anything like that.”

His parents are both professionals, his father a lawyer for the Ontario government and his mother the director of a Jewish nonprofit affordable-housing agency. His younger brother, Eli, is studying English literature at the University of Toronto. About him, Samuel said, “He is a very bright guy and won an award at the U of T drama festival for a play he wrote and directed. I didn’t think about it explicitly until I started writing comedy, but our mutual interest in comedy is a huge part of our relationship.

“In a way, I feel bad for my parents because both my brother and I did pretty well in school and showed a lot of promise. Now though, my brother is taking English lit and I am dedicating myself to comedy, so it’s sort of an unexpected scenario for them. They may have to continue working well into their 120s.”

Samuel himself is no slouch, however. His first two summers at McGill, he worked at a Young Judaea camp in Sudbury, Ont.; in his third summer, he did an internship with a nongovernmental organization in rural Kenya. He spent last summer in San Francisco, “primarily to work for a think tank, and also to, on the side, do comedy in a new city. It’s a weird transition to make in day, to go from the ivory tower of an abstract progressive think tank to a dive bar for an open mic.”

Samuel moved to Vancouver two years ago, right after he finished his BA.

“I had an offer to do a master’s, and the funding I got afforded me the financial means to be in a new city for a few years,” he said. “That’s what I really wanted: to move to a place where I didn’t really have any close friends so I would force myself to ‘branch out’ socially. That’s how I ended up pursuing comedy, I was looking for ways to meet and bond with people. It’s amazing what you realize about your interests when you permanently separate yourself from your best friends.

“The weird coincidence is that Vancouver does have a great comedy scene, for starting out.... The best places to learn how to do a performing art seem to be away from the main economic centre (i.e. Toronto) because it’s too competitive there. You probably need to start out somewhere where you can get a lot of performance time and also where no one important is watching. That way, instead of getting caught up with getting ‘noticed,’ you just concentrate on getting good.

“Vancouver might actually be one of the best cities in North America for up-and-coming comedians,” he added. “There’s a lot of opportunity here, and the audiences are well informed and demand well-written jokes. I wish more people in Vancouver knew that they live in a city with thriving improv and stand-up scenes. Many of the best local improvisers and stand-ups are truly some of the best in the country and, in some cases, North America. As a Torontonian, I hate to admit it, but I think Vancouver has produced, on average, better-quality comedy than Toronto. Having said that, there will always be stand-up shows that are abjectly terrible and no one should ever attend them. So, I would say, check out comedy in Vancouver, but look into it a bit beforehand.”

Samuel compared doing stand-up to “playing Russian roulette with your self-esteem. The best part is when people laugh at jokes that you feel are an original expression of your viewpoint. For me, I want people to laugh at jokes that I think are creative and interesting: not lines that get a reaction solely because they are shocking or vulgar.... I like making jokes that are (ideally) clever and that (hopefully) embody a somewhat unique voice. I also like experimenting with the structure of jokes; I don’t want every single thing to be a quick set-up punchline. With stand-up, you’re one person on a stage, so the limit to what you can do is really your imagination, as long as you get laughs.

“Inevitably, I end up talking about myself a lot because you kind of need to address that when you are unknown to an audience,” he acknowledged. “I’m in my mid-twenties, too, so most of what I talk about has to do with the things that I’m currently anxious about or afraid of: my career, figuring out dating, my evolving relationship with my parents, etc. I also like talking about history, a dystopian future, contemporary youth culture, and how I’d like to see a movie in which Daniel-Day Lewis is cast as a piece of furniture.”

As to his comic influences, he said, “Initially, my favorite comedian was Woody Allen. I still love his writing but, the more I got into performing comedy, the more I realized his stand-up delivery is pretty dated. Other comedians I really love are Steve Martin, Demetri Martin, Mike Birbiglia and Flight of the Conchords. I probably base my style most off of U.K. comedians like Simon Amstell (who is also Jewish), Dylan Moran and, most of all, Stewart Lee. I have also learnt a lot from watching an amazing Canadian and Vancouver comic named Graham Clark.”

Samuel said that growing up Jewish affected his humor in that “you see a lot of successful Jewish comedians and you relate to them because of your shared upbringing, so I think that helps implant the idea of ‘Oh, maybe I could do comedy,’” but added, “Initially, I did not write many jokes about being Jewish because I didn’t want Vancouver audiences to put me in a box as a ‘Jewish comic.’ I am starting to talk about it more now though and I’m hoping to cover subjects that are more unique to my generation’s identity. I’m not particularly interested in cultural stereotypes or anything like that. Enough Jewish comics have made jokes about their overbearing mothers. I can’t relate to that so much as my mom is pretty easy-going, although she does own an absurd number of avant-garde hats.”

The content of Samuel’s humor writing is wide-ranging. Especially noteworthy are his New Yorker-quality cartoons, which portray the uncomfortably serious, the delightfully inane and everything in between, with topics as diverse as racism, skinny jeans, capital punishment, religion, Star Wars, gladiatorial ski jumping and praying mantis pillow talk. (“My comedy and writing is definitely informed by the fact that I’m a pretty big nerd,” he noted at one point in the interview.)

In addition to his own websites, Samuel’s work can be found on nearlyrobots.com. “Right now, we are based in Vancouver and have satellites in Toronto, Montreal and New York City,” he said of the writing collective. “The site came about because a group of us contributed to and managed The Red Herring, which is McGill’s humor magazine and Canada’s largest student humor publication. We started Nearly Robots because we all wanted to continue writing and drawing after graduation, and there’s really no place for young comedy writers to go in Canada.

“I wish we had office parties but we really only meet in small groups and, otherwise, communicate online. We do throw large live comedy shows every few months though in both Vancouver and Toronto, all of which so far have sold out ... so, fingers crossed.”

Though he seems a natural talent, Samuel contends that he “was forced to learn how to be funny because of circumstance.” He said, “I’m a pretty absent-minded person and very clumsy, I constantly trip over things when I’m walking. I also did not have the most natural social skills, I had to learn to some extent how to interpret social cues. To boot, the natural cadence of my voice makes me sound like I’m always about to fall asleep mid-sentence.

“I really do think that outside forces shape you into a person who wants to pursue comedy. There’s a cliché that most comedians do it to try and control why people are laughing at them, and I think it’s very true. For me, there was one event in particular that I think made me realize I could use humor to my advantage.”

Referring to an incident when he was a camp counselor in 2006, he explained, “As staff, you have to get up in front of the entire camp to make announcements and stuff like that. The other staff and some of the campers picked up on my constant mumbling and it quickly became an inside joke. It got to the point where I would get up to make an announcement, and the entire camp would respond, ‘What? What did you say?’ It was horrible, I couldn’t function as a staff member. Even when I was careful to enunciate and project my voice, everyone would still pretend that they could not understand me. So, I ended up in this absurd situation where I was an 18-year-old authority figure being collectively bullied by 150 13-to-15-year-old kids who were supposed to be looking up to me.

“I knew I had to do something to intervene. So, one time after being mocked, I came back in front of the entire camp with a handwritten letter in which I melodramatically resigned my staff position. Then, I stood on the road wearing a small knapsack and self-made hobo bindle pointlessly trying to hitchhike a ride on the camp’s main road. Shockingly, it worked. Once I took command of the joke, everyone stopped making fun of me ... to my face. Of course, to this day, I still have a deep-seeded fear of Jewish teenagers.”

Hopefully that fear doesn’t extend to all teens, because Samuel will be joined on May 9, 8 p.m., at the Cultch by several younger performers in the show called Word: Everything Literary, Literal and Linguistic. Tickets for all Ignite! performances can be purchased at tickets.thecultch.com. For more information about the festival, visit igniteyouthfest.ca.

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