Corner Gas creator Brent Butt won’t have a prepared road map of comic zingers in his head when he hits the stage in Red Deer next week with his stand-up comedy routine.
He prefers flying by the seat of his pants or, as he puts it, spontaneously drawing from a mental “rolodex” of jokes, depending on what the audience is in the mood to hear.
“If they’re not a sporting kind of crowd, then I won’t do sports jokes. . . . After 24 years of doing this, I have amassed a lot of material,” said Butt, who will entertain on Wednesday at the Red Deer Sheraton Centre for a fundraiser for the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools Education Foundation.
He claims he’s never frozen or sweated it in front of an audience. “Other than when I’m being attacked by some kind of wild animal, I’m not a panic kind of guy.”
Even hecklers don’t phase him.
Before Butt wrote and starred in the hit CTV show Corner Gas, he relentlessly toured Western Canada, finagling yuks out of audiences with his unassuming brand of coffee shop humour. “I’ve been to Red Deer many, many times,” said the 45-year-old Vancouver resident, who still remembers performing at a country bar in the Black Knight in the late 1980s.
Back in those days, he was used to dealing with drunken detractors. Butt recalled, “Half the crowd didn’t know it was a comedy night and the other half didn’t want it to be.”
While audiences are more respectful now, he still occasionally hears shouts from people who want him to perform a particular joke again. “The trouble is, they tend to shout it out by the punch line, which kind of ruins it. Then you can’t do it.”
The comedian said he never found it a stretch to go from performing for locals in his native Tisdale, Sask. — where he was the class clown voted high school valedictorian — to entertaining urban strangers at Yuk Yuks in Toronto.
“I think too much is made of our differences, when really most of us are 99.99 per cent the same,” said Butt.
This common ground is probably why so many people from across Canada, as well as 25 other countries, including the U.S., enjoyed watching Corner Gas so much — a TV show that was very much tied to its fictional locale of Dog River, Sask. (It was really shot in Rouleau, Sask., and Regina.)
“It wasn’t really a show about small-town life,” stressed Butt. “There weren’t a lot of jokes about barley, or about a tractor that didn’t work . . .
“It was a show about a group of people and what happens to them — just as Seinfeld wasn’t about New York, but about a certain group of characters and their peccadillos.”
Butt, who’s a big fan of Jerry Seinfeld’s observational comedy, recalled his own hit CTV series that ran from 2004 to 2009 started out with an audience of a million viewers and grew from there.
“We were completely blindsided by (the success). Nobody expected it.”
He opted to end Corner Gas while it was still on a high. But Butt didn’t have the same opportunity with his follow-up show, Hiccups, about a children’s author with anger issues (played by his real-life wife and Corner Gas co-star Nancy Robertson), and her “inept life coach” of a husband, played by Butt.
The show was cancelled after two seasons.
But the comedian, who grew up as the youngest child of seven in a humourous family headed by a honey factory worker, seems to take the cancellation in stride.
He reasons that CTV had just been sold to new owners and a lot of other shows were also axed.
He’s now looking forward to pitching a new idea for a half-hour TV series that he can’t say too much about yet.
He also plans to start shooting a feature-length movie this fall called No Clue. Butt describes it a comic detective show “that will also be a real who-done-it thriller.”
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com