I almost threw up all over you the first time we met. I was 18. My then-boyfriend took me to a Just for Laughs showcase in Montreal. Mascara ran down my face as I watched one of the performers, Jeremy Hotz. You and I were still getting to know each other then. I was sweating and hyperventilating and I got dizzy and my jaw was sore and my stomach felt ready to implode—and it was the most distilled joy I’d ever experienced. I wasn’t anticipating, as I normally did, that the joy would soon be over, replaced by grey feelings I carried everywhere; I thought I could laugh that hard forever. I only knew of one way to fall in love: hard and fast. And so you and I began.

Falling in love hard and fast means that when you lose it, you fall hard. And fast. That boyfriend and I broke up. He left the country. I tried to take my own life. You were there every night the following summer after I was in the hospital. My little brother and I stayed up watching you on Conan until my brain settled enough so I could sleep. Thanks to you, we created a secret language—a world of inside jokes where I felt safe from my own mind.

That world expanded the first time I hung out with the person I’d later marry. “Do you know the D?” I asked. “Yeah, I know the D,” he answered, referring to Tenacious D. Our shared appreciation of this silly rock-comedy band sealed our friendship. Our close friendship soon grew into a loving relationship. You were around for that, too. At the beginning, he and I watched old Dana Carvey Show sketches. Years later, we watched a Paul F. Tompkins special where he pretends to be an employee for the South Carolina Electric Company who invites a colleague to a private work function: “Take care to wear your rubber-soled tuxedo, I hear tell they have a punch bowl filled with lightning!” We had to pause the show because we were falling off the couch in hysterics. We spent a decade retelling jokes, inventing new ones. We threw in puns, personification, and celebrity impressions. We were a silly army of two until we separated. Then nothing was funny.

Maybe you’d know exactly how I felt. So many people use you to talk about pain, after all. But me it took me writing to you to find the words. A separation means being lost in a cold place. It’s not getting warmer. You have no map. No compass. No phone. No one knows you’re there. They don’t realize you’re missing.

Crying was my only outlet. I clogged up the work bathroom with snot-filled tissues. I screamed into pillows. I didn’t bother wearing makeup to therapy anymore.

Still, you were there.

You were there every time my colleagues pity-laughed as I stumbled through a DeAnne Smith or Aparna Nancherla bit. It was better than nothing. You were there when my friend, Erin, introduced me to Baron Vaughn and Ron Funches one afternoon when I was sure I’d never experience joy again; I did that day. You were there when I stared down the weepy woman reflected in my computer screen reacting to a Hannah Gadsby line: “Your resilience is your humanity.” I realized I might love that woman. Maybe the heart is like the liver, I thought later. Maybe it regenerates, no matter how raw.

And so my raw heart connected with other people’s raw hearts—those of comedians and the audience. And I started to wonder: Maybe the best thing we can ever hope for is to look at each other’s raw hearts and laugh with understanding. Laugh at how the world is falling apart but we keep showing up every day. Laugh at how absurdly devastating it is for two people who care about each other so much to separate out of love. Laugh at the fact that one small thing could’ve been different and the comedian, audience, and I wouldn’t be sharing that moment.

In those spaces, the cold place got a little warmer. I told people where I was. They came looking me for me. They realized I was missing, and you were the compass out.

Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash

The Simpsons‘ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.

On April 8, The Simpsons aired the episode “No Good Read Goes Unpunished.” The 15th episode of the series’ 29th season addressed the issue of the racist portrayal of Kwik-E-Mart owner Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. “Addressed” insofar as Lisa Simpson looked at the camera and said, “Something that started decades ago, and was applauded and inoffensive, is now considered politically incorrect. What can you do?” She asks this question, a picture of Apu beside her, signed, “Don’t have a cow.” Apu is otherwise not in the episode.

In a 2015 interview, the voice actor who voices Apu, and dozens of other Simpsons characters,, Hank Azaria, described himself as an “equal-opportunity offender.” Footage of Azaria can be found where he says he was asked by show creators in the early days, “Can you do an Indian voice and how offensive can you make it?” In the same 2015 interview he acknowledges that Apu was, at a time, the only South Asian character in pop culture and that South Asian kids were being bullied because of the normalized racism of the character. In November 2017, comedian Hari Kondabolu released his film The Problem with Apu, about the character who Kondabolu describes as “a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father.” With the issue becoming a mainstream focus, Azaria told TMZ a month after the film’s release that the folks behind The Simpsons would be thinking about it. 

And so Lisa talks about how things applauded decades ago are now considered politically correct. In a Young Turks video titled, “Why Did The Simpsons Change Lisa Instead of Apu?” Nerd Alert host Kim Horcher wonders who exactly applauded Apu in the first place: “The all white writing staff? The white centric zeitgeist of the 1980s and ’90s?”

Comedy is a reflection of current culture and political climate. There is an argument to be made that comedians are today’s philosophers. It seems obvious that comedy spaces cannot be used effectively while being dominated by white men; plus it’s boring.

New spaces are being created where, as Horcher describes, “voices that were previously not heard because they were inconvenient to the prevailing culture are being heard now.” Not only are they being heard, audiences are vocal about their need for change. 

The Toronto comedy show series SHADE is doing just that. SHADE is a self-described “monthly comedy show that represents and celebrates comedians of colour, comedians from the LGBTQ+ community, and comedians who identify as women.” Its audience is largely people of colour—people who have told SHADE founder and producer Anasimone George that they aren’t usually at these kinds events. “[People tell me], ‘I don’t usually come to comedy shows, I feel like I’m going to be unwelcome,” she says. Since its January 2017 debut, SHADE has sold out every show.

Comic D.J. Mausner lists SHADE in a compilation of “people of colour, female-identifying/non-binary, and queer centric shows around Toronto.” This compilation is what White Guys Matter host Aaron Berg would call “opportunities to marginalized people,” not an opportunity to make people laugh. White Guys Matter is just one example of how not everyone is happy that white men’s voices aren’t the only ones being heard. The show, created by comedian Kevin Brennan, has been a regular show in New York and made its Toronto debut on April 11. It promises to “Make comedy great again” and prides itself on not being a safe space—while being hosted at local club Yuk Yuks, which has a strict no-heckling policy. At the beginning of the show, Sarah McLachlan played; even the feminist references being mocked are dated in the ’90s.

“If you’re going to tell me I can’t make jokes about Black people, I can’t make jokes about gay people, I can’t make jokes about lesbians, you’re absolutely wrong,” says Berg while co-hosting a radio show. “I can’t do it at your show that you book where you have to be on your period to perform, but I’m allowed to say whatever I want to say.” Throughout this interview, Berg goes on about free speech while host Todd Shapiro assures listeners that Berg is a nice guy with a heart of gold because he has Black friends and is married. 

“They think it is this open idea to also include these hateful ideas,” says Alicia Douglas, a comedian who has performed with Second City Toronto Touring Company and Second City Theatricals. “But that’s not an open mind. Those hateful ideas are shutting other ideas out.” Douglas understands that comedy is competitive and comedians may think they need an edge of some sort. But she suggests that if someone needs to prove themselves, why not have more people in the room to prove themselves to? There is this idea, she says, that white men are being pushed out, when in reality, other people are being welcomed in. 

When it comes to White Guys Matter, Douglas says, “people are trying to say it’s just a show or it’s just a name; no, that name carries too much weight. As comedians we should understand better than anyone how much our words and the context of those words matter. We should understand as comedians out words have power. A lot of those guys have been doing comedy for a really long time; and because of that they have this idea that, ‘well, we understand this better than you guys since we’ve been doing it for a long time.’ But the scene is really changing, and the atmosphere is really changing. I honestly think it is out of fear that this kind of thing happens.”

Comedy, commentary on life, is not doing its job if it is exclusively commenting on the lives of the same demographic—cisgender, straight, white men. In my own life there has been an obvious need for more from the comedy I grew up consuming. It started when watching Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, a show where Jerry Seinfeld spends way too much time talking about how rich he is and how awful millennials are because they work in coffee shops (instead of in expensive offices) and record themselves; meanwhile, Seinfeld records himself getting coffee with friends, and guest Norm Macdonald compares women on phones to yappy dogs. These were two guys that I, a teenager living in the suburbs using dial-up internet, thought were hilarious. And boy did I love The Simpsons.

On April 25, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert uploaded on YouTube Colbert’s interview with Azaria, titled, “Hank Azaria: ‘The Right Thing To Do’ With Apu.” In this interview Azaria goes back on earlier comments, saying he didn’t realize how harmful the character of Apu is. “I wanted to spread laughter and joy with this character,” he says. “And the idea that it’s brought pain and suffering in any way, that it’s used to marginalize people, it’s upsetting, genuinely.” He continues to say he was unhappy with the April 8 episode and suggests the show includes Indian and South Asian writers, and not in a tokenized way.

Times have changed, the culture is changing, comedy needs to reflect this.

Stand-up comic Erika Ehler.

I take improv on Wednesday nights in a basement dance studio with floors so sensitive we’re not allowed to wear outdoor shoes on them. The ratio of men to women in the class is about five to one, which is pretty normal. It’s my turn to play.

On stage my scene partner stations himself at an imaginary computer, tapping the keyboard. He says, “It’s not working!” and I go over, put my hands on my hips and say “Hmm.” The teacher shouts to stop and we freeze.

“What do you think is happening in this scene?” she asks.

“Steph is coming on to him,” one of the male students says.

“Yeah,” another man chimes in. “Definitely something sexual here.”

In my head I’d imagined I was wearing coveralls and had a moustache. I wasn’t thinking about sex with a co-worker. Before I have the chance to say so though, the teacher shouts “Go!” and we continue the scene with the attributes we’ve been endowed with.

A week later, we’re working on an improv tool called “second beats,” where we take elements from previous scenes (characters, attitudes, objects) and play them in a new environment. A male player walks on stage and asks his female scene partner, “How’s your vagina?”

I immediately look to the teacher to see if he will stop the scene or give a redirect, but he’s silent. The woman on stage stumbles over some words. We make eye contact (I’m the only other woman in the room) but I don’t say anything either—I don’t know what to do. In the scene before, another male student complained about his sex life and his scene partner inquired whether his wife was wet. So, loosely, his question could be labelled as a second beat. I’d like to argue that unless you find yourself engaged in sexual activities with a person with a vagina, it’s probably never okay to ask that question.

Being a woman in comedy means you can’t just be in comedy. You can’t separate your identity from your hobby, passion, or place of work. In class and on stage, I make the same choices I’d make on the sidewalk and streetcar, in the bar and at the gym, but now everyone’s looking. Inseparably woman here, my choices are weighted by knowing I might have to teach a group lesson to a wily room.

Erinn White, a stand up-comedian in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., shoulders this responsibility in her material, which she calls “observationally political and explicitly feminist.” The 35-year-old has told men in her shows who believe (and vocalized) that they thought it was their job to heckle that they won’t be able to shut her up. “Because I’m older than the general comedy club crowd and look physically nonthreatening—like a history teacher,” she believes she can sometimes get away with calling people out.

But Erika Ehler, a Toronto stand-up, has had a different experience. “There’s no reward for doing the right thing,” she says. Ehler quit running an open-mic at the venue Smiling Buddha when a racist comic wasn’t fired or banned from the premises after his repeated behaviour. Both women have been accused of “being delicate” and told they “can’t take a joke.”

It’s why I didn’t stop the scene in class myself. I couldn’t decide if it was my job to stand up. It sometimes feels like women can’t do anything but just go along with dastardly behaviour without losing a room, friend, or gig.

“There are times where the people who have the power don’t see the problem or don’t care,” says White. “So who has the authority and the obligation to confront this stuff?”

In one way, it’s us.

Even though it’s uncomfortable, I won’t stay quiet the next time sexist behaviour plays on stage or in class. Stage lights play tricks and make some people think they’re as big as their shadows. But when I tell a sexist to suck it, or at least back off, it’s bigger than me.

Since then, it has been Skye’s goal to turn a terrible experience into a punchline. The 29-year-old has only been in stand-up for two years, but has already pushed the boundaries of traditional comedy by weaving issues like racism, violence, and gender equity into clever jokes. She’s the co-founder and co-producer of Bad Bitches, a feminist stand-up collective that regularly holds shows at the downtown Toronto venue Comedy Bar, and a member of Manifest Destiny’s Child, a ragtag collective of Indigenous women comedians.

“I was like, ‘I need to write the funniest joke about missing and murdered Indigenous women,’” she says, “because the second someone tries to talk about it, and do it wrong, other comics will then be like, ‘Well you can’t talk about that because Courtney already did.’”

Approaching a topic this serious with humour just wouldn’t make sense for most people. But Skye believes in the power of stand-up to push issues to the forefront. In discussing them in her comedy, she’s getting the audience to confront real social issues that they otherwise might ignore. And for those directly affected by these issues, it provides an opportunity to heal through laughter.

For Skye, the dark humour—and the heartening, supportive messages behind it—comes naturally. She has done frontline work that has exposed her to the frightening realities of life—poverty, suicide, gendered violence, racism— and those experiences have found their way into her work as a comedian, a job where many field racism, homophobia, and misogyny regularly.

This humour stems from her personal life, too. In 2008, a friend of Skye’s was murdered. “People didn’t value her, because in her missing poster she was wearing Indigenous regalia,” Skye says. “I don’t think I ever really have known how much that’s changed my perspective.” In a way, Skye’s humour is a form of reconciliation with the tragedies that she’s witnessed in her frontline work and that have affected her personally.

Skye, who is Mohawk Turtle Clan, grew up in Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, in Ontario. She lived there until she graduated from high school and moved to Sudbury, Ont., to study police foundations at Cambrian College.

Two years ago, she landed work in Toronto. She would spend her day doing 9-to-5 work, then commute all the way back to Six Nations where she would often be up until 3 a.m. doing volunteer firefighting. When she couldn’t keep up with the exhausting pace, she moved to downtown Toronto.

Eventually, Skye became bored with her sudden free time and signed up for Comedy Girl, a class by Dawn Whitwell, one of the pioneers of Toronto’s thriving feminist comedy scene. With a group of other women in the class, she co-founded Bad Bitches. “I wanted something that was super feminist and could walk that line between PC and not offensive, but allowing women the space to be blue and to be crude, and to be graphic, and to be gross,” she says.

Bad Bitches, Skye says, have an unapologetically intersectional feminist approach. A typical show might feature anything from period jokes to risky jabs about how often women are killed at the hands of men for rejecting them. It’s a far cry from the typical “bro” atmosphere that one expects at a traditional stand-up show.

“I think white men only persevere in stand-up because they have so much cognitive dissonance about what is going on,” she says. In fact, she hopes straight white men feel uncomfortable with her sets—they’re rarely the butt of the joke in comedy, but rather the ones joking about already marginalized group.

With Bad Bitches, and Skye’s other stand-up shows, these norms and stereotypes are being shattered. “I’ve never gone out intentionally to spite white men, I’ve never gone out intentionally trying to rile them,” says Skye, “but they occupy a place of privilege and when you’re challenging a privilege, when you’re challenging the system, they perceive that as a personal threat.”

Skye’s work may seem contradictory—stand-up is probably one of the last things someone would think of when it comes to talking about racism, sexism, and violence. But that’s the essence of Skye’s work: confronting the scary realities in life, and making people laugh about them as a form of healing and reconciling with these realities. In her line of work, laughter really is the best medicine.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

At a punk show last June, a male security guard elbowed me in the chest and some drunk dude punched me in the face. So I left the show. I was angry, but also too exhausted to, yet again, process the wrongness of what had happened and how such violence is a symptom of the complexities of institutional sexist norms. Instead I turned to my friends and joked, “I haven’t been beat like that since my ex-boyfriend.” The ensuing laughs made me feel safe, let me know that this frequent violence is wrong, and that I am friends with people who understand this.

Then, this May I went to Toronto’s Comedy Bar to watch a stand-up show called Rape is Real and Everywhere. Men who “don’t get what the big deal is” seem to own rape jokes. But these eight comedians performing stand-up that night, including the two organizers, have experienced sexual assault and rape—and are now reclaiming the narratives of their experiences. For them, making jokes and sharing their experiences with an audience acts as catharsis and eliminates isolation. There’s a strong sense of solidarity. One of the show’s comedians says such subversive acts build awareness, support, and understanding. “It is a very traumatic, sensitive, and destructive experience” adds comedian Silvi Santoso. “For me, humour can be used as one possible way to deal with the pains.”

I started consuming more comedy after a suggestion from my therapist. Luckily, one of my oldest friends is a comedian. She has worked at Second City Theatricals for Norwegian Cruise Lines and is now attending school for social work, with an aim to create therapeutic comedy programs.

It is because of my dear friend that I have returned to Comedy Bar, this time to take a stand-up comedy writing class. I wanted to improve my public speaking skills and gain confidence, but it’s therapeutic as well. During my first class I shared something that has been building a pit in my stomach for decades, something I have been hashing out in therapist chairs for just as long. After I was done the room was laughing—and it felt amazing. I was high on it for the rest of the day. And so this is my wish for the future: that we may all heal through laughter and learn we are not alone.

Illustration by Matthew Daley

"Sitting Bed" (2006) by Life of a Craphead. Photo courtesy the artists.

Amy Lam, left, and Jon McCurley, the "conceptual comedy" duo known as Life of a Craphead.

For Toronto’s “Making Room” art show in 2006, Amy Lam and Jon McCurley—the duo who call themselves Life of a Craphead— erected a bed sitting on a couch. The couch was large and blue and the bed sat as a human would, folded at the waist, with two wooden legs on the ground. It looked comfortable. On a sign nearby, hand-written, as if the bed itself got down on bedposts and springboard to scrawl the words, was the caption “SOMETIMES EVEN I HAVE TO SIT DOWN.”

“It’s supposed to be funny,” Lam says of their work. McCurley nods. “But the first couple of shows, people just didn’t laugh.”

Today, Lam and McCurley are one of Toronto’s most sought-after installation-, performance-, and conceptual-art teams. They have appeared everywhere from rock clubs to abandoned factories, hoity-toity galleries to Hollywood’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. In Toronto’s Chinatown, Life of a Craphead offered a “Free Lunch,” giving away everything on the menu; in Montreal they sat in a church basement, selling $40 “laughter-treated” wood.

Life of a Craphead call themselves a “conceptual comedy duo,” but their work by any other name would be as funny. “Someone from a gallery will ask us to perform at it as performance artists or as installation artists,” McCurley explains, “but someone from the comedy world will ask us to perform [as comedians], or someone from the theatre world will ask us to do a play.”

They met at Canzine in 2004, each there with their own projects. The following year, the duo performed their first comedy set together for the Drake Hotel’s Joke Club night. As they chow down on eggplant curry, their chemistry is palpable: conversing in gentle punchlines, a string of sympathetic giggles, and each peeping through enormous granny glasses.

Whereas Lam has lived in Hong Kong, Calgary, Waterloo, and Montreal, McCurley has known only Ontario, growing up in Mississauga before spending a “year of hell” at Queen’s and then OCAD. Life of a Craphead’s first joke involved boxes of books taken from the house of McCurley’s parents, who had recently moved. “We pulled [them] out on stage and then we went offstage and played Beethoven,” McCurley says. “And nobody laughed. After that we brought out a dog on a cinderblock and we let him loose, with Beethoven. And nobody laughed.”

“And that was the first joke ever,” Lam sadly intones. In their earliest routines, they avoided addressing the audience directly—trying “not to do the things that stand-up comedians usually do.” But as they began to do more “fine” art events, the context changed. “The popular notion of performance art is ‘It could be anything! There are no limits,’” Lam says.

“Comedy’s expectations are different and much more clear,” McCurley continues. “You’re going to go in and you’re going to laugh at these jokes.”

"Laughter Treated Wood" (dates vary) from New Thing Travelling Show by Life of a Craphead. Photo courtesy the artists.

Life of a Craphead’s work began to test the relationship between performance art and comedy, artworks and jokes, often while occupying or reshaping public spaces. In 2007, the pair illegally sawed “musical lines” into Yonge Street—trenches that would play “music,” or rather a brief coughing sound, when cars drove over. More recently, they crashed their own gallery show— engineering a fake wedding party that seemed to sabotage a play at its climax. “Wise art people, who have a handle on things, were tricked,” McCurley gloats. “They asked, ‘How did they do that? Why did they do that?’”

But it’s the arbitrary, self-organized events that most tickle Life of a Craphead: their show at an abandoned truck factory; their proposed “stress ramp” for frustrated Torontonians to jump into Lake Ontario; taking a saw to the road outside Future Shop. “It’s more important to do something with people here than to impress people who don’t exist over there,” McCurley says. “If it gets busted by the police, then no one cares. ‘Oh well! Everyone goes home!’ But if it works, it’s like—‘I can’t believe it’s happening! This is amazing!’ Then it’s like heaven. Nothing else matters. This here is the best place to be.”