In February of 1988, a young man began his stand-up comedy career. Thirty years later, the stage might be a bit bigger and the crowd might be a bit larger, but Brent Butt is still there.
“It’s still the thing I love to do. The thing I look most forward to is getting up on stage in front of a crowd with a microphone. You would think I would be somehow done with it, that it would be boring or dull, but it isn’t, I look forward to it immensely.”
While Yorkton might be a “metropolis” compared to Butt’s hometown of Tisdale, shows in this province are like a hometown show.
“It’s always a blast coming back to Saskatchewan, I love it. There’s an immediate familiarity, like coming back and visiting family.”
Stand-up isn’t Butt’s only career anymore, as running a production company and producing film and television have become his day job. He notes that a lot of what he needs to do for production he can do on the road, reviewing footage on his phone while going between gigs, which helps when making a stand-up tour.
“It seems somehow even more special when I can get out and on the road again.”
Butt’s love of being on stage doing stand-up is part of why he thinks people still come out to see him. Audiences can tell when they’re being sold something, Butt says, but he’s not selling anything on stage, he just wants to have a good time with the crowd.
“I’m not out there because I need to be out there. I’m out there because it’s who I am and where I want to be and it’s the thing that makes me most happy. I think people pick up on that. When I’m on stage, I’m having a good time, and they get it.”
On tour, Butt emphasizes that he’ll go to anywhere that will have him, because he’s grateful that audiences still want to see him on stage. While not every comic will go to smaller cities, Butt believes that it’s his duty to go where an audience wants him.
“This was my dream, this is what I’ve always wanted to do since I was a kid. It’s not lost on me that a lot of people don’t get to live their dream and I’m living it. As long as there’s a crowd of people wanting a show, I’ll go do it, because there will be a day when they probably won’t want to come.”
There are no worries about that now, Butt is a big draw for comedy fans. Butt says the big difference now from when he started is that the venues are much nicer.
“When you start out it’s road houses where they want to kill you and they’re throwing ashtrays at you. You’re doing stand-up in a strip bar where you’re the exact opposite of what they want to see. Then you graduate to comedy clubs where people are coming to see comedy. Then you graduate to where I’m playing, theatres where people want to see me specifically. For me, it’s a matter of increasingly nicer venues. But the way I approach it is the same as it’s always been.”
The thrill of the show is also the same, as is the risk that every comic faces before they go on stage – Butt’s the only person there, and doesn’t know the audience or what they’re going to enjoy before getting in front of the crowd. That’s the thrill, Butt explains.
“When I am waiting in the wings getting introduced, it’s exciting. Thirty years later it’s still exciting.”
Of course, Butt is much more animated now than he’s ever been. When he’s not on stage, he’s gearing up for Corner Gas Animated, the revival of his hit sitcom. After six seasons and a movie, there was still an appetite for the show, Butt says, but they needed to figure out how to keep things fresh.
“We didn’t really want to go back and do the same thing again because we felt as though we had went over that as much as we should go over it, we’re all getting older, it just didn’t feel like the thing to do. At the same time, you like having a job, you like being employed. So we just said if we were going to do something, what are we going to do?”
The idea sprung from an old idea from the original series, for doing an animated scene in an episode. They went back to that idea and explored what animation might do for the show. Butt says it doesn’t change how episodes are written – one of the writers, Norm Hiscock, a former King of the Hill writer, told Butt that he shouldn’t change anything – but they do have a bit more freedom.
“In the live action show we always had these fantasy sequences where we could pop into a character’s and see what they were imagining, those were always fun and funny. But when you’re doing it in the physical world you’re always limited in what you can do. It really opens up now, we have a Sasquatch fight a unicorn in a very violent battle. Pirate ships fighting destroyers, we have a Mad Max kind of scene.”
There are still limits, however.
“When we did the Mad Max scene, I think we wrote in the script initially 100 war machines roll over the desert sand, and the directors came back and said “100? Are we drawing and animating 100 war machines, because that is going to take a really long time. How about a dozen?””
Corner Gas has been a hit since its debut in 2004, though Butt admits that wasn’t what they expected, and that in the beginning they didn’t expect much beyond the first order of episodes.
“I was surprised that anybody watched at all. I thought we hoodwinked the network into letting us do 13 episodes of a show about a gas station in Saskatchewan, but nobody is going to watch it, so let’s have a good time and make a show that we liked and we’re proud of. The fact that anybody watched blew us all away from the get go... I should probably stop being surprised but every time we do something with Corner Gas we’re dumbfounded by the response. Pleasantly dumbfounded.”
Butt will be in Yorkton on February 25 at the Anne Portnuff Theatre, tickets are available at ticketpro.ca. Corner Gas Animated debuts on April 2 on The Comedy Network.
