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Camp Kootenay Comedy Tour in town June 17
Cranbrook’s Queen of Comedy Sarah Stupar hosts intimate comedy special on the Spirit of the Rockies weekend
By Ferdy Belland
“I’m so excited to perform once again in my hometown,” said Sarah Stupar, Cranbrook’s Queen of Comedy.
“I originally trained as an actor,” said Stupar. “Ever since I was young, I always liked being onstage and acting in school productions. I attended the Vancouver Film School and studied acting for film and television, and after that I went to Montreal to study communications – but I kept studying the art of acting in a private studio outside of the university. The instructors there were really big on storytelling.
“If you want to truly act, you can’t just robotically read a script. You need to emotionally wrap yourself around the story in order to project your character in a convincing way. During that time, I worked as a venue manager at the famous Just For Laughs comedy cabaret, and I would see these comedians standing onstage, telling jokes and stories, and I wondered to myself if I could do that! I wondered if I was a good enough storyteller to perform stand-up comedy.
“Which was funny…when I was 19, I would work the doors at the Yuk Yuk’s shows that happened here in Cranbrook at the Inn of the South. In those days, I never thought: ‘oh, I want to do stand-up!’ It never even occurred to me. But for some reason, ten years later, I reconsidered: ‘oh, maybe I can try that!'”
Sarah Stupar hosts the Camp Kootenay Comedy Tour in the toney environs of the venerable Cranbrook Hotel Pub on Saturday, June 17 as part of the city-wide events bubbling up for celebrating the Spirit of the Rockies (rebranded from its former identity as Sam Steele Days), along with fellow comedians Michael Moses and Faris Hytiaa.
“My experience in the world of Canadian stand-up comedy has been amazing,” said Stupar. “It’s more like a debilitating disease than an artistic practice (laughs). Now, I just can’t stop. You need to care about it that much in order to make it, seeing how your chances of making it a career are so slim. I do it because I love doing it. I love telling jokes to people in bars in small towns, and I’ll keep doing it until I die, whether I ever become a famous comedian or not.”
“It’s rewarding for me as writer as well,” she said. “That’s a huge part of the comedy experience for me. I worked in the Canadian film industry, and I’ve written scripts and screenplays before. You can write a script, and it can be truly amazing, but that doesn’t mean that a studio will greenlight it and your script will actually be made into a movie. But with jokes – you need anyone else to deliver your quips to the audience. You just stand up behind the microphone and do it.
“You write a joke earlier in the day and then tell it that night. If the joke bombs in front of a non-forgiving audience, you ask yourself: why did it fail? So you tell the joke again the next night to see if it clicks with the next audience. And if you need to tweak the joke and add some changes, you try it again until it works. It’s so exciting as a writer.”
“It’s been a huge priority for me to hit all the comedy venues across the Alberta circuit, and that’s been so much fun,” said Stupar. “At the same time, I couldn’t do this without the loving support of my parents. I don’t know how many people understand this, but in this day and age it is extremely difficult to pursue an artistic career in Canada unless you’re comfortably middle-class or wealthier. You have to fund all your logistical expenses yourself, at least when you’re just breaking into the circuit and when you’re trying to make your name known. I perform often in Calgary, but I don’t get paid for most of the shows I do. That’s what inspired me to book more comedy tours.
“You have to go on the road to make money. Touring is different for comedians than it is for musicians. Once a comedian tells their jokes – you can’t tell them again to the same audience. I’ve written a lot of new material for use in our upcoming Cranbrook show. You prepare a 45-minute routine which you patter out for different audiences in different towns along the tour, but once your tour is finished you can’t just repeat the same routine for the next tour! You can never tell those jokes again in the same way. It’s not like performing music, where there’s still a value, and the nostalgic factor of hearing the same song again. With jokes, it’s: What? I’ve already heard these!”
“I’ve been involved in professional comedy now for over 10 years,” says Stupar, “and it’s interesting to compare notes with other comedians about their creative process, and how they write jokes, and where they get their inspiration from. I could place more effort into sitting down with determination, saying ‘I’m going to write some jokes!’ and they might suck, but then I’ll improve them in a second draft. Right now, a lot of my jokes seem to write themselves. I’ll draw inspiration from things I observe, or things that happened to me. The writing process is constant and ongoing, and I’ll scribble down a lot of little notes, or I’lll whip out my phone to record something, thinking: this might be a joke!”
Stupar was asked if there are any comedians she enjoys.
“I do indeed have favourite comedians that I enjoy, as a comedy lover sitting in an audience,” says Stupar. “I don’t watch a lot of comedy shows or comedy specials on TV. I know that a lot of people get their first introductions to comedy through Netflix specials, or skits they’ve seen on Saturday Night Live or whatever. But being involved in onstage stand-up, I see comedians in the flesh all the time, and I believe it’s best to enjoy stand-up comedy in a live setting.
“A lot of the comedians I see are peers working on the same level in the same circuits I work – for example, Brittany Lyseng performed with me before in Cranbrook at the Bighorn Comedy Festival, and I think she’s phenomenal. She’s just so, so funny! There’s another comedian named Steph Tolev, who I met many years ago in Montreal – she lives in Los Angeles now and has appeared on a few Netflix specials, and she’s just awesome.
“There are a few Calgary-based comedians I really like. I used to work in a Lebanese restaurant, and through interacting with the staff and the patrons I discovered Malik Elassal, who I think is really, really funny.”
Stupar explains how the fellow comedians joining her onstage for the Camp Kootenay Comedy Tour are worth the ticket price buy themselves.
“Michael Moses and Faris Hytiaa are both really funny guys, and I’m excited to be on tour with them. “They both grew up mostly in Lethbridge, and they still live in Southern Alberta. Michael started this TikTok series named ‘Everyday Same Time’ where he goes into a restaurant in different towns, everyday at the same time, and orders the same thing – and he waits to see how long it takes the staff to remember that he’s there.
“There’s this great comedy club in Calgary named Good Times, where a lot of Lethbridge comedians come in and pull off these great performances. Michael’s being doing comedy for a long time as well, so he’s confident onstage and just really sharp and funny. Faris just did his first TV special for Telus’ Storyhive series, and he’s a real hustler – he works really hard. Faris is a part-owner of Good Times and does a lot of good stuff to boost up the comedy community. The comedy scene in Lethbridge is really awesome and growing all the time.”
It is important to Stupar to combine inclusiveness and diversity to the lineups she constructs for her comedy tours.
“The loose theme behind titling our event as ‘Camp Kootenay’ is more about how we’re in the Kootenays. It’s the summertime. And that’s what life is like in the Kootenays during the summertime – camping. And one of the many things I like about having Michael and Faris on this tour is that they’re both black men who were raised in Canada. They had a different experience growing up. They have really different perspectives on a lot of things, and it shows in the style of their comedic delivery.
“Faris’ parents came from East Africa. Michael’s father is Canadian, but they’re still both Southern Alberta Boys. I wanted to bring them to Cranbrook because I knew they could speak to all this local redneck shit – and I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner, or in a bad way, since I have my own redneck qualities that came from a Kootenay way of life. And these guys know it from living in Southern Alberta. So, I have to say this to the more roughshod citizens of Cranbrook: stop trying to fight musicians and comedians from out of town, okay? (laughs)”
Stupar is currently concentrating her roadwork on the established Alberta circuit and the East Kootenay.
“I know the Kootenays very well, since I grew up there,” says Stupar. “I’m always visiting Cranbrook all the time anyway, since my parents still live there. I always stop in all the little towns I pass through and look around and see what’s going on, and I think: ‘oh, what venues are here? What sort of shows are people promoting? It’s an ongoing process for me to piece together touring routes. And most of the venues I ever performed in agreed to hire me because I simply walked in and introduced myself face to face.
“It wasn’t just a cold call through telephone or email or whatever; I said: ‘hi, this is who I am, can I bring my show here?’ Being based out of Calgary, it’d be easy to do shows in places like Claresholm or Nanton, since I could drive home and be in bed that same night. I’ll even stop in at a roadside coffee shop and ask the locals if they’d be interested in seeing a comedy show in their town. It’s always constant research. The actual production part of the stand-up performances is a lot of work.
“I have to balance it out with my day job, like almost every other comedian I know. I’d love to eventually branch out the touring into father parts of Alberta, or into Saskatchewan, but I’m not there yet. Today, Cranbrook – tomorrow the world!”
The Camp Kootenay Comedy Tour appears at the Cranbrook Hotel Pub (719 Baker Street) on Saturday, June 1h as part of the 2023 Spirit of the Rockies civic events.
Admission: $20 advance (tickets available at the Pub during regular business hours), $25 at the door. Showtime 8 p.m.
Don’t miss out all the side-splitting hilarity! And thank you for supporting live events in our community.
Photos submitted
