{"id":7853,"date":"2014-08-20T21:44:06","date_gmt":"2014-08-21T01:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=7853"},"modified":"2014-08-27T17:30:55","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T21:30:55","slug":"brocks-banter-comedy-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/brocks-banter-comedy-tragedy\/","title":{"rendered":"BROCK’S BANTER: Comedy & Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right at the outset of this week\u2019s column I would like to thank Angela Gismondi for putting last week\u2019s edition of The Auroran together in my absence. It was nice to have a week off to re-charge before the busy election season ahead!
\nAlthough it started a week later than it has in years past, I was off once again to Jamestown, New York, a smaller-scale city in upstate New York, near the Pennsylvania border, for the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival. The annual trek to Jamestown, the birthplace of Ball herself, has become something of an annual family tradition for these local Lucy fans and it is fascinating to see how the festival has evolved over the years.
\nWhat started out as a festival for \u201cnew comedy\u201d, eventually morphed into a series of festivals honouring Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, their co-stars,
\nco-workers, and their respective television series.
\nIt was a Lucy fan\u2019s dream to have the chance to meet and learn from some of the people who made their own indelible marks on this particular niche of the entertainment industry, but the years have necessitated a shift back to its original focus.
\nThose who had been involved with I Love Lucy from the start, and even those with even the most tangential relationship with Ball and\/or Arnaz, have become endangered species with the passage of time, so organizers of the Festival have gone back to their roots with a returned focus to comedy, with a few dashes of \u201cLucy\u201d thrown in for good measure.
\nAlthough it started on Wednesday, August 6, this year\u2019s festival went into full swing the following day with a Stand-Up Comedy Showcase hosted by Canada\u2019s own Caroline Rhea. As someone unfamiliar with her comedy work outside of \u201cHollywood Squares\u201d and Saturday morning reruns of \u201cSabrina the Teenage Witch\u201d growing up, I was pleasantly surprised how hilarious this woman is as she hosted up-and-coming comedians Carmen Lynch, Moody McCarthy, and Andrew Norelli who each brought their unique perspectives of the world to the stage.
\nComedy continued the following evening with stand-up performances from Tom Cotter, who almost took the crown on America\u2019s Got Talent, with his wife, comedienne Kerri Louise as his equally funny warm-up act.
\nComedy continued throughout the weekend in various locations and it culminated with a headliner appearance from Jay Leno on the Saturday evening, which was opened by a wonderful \u2013 but all too brief \u2013 concert from Lucie Arnaz.
\nJay Leno was\u2026 well, he was Jay Leno.
\nOkay, in the interests of full disclosure, I am dyed-in-the-wool Team Coco, but I did go into the evening with an open mind. After all, if you expect the worst you\u2019re always bound to be pleasantly surprised, right? Well, I\u2019m here to report that old adages are not necessarily true.
\nMany people love Jay Leno and I can see why. Comedy \u2013 and what people find funny \u2013 is a very broad spectrum. Some like their comedy pre-digested, some like their comedians to lend a voice to what they\u2019re thinking, or wish they thought of themselves. That\u2019s Jay Leno to me.
\nMany friends who were also in attendance over the weekend, however, want their comedy to be fresh and topical. (Yes, before I go on, I am fully aware of the irony in looking for fresh and topical comedy at a festival founded to honour a woman who would have been 103 this month and a show which made its TV debut 63 years ago this fall.) So, with that in mind, we took bets as to how many fresh and topical Monica Lewinsky jokes would be part of his act.
\nAfter putting my money on three, I am also here to report my wallet is lighter. There was not a Monica Lewinsky joke to be found in the hour-and-a-half he was on stage, but there were jokes aplenty about the wonderful world of transfats (\u201cThat\u2019s fat that\u2019s liposuctioned from\u2026\u201d well, in the best interests of this newspaper, I won\u2019t finish the punchline), Lynndie England and Abu Ghraib prison and, my personal favourite, \u201cRemember when Bjork wore that swan dress to the Oscars a couple of years ago?\u201d (For those keeping score, \u201ca couple of years ago\u201d was 2001.)
\nThe important thing is many people were thoroughly enjoying themselves, it was a sold-out crowd, and a sure indication the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival will carry on the comedic legacies of the First Lady of Comedy and everyone in her orbit for years to come.
\nAnother indication of the interesting things to come? The creation of a National Comedy Hall of Fame in Jamestown, NY, similar to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, founded in honour of Ball and Arnaz, with their daughter presiding over the soil turning ceremony of Phase 1 a few hours before the show. <\/p>\n

MEANWHILE, OVER IN CALIFORNIA\u2026<\/em>
\nHindsight is a very interesting thing.
\nAfter the festival wrapped and the thousands of people from 38 U.S. states, Canada and Australia began their journeys home or settled back into their \u201creal lives\u201d once again for the workweek ahead, news broke on the tragic and untimely suicide of Robin Williams.
\nIt is difficult to consider that as so many of us spent that particular weekend in a comedic paradise, burning more than a few calories with more belly laughs than is practical to count and, for some of us, walking away with a few well-earned laugh lines, that one of the world\u2019s brightest comedy lights was considering and preparing to, to borrow a phrase from I Love Lucy, \u201cdim his bulb.\u201d
\nIn almost every avenue over the past week, pundits have reiterated the principle that comics are often tortured souls who find a particular outlet in making people laugh. I suppose it is true, as Lucille Ball herself came from a background of tragedy and struggle, but Williams\u2019 death has underscored the point.
\nWhether you thrived off the manic energy Robin Williams brought to stage, screen or television in Mork & Mindy or Good Morning Vietnam, preferred some of his more dramatic, lower-key work like in Good Will Hunting or The Face of Love, which unspooled at the Toronto International Film Festival nearly a year ago, he offered something for everyone.
\nFor those of my generation, he was an indelible part of our lives, whether we came to know him from his brilliant voice work in Aladdin, from his fresh interpretation on a classic story in Hook (I still have all the Hook trading cards collected religiously when I was six), through being thoroughly disturbed watching One Hour Photo expecting a comedy, or by driving everyone within a certain radius crazy quoting from Mrs. Doubtfire.
\nHis was a light that will certainly be missed, but as I look back over the last weekend, I wonder what drove everyone taking the stage over the Festival into the warm embrace of comedy and its audience. Do they just want to make people laugh, or are they looking for a comfortable outlet for what is bothering them? Do they have so many keen observations bubbling over that they need to express them to a collective, or are they looking for an escape?
\nWhatever the reason, they make a lot of people happy, and if anything good can come from this tragedy it is that everyone takes a good look inside themselves and, if needed, seeks help for whatever might be weighing them down. As strong, solid, and permanent his legacy to comedy might be, this might, at the end of the day, be his greater contribution to the world.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir Right at the outset of this week\u2019s column I would like to thank Angela Gismondi for putting last week\u2019s edition of The Auroran together in my absence. It was nice to have a week off to re-charge before the busy election season ahead! Although it started a week later than it has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-22F","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 19:06:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}