‘All I Want to Do Is Tell Jokes, but I Don’t Want to Kill Anyone’

It’s not easy being funny at the moment. Like everyone else, professional comedians are largely stuck at home, forced to try out jokes on friends, partners and, occasionally, the cat.

Vancouver comedian Sophie Buddle is frustrated at being unable to hone her craft in front of a live audience. “All I want to do is tell jokes, but I don’t want to kill anyone,” she says.

The first woman to win a Juno Award for best comedy album, Buddle is also possibly the youngest to win (she’s not sure that’s true but is going to check).

She toured extensively after the release of her award-winning album Lil Bit of Buddle, but the pandemic put the kibosh on performing live. Like a lot of performers, she can’t help but feel like the pandemic shutdown was aimed at her as she put everything temporarily on hold.

Buddle is currently at home in Vancouver with her boyfriend Mayce Galoni, also a comedian, doing podcasts and working on material for a new album — and perhaps going slightly cuckoo.

She grew up in Ottawa and moved to Vancouver when she was 18, missed the deadline to attend film school and ended up in fashion school, though she “dropped out in a hot minute.”

“I did get a free iPad that I spent the next five years paying off,” she says.

Comedy was ready and waiting. But she was already primed for it. Buddle and her mom had attended amateur comedy nights in Ottawa every Wednesday for years, until she was ready to take the stage herself.

She started early at 15, lying about her age to perform in clubs and learning her trade through a baptism of bad gigs and teenage bravado. In Buddle’s case, this meant telling dirty jokes before she’d even had sex.

“People would say, ‘You’ve got balls’… I wasn’t aware of how bad I was. It took a couple of years to get good.” When you’re young, she says, you get accolades for just trying.

It wasn’t until she’d hit the tender age of 20 that she felt she found her voice.

The comedy road isn’t easy, but opening for comedians like Bob Saget and Caroline Rhea, as well as stints on the CBC’s The Debaters and JFL NorthWest comedy festival, won her wider attention.

It wasn’t until she got a gig writing for This Hour Has 22 Minutes that comedy started paying the bills. The job came about almost by accident: a producer on a trip to Vancouver called her and her boyfriend in for a meeting and hired both. “I went from making $11,000 a year to being able to pay my rent and not starve.”

She describes the pre-pandemic writing room at 22 Minutes as highly collaborative and filled with funny people trying ideas out together. Comedians tend to work individually, but Buddle is liking the teamwork.

Buddle and her partner Galoni are using their down time to compare notes on their respective obsessions in a podcast naturally called Obsessed.

Despite the perils of being romantically involved with another comedian, she is effusive about her choice. “I can’t believe my luck. We’re very aware of each other’s feelings.” The only thing that is occasionally contentious is who came up with certain ideas, she says.

In addition to her album and podcast, there’s a wealth of Buddle’s standup all over the internet.

But a quick look at Buddle’s Instagram account brings up an issue in comedy that isn’t so funny.

“Chris Delia after I bop his head with a mallet” is a pointed reference to the American comedian accused of sexually harassing young women. It’s the latest in a long line of similar stories involving famous funny men.

Even without predatory behaviours, many comedians have been called out for stepping over the line from funny to offensive, although where that line is drawn can vary widely. High-profile figures like Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Burr, Joe Rogan and Jim Jeffries have variously railed against what they term to be the censorious culture of the moment.

Meanwhile, Hannah Gadsby has made an entire career out of refuting the climate of cruelty disguised as comedic licence.

As cultural mores shift, what was once tolerated or laughed off just isn’t anymore. Buddle is philosophical about the changes. “I do think it’s a generational thing only in that younger people are almost always more progressive than the generations before them. I think that’s happening in comedy, but I don’t think there’s anywhere that that in general isn’t true.”

How does she contend with increased sensitivity to things that might cause offence in her own work?

Buddle says it’s a comedian’s job to figure out where the border lies and skate along the edge, which can be “pretty scary.”

“But comedy’s job is to explore the darker subjects,” she adds.

The high wire aspect of doing this in front of a live crowd gives the form its particular rush, for both performer and audience.

Buddle comes from a long and well-established tradition of Canadian comics, many of whom started in standup and went onto film and television.

“Canada’s best export is comedians,” she says, citing Erica Sigurdson “as one of the best joke writers in the business.”

In general, Canadians tend to be a funny bunch and Canadian women in particular are hilarious. The likes of Catherine O’Hara, Andrea Martin, Cathy Jones and Mary Walsh come easily to mind.

“I have a theory that colder countries make for funnier people because you’re indoors a lot and you have to entertain each other,” says Buddle.

But in this moment where everyone is largely indoors, the transition to digital delivery has been hard on professionally funny folks.

Some comedians have made the shift more easily. Trevor Noah’s intimate delivery works well, whereas Seth Meyers seems to be perpetually waiting for laughs that never come. The energy that evolves, often in the moment, with a live audience is something not easily replicable in an online experience.

Buddle is desperate to do live sets again, to be able to try out new material live, and is feeling particularly torn at the moment between the desire to perform and the need not to kill anyone with COVID-19.

“The second it’s safe, I’m doing comedy again.”