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| Fraser Young : Email Interview + In Person Interview with Fraser Young : Email Interview done March 8, 2006 - In Person Interview done March 19, 2006 |
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Email Interview: 1. When you first started out, what was it like getting gigs? Actually, I started comedy while I was going to university, so I would come and do shows in the summer, and then be away at school for 8 months. That went on for 3 years, so it was tough to really build. After 3 years, I took a year off from school and was coming downtown every night for shows. I didn’t it find it all that tough to get on to stages because I’m a great guy and everyone likes me. After my year off, I went back to school to finish my degree, and that’s when things started picking up for me. I got my first TV spot and won the Tim Sims award. By the time I graduated, I had already booked a Comedy Now taping and a spot at the Just For Laughs homegrown comedy competition finals. So basically, I kind of just walked into a career. I also did a college showcase that summer and so I got booked for quite a few gigs. Basically what I am trying to say is that everything I have now got handed to me, and that working at it is for suckers. Teach that to the kids. 2. Where have you traveled to for stand-up? I’ve been back and forth across Canada a couple of times, which is always a great time. I’ve done some shows in the big U.S. cities (New York, LA, Boston, Chicago), and got as far away as Hong Kong, but my favourite trip was doing a military christmas show mini-tour. We started off with a couple of shows in Goose Bay, Labrador, which is fairly far north, and awfully cold in December. From there we went to Alert, which is at the top of the goddamned world. It is the most northern permanent settlement in the world. It is north of everything! It is north of magnetic north, which is a little unsettling. Your compasses will be of no use. So we were up there for 4 days of pitch black, so it always seems like it is either 10 at night or 5 in the morning, tough to get used to. There was some weather problems on the way back, though. We had a stopover in Greenland (which is not a good sign. Anytime you have to go south to get to Greenland, you are way too far north.) There was a snowstorm (surprise!) and we almost got stuck at the US air force base for the weekend. The big kick in the ass was that no one had any US money and there was no bank machine at the base, so there was about 16 people on the tour (musicians, dancers, crew, etc.) who would have had to beg their way around for a weekend. In the end we were able to take off in time, and I made it back with most of my fingers. 3. Tell me a little about your trip to Hong Kong. This is going to be a long one, feel free to take whatever you want from it. Hong Kong was awesome! Not so much about the shows, but everything else was unbelievable. I remember the timing got screwed up a little because our flight got pushed back. The way it was set up was that we would take off Monday evening, and arrive in Hong Kong Wednesday morning, which was odd on its own, losing a day on the plane. Then we would have a day to recover and perform Thursday night. But, the airport got shut down on Monday because of snow, and we got moved to a Tuesday flight. This was enough of a pain in the ass because it was February, and knowing I was going to a warm climate, I had left my jacket with my friend who dropped me off at the airport. Now I’m standing outside trying to grab a cab in minus 20 with short sleeves, and there’s like a million people outside because the whole airport is shut down, so I almost died before the trip even started. Eventually we get on the Tuesday flight, arriving first thing Thursday morning, on the exact opposite time from Toronto, because Hong Kong is 12 hours ahead. So you have a half-day to turn your mental clock right around. Plus I’m hammered because you get free drinks on overseas flights, so I grab a quick nap and I’m getting ready for the big shows. We get there that night - 11 people in the crowd. We had 1 show Thursday, 1 Friday, and 2 on Saturday. I’d say they averaged 25 people a show. This dude spent a few thousand dollars flying us over there and putting us up for the weekend, and did zero promotion for anything. The shows were fun to do, and the people that were there were great, but this dude lost his fuckin shirt. But when they took us around the area, the same guy owns the main downtown entertainment district, Lan Kwai Fong. He’s got about 40 or 50 restaurants and bars and they are all jam packed all night. It probably took this dude about 10 minutes to make that money back, so I’m not too concerned for him. The shows themselves were funny because of what did or didn’t play. The crowds were usually a mix of British ex-pats and Chinese people trying to improve their English. So, obviously you have to drop any Canadian-specific references from your act, but there would still be some things that just didn’t transfer, culturally over to Hong Kong, which was funny. What I couldn’t get over was the fact that the other comic I was with was doing jokes about GST and how Canadians are different than Americans and he was mystified why it wasn’t going over as well. Dude! No one cares! Overall, they were smart crowds, though. It’s nice to know that your material can cross an ocean and still be funny. In Person Interview: May: When you do your normal stand up, do you know what you're doing before you get up there? Fraser: I would say mmmm some of the time. For a showcase or something like that I'll know exactly bing bing bing bing what exactly I'm going to say almost everywhere, maybe a little adlib here and there. When I'm doing a headline set it'll usually be that I know what I'm going to start off with, like the first 5 minutes and then have a rough idea of what I'm doing but I will kind of let the crowd dictate. Like okay, they like this kind of stuff, I will give them this kind of stuff, if they don't like this kind of stuff, I'll slant them more this way. If it's like a dark crowd, that's fun for me so I can do dark stuff early. So I'll usually do a couple of testers, early out there, slightly dark, not really offensive or anything like that, and if they really eat that up then you can get further and further into it as the night goes on. You know? But if they’re not into it, well alright, then you’ve got to do it squeaky clean, and it’s just got to be, you know [whole lot of mumbling] just stuff I wrote when I was younger. May: So what do you find more fun to do then? Fraser: Well, you know, for me it varies. I like uh, I’m a big fan of the turn of the phrase. I like, clever, you know, I like to try to put things cleverly, as I’m not doing now at all. But I mean, I will spend some time trying to really put together some word or a nice certain phrase I find can really can hold the whole night together. [bunch of random banter about my sister and I and the inside jokes that are his doing, really not worth typing out] May: Have you ever had an evening go horribly, horribly wrong? Fraser: Oh yeah, probably a bunch. I’m trying to think of one in particular. Oh, well it wasn’t evening, it was an afternoon show, I went to Lambton College in Sarnia. These nooner gigs they get for the college shows, there’s no posters, no advertising, you’re basically just showing up in their cafeteria and then the guy’s got a microphone and says ‘please welcome your comic’, and if he gets your name right you’re lucky. And then you just talk for a while, and people are there for - basically it’s like a comedy attack. Like they’re there to play cards or have lunch or whatever and so you’ll be there talking, and some people will be there for like 5 minutes and they’ll leave, some people will be there for the whole time, but they may not necessarily be paying attention. But this one, in Sarnia was brutal, cuz there was maybe about 15 people, all as far away from the stage as they could possibly be. And so, I mean there were people getting up and there was a point where literally there was 5 solid minutes where there was not a single person listening to me. I was even like testing them, you know, and no one was paying any attention at all. And so basically, I could have just been - I have to be up here for the hour to collect my money. But even those ones, you take fun in that because, you know whatever. I can’t even remember the last time where i had a gig that I really hated doing, because even when it’s goes wrong. I’m not really a guy that gets into it with the audience so much, I’m not out there to start fights or anything like that. So overall, I rarely get angry at people you know, it’s just ‘hey, if you’re not here for the show I understand that’. May: How did you come to hookup with doing this [Sunday Night Live]? Fraser: Uh, I had known that the show had been around for a while, and so they ask me here and there, well actually they asked me to host first, so I hosted here maybe about a year ago, well not here, at the Poor Alex. And then after that, I mean they’re a really fun bunch of guys, just fun to hang out with, so I’d just come by and do a news segment every now and then, or just fill in for a couple of sketches. So, around November I had been working with them for a year and a bit and for the last 5 weeks in a row I had shown up to just do like other stuff, so Gary, he’s the producer and actually at the time, and also a lot of their cast members were out of town. So they were short 3 or 4 people so they asked if I wanted to join and I was kinda like, you know what I’d love to. But for me, and also for Nikki Payne and Gilson Lubin, who are also cast members, we already had stand up stuff going before we started here, so it’s the same kind of thing. I just spent the 2 weeks in Ottawa so I couldn’t be at of the last two shows and I missed all the rehearsals this week, so it is kind of tough to fit it in. But for me, it really works out great cuz it is, you know, you’ve got to have brand new stuff written every week so you really have to bust your ass. So it really keeps you on task you know? May: How did you come to end up on Video on Trial? Fraser: I think it was a couple of things. Bill W used to work at Much More Music, he got me involved with this show Listed they do on Much More Music, Listed Top 20. So I did a couple of them - cuz he comes down to the Laugh Resort every now and then, well he’s in Edmonton now, but he used to come down to the Laugh Resort all the time, and he really enjoyed my stuff. So he asked me to come do one of these shows, so I did, and when they were putting together the Video on Trial stuff, the producers talked to each other, so when they came down to the Rivoli they already knew I had done some stuff before, so when they saw me there were interested in having me on the show. May: So that’s not your only TV spot, you’ve done other things... Fraser: Yeah, I’ve done a few things. May: So do you get strange ‘I recognize you’ stuff? Fraser: Oooh yeah. Especially right now, like when they went crazy with the Much Music stuff over the Christmas break. It was just Video on Trial, Stars on Trial, like 24 hours a day. The end of December/beginning of January was like the weirdest period of my life I mean literally, I couldn’t even walk down the street...well, not literally, but almost to that level, and everytime I go into a bar there’s like 30 people oh this and that hello. [makes wild hand gestures] May: Do you get a lot of screaming 14 year olds? Fraser: No, no, no. I find the screaming 14 year olds arn’t as big a fan of mine as of other people on the show. I don’t really think my humor is as suited for the screaming 14 year old girl as much as it would be for someone else. You know? May: How weird is that? Fraser: It is, it is really bizarre. Like, I’ve never had that happen to me before. Where it’s just that someone comes up to me because they recognize - I can somewhat understand how someone who is actually legitimately famous, how that would get old after a while. But for me, it is not even close, it’s just for me I haven’t got the negative end of it. I mean there’s obviously people out there who don’t really find my stuff that funny, but I’m not getting those people coming up to me and saying, ‘hey you know what, you suck.’ They are at least good enough to just say [not to him] whatever you know, fuck this guy. May: The leap to doing this full time, did you have a day job you had to quit? Fraser: I had a plan for a day job, I did - I went to university for three years and I was doing stand up in the summertime for those three years and then after three years of university I was like you know what, I’ve really got to take a shot at this, so I took a year off school, and just 16 months of working all day - I was working for my father - working all day, and then I was doing stand up at night. So I was living in Newmarket, driving down to Markham and back for work and then drive down to Toronto and back to do shows. So that was just - the positive thing about that was since I took a year off from university, all my friends were in university, so there wasn’t really a lot of opportunity for a social life, everyone was away, and so it was just working and stand up the whole time. So then I went back and finished my fourth year because I figured, I was already three years in to it, might as well just polish off this thing, get a degree, get a sense of accomplishment. And so when I went back for the fourth year, everything started falling in place, I got my first tv spot, I won the Tim Sims award that year, i got my comedy now that year and I got into the just for laughs festival was that year. So it was all kind of bing bing bing bing, and all of a sudden when I graduated university, I kinda had some money already and I had planned on getting a job, because I had this business degree. I was going to work in an office or something like that and then I thought, you know what, I’m going to make a go of this. And I got my first college showcase, so I got booked for a ton of college gigs and I was like ‘I’ve got money right now and I’ve got money incoming, let’s try and roll with it.’ It was really, like BOOM, let’s get in to showbusiness. May: So what’s going on with the Raise the Roof fundraiser at the Rivoli? Fraser: I’ve done the Raising the Roof show a couple of times. I did the gala last year and they can’t have the same gala people every year because it’s usually a lot of the same audience there but I’m going to be hosting some of the shows at the Rivoli, first Sean Cullen hosted both shows on the Friday for Raising the Roof. I’m excited about that because Sean, Sean’s great to work with in the first place, it’s just fun to watch. You get in there for two shows that’s just full on Sean and it is awesome. May: Hmm, I’m done anything else? Fraser: I don’t know if you’ve written up all the Hong Kong stuff [email interview], but in addition I want to add, when I went there it was Feb/Mar of 2002, which was like the onset of SARS. So I went and did the shows in Hong Kong and then I went to Thailand for 2 weeks - I figured the guys paying to get me halfway around the world, I may as well go to Thailand for 2 weeks and come back - so I had been away and hadn’t talked to anyone in 2 weeks, and then I got back and I was hanging out, I had made some friends in Hong Kong, so I figured I’d stay around for another 3/4 days or whatever. So I called back home and let my parents know I was sticking around and my mom was like ‘oh you can’t they’ve got the Hong Kong flu’, and I was like ‘the Hong Kong flu?!’ because it was still called the Hong Kong flu back then. And you know, you go around, but you didn’t even really notice. When I got back I saw all the news footage of everyone walking around in masks, I didn’t notice that when I was there. I guess those people were just staying in their houses, because going around 3 or 4 days in Hong Kong it was fantastic. And then you get on the plane to come from Hong Kong to Toronto and it was like mask-city man. That whole plane ride, everyone had a mask. It was bananas, and when I got back to Toronto that was right around the time it hit. So it could have been my plane ride that brought it back! It was right around the time when it really hit Toronto big time and I had a friend in Hong Kong, and she came out to visit me, and when we’d go around and she wanted to go to petting zoos and stuff and they have all these things you know ‘if you’ve been to any of these countries in the last month or so entry is forbidden.’ And I said I know you don’t have SARS, but I mean rules are rules and that’s the way it’s got to be. |