Canadian comedian Gerry Dee has some healthy advice for young comedians: don’t put all of your jokes in one basket. Dee, the star of the hit CBC comedy series Mr. D and a longtime standup comic, says it’s important for comedians to have a solid backup plan.
“I tell young comics to make sure they have a financial plan, a day job, or something,” says Dee, currently on a national comedy tour that brings him to Victoria on December 11. “The odds of comedy panning out are slim; you should certainly try, but you need a career or something that has a stable income. That’s the hardest part of this job; there’s no income for some people for a long time, or even forever, and when there is income, it’s not that much.”
And while that’s no laughing matter, Dee has proven that hard work and a lot of luck can result in a pretty solid career in comedy. A former Canadian Comedy Award winner, Dee explains that he’s an anomaly in a comedy scene that sees countless comics working Canadian standup stages in search of their own big break.
“I’m not an example of what is normal,” says Dee. “I’ve been really lucky and gotten good breaks. There are a lot of really funny people out there who don’t make as much as they probably should, but that’s just the nature of the business.”
Dee’s face has become a lot more recognizable in recent years due to his popular television series, Mr. D, based loosely on his time working in the school system where he worked as a teacher and sports coach.
“There’s some truth to it,” he says about the show. “I think most of it is exaggerated truth; a lot of things I wanted to say when I was a teacher, and a lot of things I wanted to do, but I never did. And some of it is actual stuff that happened when I was teaching.”
With the show’s third season premiering on CBC on February 24, and the first two seasons available on DVD and Netflix, Dee is curious to see what kind of reaction the sitcom gets as it continues to gain momentum.
“I think it’s the funniest season and the best season. We’re three times through it, right, so you get better and better,” he says. “It’s not easy creating a great sitcom, they’re few and far between, but we’re trying. I think we’re starting to grow more as a group and we’re making it funnier and funnier.”
As for his upcoming standup show in Victoria, Dee says he’s gotten past any pre- or during-show jitters that he used to have; now he just has fun with it. And although hecklers are few and far between at this stage of his career, he still has a clever way of dealing with the audience-borne pests.
“When I used to deal with hecklers, because I don’t really get them anymore, I’d just ask them questions like, ‘What do you do? Do you have a girlfriend?’ And they’d usually just end up heckling themselves with their answers.”
Gerry Dee
Wednesday, December 11
Royal Theatre
$55 and up
rmts.bc.ca