A few weeks ago, I interviewed Erin Rodgers, a standup, sketch and improv comic from Toronto. At one point during the interview, the conversation veered to Rodgers’ undergraduate experience at U of T, and she began to tell me a rather amusing anecdote about the crowd of morose punk rockers that she was friendly with during university.
If I had actually thought it through, I probably would have realized that the most tactful approach to my next question would have been to simply ask Rodgers when she had graduated from university. At the moment, however, I was too preoccupied with trying to date the revival of the punk movement to realize this, and instead blurted out:
“So, you went to U of T in the ‘90s?”
Rodgers shook her head.
“Oh, the ‘80s then,” I said, without pausing to consider that my calculations would make Rodgers a suspiciously youthful forty-something.
Rodgers hesitated for a moment and then replied, “Actually, it was the 2000s.”
As I realized that I had just unintentionally implied that Rodgers looked old enough to be my mother, I was overcome by the sudden desire to crawl under my chair and hide there for a few hours. Fortunately, Rodgers seemed entirely unfazed by the conversation, which, in retrospect, is not entirely surprising. As she made clear during the interview, Rodgers has an appreciation for the cringe worthy moments that crop up during social interactions, an appreciation that she hopes to spread through her latest project, AWKWARD: A Show of Epic Fails.
AWKWARD, which Rodgers hosts and produces, takes place once a month at the Comedy Bar on Bloor St West. Each installment of the show features a different group of comedians who each share one of their most embarrassing stories with the audience. It’s a relatively simple premise, but Rodgers believes that AWKWARD is able to tap into the universal, psychological need to affirm that everybody, no matter how cool, occasionally acts like an idiot.
“Everyone feels like their embarrassing story is the most humiliating thing that has ever happened in the entire world,” she said. “And then you hear all these other [embarrassing] things … and you realize ‘Oh my god, it’s not just me.’”
Rodgers also mentioned that comedians and non-comedians alike have expressed an interest in participating in the show.
“I’ve found that people kind of want to get [their embarrassing stories] off their chest,” she said. “Everyone knows that those stories are funny, and when it’s an atmosphere [where] … there’s a bunch of people who are going to do the same thing, I think you feel much more comfortable.”
However, as the October performance of AWKWARD proved, recounting an incident of personal humiliation in front of a live audience can be a risky business. Several of the comedians who were featured in the show definitely fell flat with their stories, which weren’t awkward enough to be inherently funny or injected with enough humour to make them entertaining.
“I’m feeling kind of awkward right now, to be honest,” one comedian said, when the end of his story was met with silence and a single cough from somewhere in the back of the room.
“You and me both,” I thought.
The comedians who came equipped with more carefully constructed anecdotes, on the other hand, probably found the type of gratification that they were looking for when they agreed to relive their most embarrassing experience on stage. Luke Gordon Field was hilarious while describing how he was thrown off a mule during a vacation to Greece, and Jocelyn Geddie told an amusing story about how she came to compliment one of the cool girls in middle school on her “horny” dress, severely misinformed as to what the word actually meant. There was also a thoroughly typical, but nonetheless entertaining, “being-awkward-while trying-to-impress-a-girl” anecdote from John Baird, and a story from Jerry Schaffer, an alum of Second City, who once told the soon-to-be-famous musician Jesse Cook that he needed to improve his keyboard skills.
Rodgers has plans to open AWKWARD up to non-professional performers who want to share their embarrassing stories, and during our interview, she invited me to participate in the next show. I’m not sure, however, that I have an awkward anecdote that is worthy for the stage. Perhaps I’ll try to guess the weight of my next interviewee and see how that goes.
