November 20 was no ordinary night in the Trinity College junior common room. Eighty students crammed into every available crevice and all eyes were intently focused on a single person: Colin Mochrie.
[pullquote]If you go down to Comedy Bar at Ossington and Bloor… Eddie Izard is doing a couple of shows there, Pat Thornton just did 24 hours of comedy. A lot of the improv troupes are great, I think comedy [in Toronto] is doing very well.[/pullquote]
Mochrie visited U of T as the special guest speaker of the Trinity College Comedy Collective.
A veteran of Canadian comedy, Mochrie starred in This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Royal Canadian Air Farce, Getting Along Famously, and two incarnations of Who’s Line is it Anyway? He also has more cameos under his belt than this article has room to list. But that night, instead of showcasing his legendary improv skills, Mochrie answered students’ questions and told stories about his illustrious career.
The room echoed with laughter and the clinking of emptying beer bottles as Mochrie thrilled the crowd with his wild stories and insightful views on comedy. The focus of the questions ranged from stage fright, to the Canadian comedy industry, to the social and political role of comedy. When asked if he has ever been starstruck, Mochrie told a story about his performance at the White House Correspondence Dinner and his subsequent invitation to tour the White House with Bob Dole and George W. Bush.
Colin Mochrie at Trinity College. BERNARDA GOSPIC/THE VARSITY
As the talk progressed, the tone became a little more philosophical. Mochrie discussed the arbitrariness of censorship, illustrating his point with a story about an argument that broke out on the set of Who’s Line is it Anyway? One of the show’s producers apparently wrangled with a censor about the quality and quantity of swear words that the actors could use per episode. According to Mochrie, the producer walked out of this heated debate to triumphantly tell the actors that they’d “lost a pussy but got two penises.”
Mochrie’s talk at Trinity is just one of a series of events organized by Jacob Duarte Spiel, a Trinity College student. Last year, Spiel created the Trinity College Comedy Collective with the intention of bringing together like-minded comedy lovers.
“For the first meeting no one showed up,” Duarte Spiel said with a laugh during an interview with The Varsity. “[But] I’d already [planned] to invite comedians to come in and talk, in order to give us some guidance.”
During the second meeting, Spiel brought in local voice actor and comedian Dwain Hill (of Arthur, 6Teen, and Crash Canyon fame) and the meeting drew a substantially larger crowd than it had the first time around.
“I kind of realized maybe that’s all the club should be,” Duarte Spiel said. “Maybe it should just be a series of talks.”
The Trinity College Comedy Collective has since hosted increasingly bigger names, from local stand-up Bobby Knauff, to Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson and Mark Mckinney, to Governor General Award-winning playwright George F Walker.
Duarte Spiel sees these talks not only as a means of offering guidance to aspiring comics, but also as a starting point for getting high profile comedians to perform at U of T.
“I would love to see a comedy festival,” he noted. “A lot of students feel like numbers [on such a large campus]. A good way to fix that [is to] give something back to them.”
Jacob believes that comedy is one way that U of T can combat its reputation as a less-than-fun place to study. Toronto has one of the best — if not the best — comedy scenes in Canada, something that Mochrie affirmed during his talk at Trinity College.
“If you go down to Comedy Bar at Ossington and Bloor… Eddie Izard is doing a couple of shows there, Pat Thornton [a local comedy hero, starring in such shows as Punched Up and Hot Box] just did 24 hours of comedy. A lot of the improv troupes are great, I think comedy [in Toronto] is doing very well.”
Comedy is cheap to produce, can be performed almost anywhere, and, as Spiel’s talks clearly demonstrate, comedians tend to attract quite an audience. One can only hope that in the near future, U of T will take more advantage of the tremendous cultural resources at its disposal. Until then, comedy fans can get their fix, thanks to Jacob Duarte Spiel and the Trinity College Comedy Collective.
