An Evening with Brent Butt, Centennial Theatre, Saturday Sept. 24 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $40. All proceeds go to North Shore Disability Resource Centre Foundation.
“Really? You’re going to kill me because you don’t think I’m funny?”
The place was lousy with leather, an intimate, Roman Colosseum-type crowd of bikers who probably seemed like they’d pulled off the road to fortify themselves before the next felony.
Brent Butt’s amiable brand of coffee shop humour wasn’t going over.
For most comedians, a crowd’s silence in the face of a good punchline is about as terrifying as it gets, it means any control they might have had has turned into a rope of sand.
But it can be so much worse.
“I was in a green sweater,” Butt says, recalling the bush bar somewhere between Toronto and Hamilton.
He was about 15 minutes into a scheduled 45 when one of the bikers stood up.
“One guy actually walked up to the foot of the stage, pulled out a bowie knife, pointed it at me, and then dragged it across his throat,” he remembers.
That was when Butt first asked if he would be murdered for not being funny.
“I just said to the guy: ‘That’s not an overreaction to you?’”
He exited the stage to find the bar’s “livid,” 6-10 owner.
The owner didn’t mind the comedian cutting his set short, but he was enraged these funny boys still expected to be paid in full.
“I just thought we should cut it short or you’re going to have the police in here investigating the disappearance of two comedians,” Butt says. “They’re going to have a forensic unit in here looking for our blood.”
After agreeing to get paid half the money, Butt found the back door and left through the kitchen.
It’s the only kind of show that bothers him, he explains.
“Just bombing, that never bothered me. You can always get ‘em tomorrow.”
Speaking from Los Angeles the day after attending the Emmy’s (incidentally: the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were appreciated, but “a little dry”) Butt is amiable as ever as he talks about his Saturday night show at Centennial Theatre.
The performance is a benefit for the North Shore Disability Resource Centre, which helps people with disabilities get health care, housing, and jobs.
Butt will be telling jokes for the Centre, something he’s been doing as long as he could talk
“The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut, himself a younger brother.
If there are comedic benefits to be reaped by the baby of a family, then Butt enjoyed a considerable advantage as the youngest of seven children growing up in Tisdale, Sask.
“For me, the high watermark was trying to make my older brothers and sisters laugh, because they would never give it up very easily to their dopey little brother. If you could make them laugh, you knew it was legit.”
Butt remembers seeing a stand-up comedian for the first time when he was 12.
“I was just hooked. I went and told my mom: ‘I’m going to be a stand-up comedian.’”
Butt had his first stand-up gig in Saskatoon in 1988. He’s rarely stopped since.
“It’s where I’m most comfortable, really. I feel like that’s the hour of the day where I know what I’m supposed to be doing. The rest of the day is confusion.”
