Preview
JUST FOR LAUGHS
Featuring Rick Mercer, Mitch Fatel and Joey Elias
Wednesday, November 12
Jubilee Auditorium
Between jokes in his act, Mitch Fatel sometimes proclaims, "I’m very funny." The words are not bellowed to the back rows but gently offered as the veteran stage comedian looks meekly down at his shoes like a little boy confessing the name of a girl he likes.
This gentle reoccurring bit fits succinctly in Fatel’s act – he displays a childlike innocence and amazement towards very adult things, like men’s obsession with breasts.
"I have always loved girls," Fatel says. "I never went through that period in my life where I just wanted to hang out with the boys. When all the other guys were playing football, basketball or baseball, I was playing house with the girls. What you see onstage now is maybe a side of me that never quite moved on.
"As I got older, the sexuality that I started to feel for girls was stuck in that childlike love of them. I never set out to do that onstage. It just came out."
The slight New York comic’s candy-coated outlook has struck a chord with audiences for more than a decade. He has performed multiple times on both the Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and recently he was a top attraction at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal.
In fact, he was so successful that he was selected to be one of the acts touring the nation as part of the Just for Laughs Comedy Tour 2003. The tour, which comes to Calgary on November 12, is headlined by Canadian comedy icon Rick Mercer, a veteran of TV’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Made in Canada, who parlays his whimsical observations of Canada and the U.S. into big yucks.
Four other male comics round out the tour’s roster, meaning that Fatel, the guy who has always hung out with the girls, is now logging long travel days and nights with nothing but the fellas. The experience has been an eye-opener.
"I never could have expected the camaraderie," Fatel says. "I like hanging out with the guys on the bus and laughing and going to dinner with them.
"I can tell that these guys have become my family."
If that is the case, the part of the raucous older brother is most likely being played by Montreal comic Joey Elias. A doorway-filling mountain of a man, Elias looks like he should be working security at the Just for Laughs show rather than performing as part of it. In fact, he used to work the door at a Montreal comedy club.
These days Elias delivers a brash, every-guy appeal as he tackles subjects like the complexities of the French language and the many concussions suffered by the hockey-playing Lindros brothers.
Elias says he is having a blast on the current tour, and that it does not involve the competitiveness that often appears on the pro comedy circuit.
"Whether you’re on first or last," he says, "everybody is rooting for each other. That is the truth. There is no sense of hierarchy or one-upmanship at all."
Further to that team concept, the cast took the stage together to receive a rousing ovation on the first night of the tour in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
"The whole place just stood up at once," Fatel says. "It was like they’d got a great buffet (of comedy) and they were applauding that and not one of us. It was a very good feeling."
Standing together with comedy-mates as the audience cheers wildly – it’s almost enough to make a childlike comic gaze down at his shoes and declare, "We’re very funny." |
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