By Noemi LoPinto / Photographs by Adrian Brown
Paul Myrehaug considers it a good working day if hi spatrons can’t breathe. if they cry hot tears, expectorate on their friends and gasp with pain. the best outcome for this standup comedian is if he kills an entire room of people. With his timing, of course.
“i’m starting to make peace with being a sick bastard,” Myrehaug says from a hotel in red Deer. “being a blue comic means talking about the dark stuff. i used to fight it. i didn’t want to embarrass my parents, but i get more laughs when i’m on the blue side of things.” the 25-year old Camrose-born comic, who won the Yuk Yuk’s Great Canadian Laugh off in 2007 (complete with $25,000 prize) and appears this spring in a series of shorts on the comedy network, moved to Vancouver last summer after a stint in toronto to be closer to the u.s. comedy tour circuit.
“The first time i got up on a weekend at Yuk Yuk’s in Edmonton, i looked like a homeless guy,” Myrehaug says. “The rest of the guys had nice clothes, and i had on a ball cap, t-shirt and ripped jeans. my first joke got no laughs and it just went into the tank.” he threw in a side gig or two while he built a following and even once worked as an X-ray welding inspector for the pipeline. (“you should not give a kid like me access to radiation.”)
Things picked up though, and myrehaug has cleaned up his appearance, if not his act. his routine centres on the ins and outs of dating cougars (as in women), what it’s like to undergo adult circumcision (insert your own joke here). OK, you kind of have to YouTube it. but it’s not all frat-boy humour. Myrehaug likes to adapt an old Lenny Bruce maxim that the link between pain and laughter in comedy is “tragedy plus time.”
Category: Entrepreneurship, Work
