“Holy shit, it’s a Wednesday,” said Paul Snepsts as he looked out at a capacity crowd from the stage of The Cape’s Odyssey Ballroom on August 13th. He was introducing the second in a monthly series of “Comedy at the Cape” shows, the product of a partnership between Comedy Country and The Cape designed to extend the entertainment available in the County into the middle of the week, as well as into the “shoulder season.” 

The emphasis is on the local.

An informal audience survey revealed that two-thirds of the crowd was from the County — and only half of them were immediate family members of the performers.

The show featured opening routines from local stand-up comics who trained in Mr. Snepsts’ County Comedy Project — a boot camp for developing comedians.

Beginning in 2015, Paul and his partner, Julianne Snepsts, launched a satellite of the Toronto Sketch Fest, whose mission is to support comedians at early stages in their careers, called Comedy Country. 

“Prior to the pandemic a big component of Comedy Country was to bring these acts from the cities and then have those groups offer a workshop or some sort of training. The idea was that our local community would be able to experiment and test out their own funny bone.”

The pandemic required a reset. “We got some funding from the Ontario Presents network. The mainstays of the previous program, Lenny Epstein and Gavin North, became the teachers who developed this eight-week comedy boot camp. We’ve gone through three iterations so far. The last two have been supported by the Huff Family Fund. It’s been really cool — there are maybe eight comedians out there now actively doing sets.”

For some of the performers this month at The Cape, this was their first or second gig. At the second installment of Comedy at the Cape, Mark Newberry riffed on adult incontinence — “it was a Jackson Pollock.” Belleville’s Sierra Simmertush took on baby names and cross-cultural misunderstandings. Sean MacFayden spoke to the immediate moment, talking about his local well running dry this summer; he was grateful for that morning’s rain so he could wear clean underwear to the show. He was enjoying Picton’s water service: “when in town, flush it down!”

The main attraction was the veteran Toronto sketch comedy trio, The Understudies. Rob Knox, Megan MacKeigan, and Justin Skinner specialize in the absurdity of everyday life, and the generic conventions we silently accept.

In their adaptation of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” the song’s haunting, or perhaps lugubrious, story of an astronaut abandoned in space becomes a narrative of a bullying Major Tom’s massive narcissism (complete with vanity mirror), and the revenge of the humble Ground Controller.

Conversely, in a K-Tel kind of advertisement for a collection of Beach Boys-style surfer songs, the genre’s aggressively carefree happiness turns into a surf celebrity’s horrific memory of being the last survivor of an apocalyptic day on the waves, a Californian Mr. Kurtz.

Their opening number, a celebration of vacation season based on Mungo Jerry’s 1970 hit, “In the Summertime,” descended into an absurdist gothic terror story worthy of Salvador Dali — despite the others’ efforts to keep things at the surface.

Mr. Skinner has a brilliant ability to play dumb — a key comic role. He doggedly sticks to his version of reality, insisting on impossible experiences.

Patterns were apparent in the great variety of sketches the trio produced over the course of the evening. Some perhaps overindulged in straightforward silliness, testing the audience’s limits, all in a set-up for a single punchline.

A court scene in the Deep South featured lawyers, each claiming to be a “simple country lawyer.” A competition ensued, each one claiming to be more simple than the other, the worst, the least educated — or even sentient — person in the room, in order to appeal to the jury as the most authentically salt-of-the-earth. This one, it must be said, cut quite close to home.

Mr. Snepsts’ hopes for comedy in the County are ambitious. The regular Comedy at the Cape series continues through December. On September 10th, S01EP03 features Kyle For Mayor from Belleville as well as the County’s own Short Attention Spa (Messrs. Epstein and North). “I’ve kind of framed this series using the nomenclature of a Netflix series,” notes Mr. Snepsts, “you know, seeding the idea that there will be other seasons to follow.”

Comedy Country is also bringing special acts, like the Perfectly Reasonable Night of Comedy at the Regent in August. The season finale will feature Ali Hassan’s “Does This Taste Funny?” show in October, opened by the County Roundup — Mr. Snepsts’ own satirical news desk quartet featuring local headlines. He promises not to spare the Gazette.  

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