JFL Toronto Review: Todd Barry
Filed under: Reviews, Festivals
One thing certain about the newly-returned Just for Laughs Toronto is they've branched out into a variety of venues that we would have never seen before, including the Randolph Theatre in the Randolph Centre for the Arts, a Methodist church turned into a community arts space and education centre. So sliding into the pews, we had a lovely open area with great acoustics and honestly, not the best place for comedy. Comedy thrives in intimacy. Huge, vaulted ceilings are not exactly great for coaxing out the laughs. But the evening did not disappoint.
Canadian comic (and as his bio says, 2-time Juno loser) Matt Wright started us off with a fun if slow burn set that relished in the pause. A lot is made of the idea of joke density, and it's certainly a big part of club comedy work, but the long walk, the pause, and the relishing of silence is a skill that Matt brought to the table with fun jokes about weddings and his Newfoundland heritage (in particular how much harder his grandfather's generation was than his). It was a perfect appetizer to the buffet of slow burn that Todd Barry brought to the show.
A seasoned veteran with a long list of achievements (as he will immediately tell you), there's a self-effacing quality to Todd Barry's comedy. He is self referential, self congratulatory, and aloof, but in a way that is clearly taking the piss out of himself. At the same time, he ventures into long threads of crowd work where he can weave the dullest of chaff into the most glittering of gold. He was able to pull a potential luggage set, a role in a young director's movie, and jokes about a guy who was at a show of his almost a decade ago from an audience who came not really understanding the patter of crowd work but at a leisurely pace. Often, you'll see crowd work comedians shooting off rapid fire quips and peppering the audience members with questions, but not Todd. It was entirely languid at times, a leisurely conversation with someone who was in no rush to get where they were going, just wanting to enjoy the scenery on the way there.
The joy of slow burn comedy is the imperceptible rising of tension; the jokes are dense, but in a way that are a slow tightening of the screws until he's able to play you like a well-tuned guitar, and that's what we got tonight: Todd at his best, even if physically he was struggling, having recently broken five ribs and having to do the set sitting down. He was able to destroy in a former church filled to the rafters.
Tags: Todd Barry, Matt Wright, crowd work, JFL Toronto, Just for Laughs
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