Drama Beat
Toronto based Nova Scotian born comedian Ron James shared the funny and a piece of himself at the Yates Theatre, Nov. 22 for a good sized audience.
He returns for a second show tonight, Nov. 23 .
I always look forward to James’ elaborate storytelling and hyper-literate stream of consciousness musings on life.
He jumped on stage with a twinkle in his eye like a hyperactive elf, but was more distracted than he should have by the lack of laughter from the section I was sitting in, considering he’s been a touring comedian for over 20 years and should be used to hit and miss audiences, though judging by the peals of laughter from the rest of the room, he was a hit. I was chuckling throughout.
He was also treading more cautiously than I expected around jokes about Conservatives, though he cracked jokes about Liberals too.
The whole show was a lot more political than I expected.
He opened innocuously with a few observations about The Lethbridge Lodge, the contents of dairy creamer on the table and how he doesn’t know what’s in in any more than he does about the contents of the Covid vaccine and talked about how much Lethbridge has changed since he was last here and talked about travelling around Alberta, reminiscing about recording one of his specials in Calgary.
He launched into his popular bit about the perils of building golf courses on wildlife habitat, with bears and cougars looking to make lunch out of unwary golfers and the time it takes to read safety pamphlets and instructions on bear spray.
He distracted himself from that by talking about being diagnosed with ADD and medication before returning to finish the bear story.
He joked abut inbreeding and the Royal family and CBC programming, suggesting a Family Feud Canada with a family of hillbillies against the Royal family might be funny.
He had plenty of verbiage, which was equalled by the number of bodily function jokes, funny voices and utterances, mugging and poses to come a little bit later.
He spoke a lot about surviving the pandemic and went off on conspiracy theories and theorists, Donald Trump and U.S and Canadian politics.
The 65-year -old comedian hit his stride with more personal material, particularly when talking about aging and the ins and outs of being married, divorced, trying to date online as an older single and eventually dating a 35-year-old a few years ago.
Some of the highlights were about living in a condo in Toronto with his vegetarian daughter who got him into juice cleanses during the pandemic with both hilarious and disgusting results.
He reminisced about playing hockey has a kid with buckle up skates, and recalled about camping while on drugs and having to worry about the tide rolling in on him.
He wound up his show with a spiel about malfunctioning cell-phones and the phone store clerk asking him of he had a paper-clip to remove the SIM card.
So if you’re in the mood to laugh and think, don’t miss Ron James’ second Lethbridge show tonight at the Yates theatre.
— By Richard Amery, L.A. Beat editor
