Laughter Is The Best Medicine

Local comic Pat Thorton has been running a 24-hour stand-up marathon to raise money for the Stephen Lewis Foundation to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. Running from 7 pm to 7 pm at the Comedy Bar, he'd try to tell jokes (livestream on the Internet) with minimal breaks. He has help, of course. People in the audience, typically other comedians, would write jokes on slips of paper and drop it into a bowl for Thorton to read. By the end of telethon, the stage would be littered ankle-high in discarded papers. This spontaneous nature can result in some surreal topics as the community play off each other's contributions. A few years ago, an extended riff on Kevin Sorbo eating out of garbage cans went viral and caught the attention of the actor. This lead to Sorbo hosting a Kevin Sorbo Garbage Week-end at the Comedy Bar later that year. This year was the 5th installment of Pat's 24 hours.

I caught an hour online Friday night when the topics were "shitty Noah", "Upside-down Terry", and "Bad Oprah". Early Saturday morning, I dropped by at 5:30 am to see the show in person. The crowd had dwindled by then but started to pick up by the time I left at 9:30. When I arrived, the riffs were about rejected show episodes (Rejected TNG, Rejected Golden Girls, etc.) with a sidetrack into rejected kites (e.g., bricks, dead birds), friendly house ("I love wearing a toilet paper costume for Halloween"), scared kid, and the occasional bad Oprah. The two strongest topics were a down-trodden Coolio trying to survive on the street and singer Jann Arden's voracious appetites for eggs. The latter were particularly surreal: she tries to invent a time machine when she found out about dinosaur eggs; calling Godzilla Eggzilla because egg is God; gobsmacked about fish (i.e., roe); even trying to eat words with the letter O. A lot of it was, no surprise, quite blue.

Serendipity played a big role. A misreading of "is Coolio" as "15 Coolio" introduced a roving gang of 15 Coolios who eventually graduated from homeless hobos to assassinating JFK in a time-travel mission. The arrival of young kids at 9 a.m. (who submitted their own jokes) meant that some of the adult material couldn't be used. This spurred the introduction of Insufficient Plot Summaries. Jann Arden became aware of the show via twitter. Though she was in the Greater Toronto Area, an attempt to get her to come in person fell through, though she did make a donation online.

Thorton did more than just read the jokes. He injected personality and wit to make them work. And a lot of them did. I've been to shows where the jokes weren't half as good. He rallied the troops when the energy flagged, especially since they were writing the material. He even did a couple of improv bits including an extended monologue on whether or not, as a note he read stated that "Everybody has a dink", this could be true (given that all such factual updates obviously came from respected news anchor Peter Mansbridge.)

My own energy was flagging by mid-morning. So I grabbed some free tarts and doughnuts and headed out. This year, the telethon raised over $30,000.