Stand-Up Comedy and Social Media:

A powerful tool for some montreal comedians

By Lucas Sodano

About two years ago, I was taking pictures for the comedian collective Fishnet in Montreal. At the time I did not have any sort of experience with a camera and I did not really know what I was doing, but the opportunity fell on my lap and I agreed to work for free and took it as a learning experience. My job required me to film and take pictures at their shows and create content for social media. One of the things that struck me was how serious social media was for them. When I heard them talk about their Tik Tok accounts and their Instagram posts, I understood it was the very thing that brought them on stage. They were choosing what clip to post or pitching ideas for future sketches. Creating and posting content, building an audience and promoting your work and upcoming shows, is now crucial if you have any hope of making it in the industry nowadays.

Stand-up comedian and activist Renzel Dashington also uses his Instagram profile a lot to promote his work. Posting funny and often controversial reactions to current events and videos, doing Instagram lives, and using comedy to speak up on racial issues have been a significant part of his career. On top of all of this, he hosted a show that ran for over 200 episodes, each of which could last between 1 to 2 hours on the platform during the COVID pandemic. As a member and co-founder of the collective Bad Boys du Rire, Dashington often includes promotional footage of his stand-up career at the end of his short videos. He has been doing stand-up comedy in and outside of Montreal both in French and in English over the years and has become very popular because of it, especially among Montrealers. Renzel has over 30k followers on Instagram and his show C.Koi le Baille during the pandemic has generated 3.5 million views.

Instagram: @basboysdurire

Facebook/basboysdurire

Others like Daniel Tirado, a Montreal-born and New-York-based comedian, mainly post clips of their shows. While their social media presence is not as significant, these clips of selected jokes are used as teasers to invite people to go see the whole performance. Therefore, they are still able to do self-advertising for free, even if their social media presence is not as significant as comedians like Renzel Dashington.

I, for one, have benefited a lot from these comedians’ active presence on social media, especially during the COVID pandemic as my brain’s need for entertainment was at an all time high. I have had the chance to discover many talented comedians on Iinstagram and Youtube, without having seen them live (yet). I believe we have entered a new, fascinating era of entertainment that is revolutionizing the industry of stand-up comedy from the comedy clubs to the marketing and booking agencies.

Montreal has been known for decades as the stand-up comedy capital (though NYC has recently taken the title), thanks in great part to Just For Laughs, which to this day remains the biggest comedy festival in the world. JFL was the main road that comedians could take to make a living from their art and gain fame.

The city is also praised for its comedy clubs like Le Bordel, The Comedy Nest or the Montreal Comedy Club (Comedyville) and for its renowned appreciation of stand-up comedy. L’école nationale de l’humour has also been, since 1988, a very important institution for French-speaking comedians.

However, years ago, before YouTube and the internet, it was a lot harder for new comedians to make it in the industry. The only way to get any sort of recognition for their work was to perform in comedy clubs and god knows it is not always so easy to stand out, let alone get booked in these places. Today, it is a different story. New comedians can launch their careers from home before even performing live in front of an actual crowd. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Youtube, etc. allowed them to post reels of their performances, create sketches and perform live comedy from home while interacting with their fans.

Lots of comedians are also invited to podcasts such as Sous-ecoute, hosted by stand-up comedian Mike Ward or Le Podcast des Personnages, where French-speaking comedians come up with a character and keep up the performance for the duration of the episode. Some of them even launch their own podcast and then post clips from it later on their social media platforms. Montreal has a very significant scene both in English and in French, and the number of stand-up comedians has exploded thanks to these platforms.

However, this rapid increase in the number of performers poses a new problem: saturation. An incredible number of comedians are now competing for the spotlight and there are only so many comedy clubs in the city. Perhaps we need to create more clubs, more shows and more opportunities to exploit this comedy boom.

To better understand the situation, I am gonna explore the subject in depth with Renzel Dashington, a Montreal based comedian of haitian descent who uses the internet in many different ways. We will talk about his experience as a comedian, how the internet has impacted his career, what changed from when he started, and where he thinks the industry is going.

Photo: Le Journal de Montreal

I met with Renzel (@renzel.dashington) at Cafe Pista on Saint-Laurent on a cloudy friday afternoon. I got there early to set up and prepare for the interview. Many Montrealers will agree that finding an accessible coffee shop that is not constantly full of people can be a challenge. Cafe Pista is spacious enough and mostly attracts a couple of students who come here to study and write their essays. The soft playlist and the noise of the baristas making coffee in the background was perfect for us to talk for over an hour. I set myself up in a little spot with a sofa and a coffee table. Renzel walked in shortly after and ordered a coffee and a muffin before sitting down with me.

Renzel Dashington has been working in show business for over 20 years now and before being a stand up comedian he told me he worked in the music industry as a manager, producer and executive producer. At the beginning of his career, he worked a lot with Corneille, a popular canadian singer from Rwanda who debuted his career in the 2000s. He also worked a little bit in television production, behind the scenes.Renzel has been doing stand-up for seven years now. While he has mainly been performing in French, he has recently been working more in English and mentioned that he aims to tackle the British scene.

Our initial conversation subjects were about his one-man show Activiste malgre moi, about the different venues in Montreal and about the industry in general before getting into the subject of the internet and social media. When asked about the way he uses social media, he first inquired about how bad he thought most comedians were at it. I could see where he was coming from because when I was doing research for this article, I found that on many comedians’ instagram page or tiktok account, they only posted a couple of clips from their shows and open mic performances, but that was about it. Only a few of them use it at its full potential.

For Renzel, social media was like a gym in some ways, especially during the pandemic. It allowed him to try out some new material, test some jokes and interact with people.

“I use the internet to talk to people because there’s some things, thoughts, ideas that will probably never exist on stage. so its almost as if it’s a draft. [...] I discovered this during the pandemic. Like, I did three hours speaking to myself. But I say speaking to myself… not speaking to myself like… I was doing freestyle. [...] Like i was at an open mic and gauging laughs with a 30 second delay. [...] I was working through ideas.”

He also explained how performing on instagram live changed his relationship with silence, which can be a comedian’s worst fear. Even for the audience, silence in a stand-up comedy show is often very awkward both for the audience and for the comedian.

[...] like for me, it changed my whole relationship with silence. At first the hardest thing is silence. Because either you’re talking or people are laughing. In my mind that’s how it works. So when i spent all this time in pandemic doing a lot of lives [on Instagram], talking with myself/to myself and punching, my relationship with silence changed totally. My relationship with saying something and letting it land, letting the moment take its time because sometimes people understand things differently and then that creates other moments. So I owe that to the internet.”

So during the two years of the pandemic, when no comedians could perform in person, Renzel used this to his advantage and kept working. This period allowed him to work on his one-man show and be able to extend his stage time.

“Pre pandemic, [...] I was working on my hour, i was like “I don’t know how I’m going to do this” because like the stamina and just... you know you can do an hour but you lost people like half an hour in.”

But the comedian explained that coming out of the pandemic, he felt comfortable performing for an hour without losing the audience because of social media.

Renzel is also an activist that uses his social media platforms to speak out on racism and give a voice to the people who need it. Among other things, every year he participates and organizes the Marathon sur le profilage racial with Radio-Canada and Clinique Juridique St-Michel which is a 24 live event where racialized people come speak on their experiences regarding racial profiling. Often times, in the industry, people recognize him more as an activist instead of a comedian. People also tend to dismiss his work in comedy because of his activism and this has impacted his career, which is unfortunate, because he has been working very hard to help people while working on his career as a comedian at the same time. Renzel explained that this has also had an impact on his ticket sales and that social media has helped him navigate through that in some ways.

“The thing the internet has afforded me is to organize. […] for me it was also a learning curve because i'm also an activist. I talk about black issues, human issues […] i get seen a lot through that, a lot of people know i'm a comedian, but actually, their experience of me was of anything but comedy. so I was filling out rooms, but i feel I wasn't filling out rooms as much as I should have because for the amount of people that know me [...] you know like the bad boys du rire thing […] [when] i started we were doing about 5-600 a month and years later we’re doing like 900. I feel we should be pushing people out the door because we're doing 3000 a month.”

After our discussion, by the time I finished writing this feature article, what Renzel qualified as a protection umbrella institution in montreal for comedians, Just For Laughs announced that they were cancelling their 2024 edition and filed for creditor protection. This raises a question on this active evolution of stand-up comedy scene in Montreal . Just For Laughs was the most important institution for the industry and was a worldwide festival where many popular comedians like Kevin Hart made their debuts. This is definitely a big loss for the city, but it is gonna be interesting to see the direction that the music industry will take after this.

Bio:

Lucas Sodano is a writer and founder of Exprim magazine. He is a Media and Communications student at LaSalle College in Montreal, Quebec. Lucas mainly writes feature articles about culture in Montreal and focuses on music, stand-up comedy, and visual arts in both the English and French scenes. His introduction to the Montreal comedy scene was as a photographer for Fishnet, a comedy collective, and is currently attending shows both on- and offline. He has been managing and producing content for the social media of Exprim since 2021. Follow him on Instagram: @llllucas.sodano

Sources:

  • Noakes, T. C. (2022). How just for laughs made montreal the comedy capital of the world. Cult Mtl. Retrieved 2024, from https://cultmtl.com/2022/07/how-just-for-laughs-made-montreal-the-comedy-capital-of-the-world-jerry-seinfeld-rowan-atkinson-mr-bean-margaret-cho/.

  • Renzel Dashington. Gala Dynastie. (n.d.). https://www.galadynastie.com/nommees/renzel-dashington

  • Destrempes, M. (2019). Les bad boys du rire : quand l’entrepreneuriat et la diversité culturelle se rencontrent. Le Journal de Montreal. Retrieved 2024, from https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2019/04/12/les-bad-boys-du-rire--quand-lentrepreneuriat-et-la-diversite-culturelle-se-rencontrent.

  • Indongo, N. (2024). Le Bad Boy du Rire: Renzel Dashington. cbc.ca. other. Retrieved 2024,.

  • Notre histoire. École nationale de l’humour. (2021, May 18). https://enh.qc.ca/a-propos/historique/

  • About Us. Just For Laughs. (n.d.). https://www.hahaha.com/en/about-us

  • Sodano, Lucas. Personal interview, 23 February, 2024