Reflections on TO Sketchfest in the shadow of Coronavirus

My 16-year-old son was incredulous when he heard that my wife and I would be attending multiple shows at something called “T.O. Sketchfest” over the last couple of weeks. As the resident King of Euphemism, he couldn’t believe that a festival might proclaim itself to be sketchy… aka shady or ill-conceived, or both. 

He misunderstood, of course. We were referring to the Toronto Festival of Sketch Comedy, or TOsketchfest, which ran from March 4-15 at The Theatre Centre, The Comedy Bar, and Crow’s Theatre. Now in its 15^th year, the festival is neither shady nor ill-conceived. To the contrary, it seems incredibly well-run. It’s sponsored by diverse organizations including all 3 levels of government, The Second City, CBC, Crow’s Theatre (which was one of the venues) and several other businesses. And it’s staffed by lovely volunteers and energetic performers.

As planned (and over our son’s misguided protestations), we would see multiple shows over the course of the festival. At the same time, we tracked the progress of COVID-19. In one short week, it moved from a dull background hum to a deafening roar . . . before it swallowed whole the festival’s last day – the cancelled “Best of the Fest” show (which my son had intended to attend with us).

It’s a funny feeling, laughing in the shadow of an invisible stalker who may just be filling the lungs your laughter is emptying. 

Yet laugh we did…

• At the inspired ultra-Canadian and ultra-political duo 1623 – starting with the audacity and assassin’s delivery of the Black Nkasi Ogbonnah playing the ghost of Sir John A MacDonald advising Kat Letwin’s Justin Trudeau on crisis management. Not COVID-19 crisis management . . . blockade crisis management. Remember that? This was the start of week, remember? We split our sides at this one. 

• At the Flying Solo show on International Women’s Day, which featured four emerging female comics: Rabiya Mansoor, Rena Taylor, Anna Smith and Meg MacKay. The show mixed and matched of the performances by the four: some longer-form, some shorter-form. Diverse in approach and focus. The Women’s Day context added some zing – but with corona knocking, was starting to feel like it didn’t.

By the next weekend, the sanitizer bottle was at the front door of the theatre. Crowds were a bit thinner. And we kept on laughing. 

• At HUNKS (Rory Fallis, Tim Gray, Matt Nightingale, and Dana Smith) – 3 fresh-faced and one off-stage, charming and deeply silly Winnipegers who like to sing, play act and goof off. No politics – just silliness. 
• At Gender? I Hardly Know Them – a charismatic, pronoun-cognizant duo straight from Edmonton, who jumped onto the stage pronouncing “Gender is dead. Welcome to the funeral” . . . and then smacked us in the face with honesty, insight and outreach blended with crazy satire and situational comedy. We learned something, and we really laughed. 
• At the tight, inspired, joyous and flat-out hysterical Tita Collective, who kicked hard at the darkness with their loving, high-energy sendup of their own Filipino culture. I swear Tita Avengers is superior to Avengers: Endgame. Really! None of what they did mattered for its content, but audiences laughed louder and longer at this show than at any other we attended at the festival.

Saturday the 14th, it would turn out, was the final day of the festival. Full social distancing was now in effect: each row in the venue was interrupted by forced firebreaks. We sensed that might be the last live theatre we would see for weeks, if not months. Fittingly, the two shows we targeted blended laughter and serious subject matter. Once again, we laughed: 

• At Dead Parents Society, a fast-moving 5-person show that mined comedy from each person’s recollections and experience of the death of a parent. This was fast-moving, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and often moving. 
• At the final show of the festival: Gillian Bartolucci’s one-woman show The Weight of It All. This multi-award-winner at the 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival was a deeply personal, scathingly insightful and encyclopedic show on being a woman today. This powerhouse show blew us away: swallowing up the festival in a supernova burst of energy, commitment and focus. And deep, appreciative, and sometimes uncomfortable laughter.   

A fraction of the total festival, these are the shows that we happened to see. And as the world shuts down in the shadow of COVID-19, we are grateful for each of them, and for the collective experience of our first TOsketchfest. The festival was a true showcase for comedic creativity distilled from diverse cultural, personal and geographical perspectives. Nothing sketchy about it at all! 

So we’ve put our son on notice. He is expected to join us for a handful of shows at TOsketchfest 16 in March 2021. And – especially if we are by then free of the long shadow of coronavirus – he should be prepared to laugh and laugh and laugh. 

With life-affirming and unrestrained abandon. 

© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya/SesayArts Magazine, 2020