Interview with Paul Myrehaug

 We promised you we'd bring you the odd exclusive interview and we weren't lying. This week we caught up with hilarious comic Paul Myrehaug about moving from and working in his native Canada as well as his experience of this year's Edinburgh Fringe.  

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JTT: Being a comic means traveling all over the place. Does the nomadic liftestyle suit you?

Paul:Yes. Over the last two months I honestly don’t think I’ve been in my bed for more than two nights straight. Today I woke up in Copenhagen and flew here. I like it; my main priority when I moved to Europe was to travel as much as possible, so I’m still in the zone where I like it but I can see me getting a bit tired now. The travel in Canada is tough too because it’s such a big country. The flights and drives are long and hard. So I’m just starting to feel like I could use a more solid base.

JTT: What could you see yourself doing?

Paul: I’ll never not do stand-up. I guess trying to get a writing gig or something like that. Opportunities are definitely be more in Canada than here in the UK because I’m still a bit of a new kid here. I’ll probably try to move in that direction but certainly not right away.

JTT: Was it hard starting when you moved to the UK?

Paul: I would never say in Canada I’m a household name but it’s easier for me to book gigs there. It was hard though, it was a cool challenger because your nervous to do all the gigs again. I don’t have the currency over here to be like ‘oh that was a shitty set’ and the club owner to be invite me back. I’m still only getting to know everyone so a shit set means I’m not coming back. That fear makes it fun. 

JTT: Are you doing xmas shows in Canada?

Yeah I’ll be doing no comedy clubs, just Christmas parties in Alberta. It’s in the middle of the country where I was born and raised but it’s also where all the oil is. So all those oil Christmas parties and functions there’s normally more gigs than there are comics so it’s a good place to be around that time. It scares the shit out of me every time! It’s a little different because you’re booked to do 45 minutes to an hour and you have to be corporate clean the whole time.       

JTT: Do you think Canadians have a slower style of comedy to English comedians?

Paul: Definitely. I think that’s because of the landscape. We’re all slower storytellers because you’re forced to do a lot of time quickly. If you have a car in Canada you can be opening a club within 3-4 years of starting comedy. I was dong half an hour sets early, way too early so I think when you have five minutes of material and you’ve got to fill half an hour you’re talking super slow, doing these stupid stories from high school, so I think that’s why we all have that slow drawl. It’s a completely different speed here.

 JTT: How close do you feel your on stage persona is to the real life you?

Paul: It’s starting to become more level now. Guys that have been doing comedy a long time say it would be at least ten years until you start talking even closely to how you should be and I’m hitting that time about now. I think it’s like a blown out personality of what I really am. On stage I’m the guy I’d like to be if I could have no filter, it’s who I’d like to be because it’s juvenile and juvenile crap makes me laugh.

JTT:You did Big Value this year. How did you find it?

Paul: It was nice because I was going to Edinburgh to do another show [The Canadians of Comedy] and that was on at 11pm so that was all I was doing and then I got invited to do Big Value pretty late in the game. My manager was like ‘You might as well’ because I’d never done Edinburgh before, I’d never set foot at that festival. Then when I got up there I was really thankful that I was doing the show because it was a room of 100 people every night. Obviously out of 30 shows you’re gonna have a few that don’t go perfectly but most nights were awesome. They were really fun, such a good experience. All of a sudden I wasn’t fearing the festival anymore, so then when I went to do late and live and shows like that I had material I knew would work for those crowds.

JTT: Was there a reason you chose not to do a solo show at the festival?

Paul: When it came down to it my manager said ‘no one knows who you are’ so he didn’t like the kind of venues I could get [if doing a solo show] then we got the phone call about the triple hander and thought we can go back in a year’s time to do an hour. I want to go up there next year to do a solo show but looking back I’m so happy I didn’t do an hour. Without seeing it first, my game plan for going up there probably wouldn’t have been a great fit for doing an hour, having never seen a one man hour show before. In North America there isn’t anything really like it, we have fringes but [one man shows] aren’t popular in the mainstream at all. So I had no fucking idea what one was but now I do. 

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Make sure to look out for Paul when he returns to the country in February!