COMEDY

ARTS Maddy Kelly is part of the New Wave of Standup

by Steve Newton

Maddy Kelly didn’t wait long to start her career in standup comedy. In fact, four days after she turned 19—the legal drinking age in B.C.—she did her first set in a local club. After that, she felt like she was part of the Vancouver comedy scene.

“There was a really, really welcoming community at that time,” Kelly says on the phone from her Mount Pleasant home. “It felt like I was becoming a part of something which I wasn’t aware of before I started comedy. I did all the open mikes and we’d go to the clubs and watch comics who were better than me, and it was really, really fun to be 19 and 20. It felt like I was growing up, you know?”

Now, at the ripe old age of 25, Kelly is enjoying the fruits of her labour of laughs. Besides being known around town for her standup work, she has made a name for herself working on podcasts (Let’s Make a Sci-Fi), a conceptual comedy show for CBC Gem (The Slowest Show), and a sitcom project (Popcorn for Dinner) that was bought by the Podcast Network.

She’s also going nationwide as one of the comics featured on the second season of The New Wave of Standup, which launches March 29 on the free CBC Gem streaming service.

Filmed this past winter at Gastown’s Guilt & Co., the series features 12 Canadian comics offering up their funniest work in 10-minute sets. Kelly says it was quite a challenge coming up with a tight, chuckleworthy set in time for the taping.

“I did have to write it quite fast,” she recalls. “I was workin’ overtime, doing a lot of stuff at night to get the material worked out. My friends Bobby Warrener and Malik Elassal, they were like my pit team—we all worked on the set together and it was so fun. I’m really happy with how it turned out.”

During her allotted time, Kelly covers topics like her Irish Catholic immigrant grandparents, being really broke for a long time, and getting a wrong order from A&W during the pandemic. She claims to know most of the comics taking part in The New Wave of Standup, which includes one of her best friends, Vancouver’s Andrea Jin.

“We got to the same taping at the same time,” she says, “and that was really fun. I think I was a better comic because she was in the room with me.”

Kelly says that her favourite standup comedians when she was starting out were Mike Birbiglia, Maria Bamford, Wanda Sykes, and the late Louie Anderson. She’s much younger than any of them, though, which is a bonus when you’re trying to connect with a youthful crowd.

“I can relate to the same issues [as the audience],” she points out, “like talking about dating apps and social media or whatever it is. But I’m also going through similar things people in their 20s are going through, right now, and not talking about it in the past tense.”

Speaking of social media, one of the factoids mentioned in Kelly’s impressive bio is that she has amassed more than 2.5 million views on Tik Tok. That exposure wasn’t brought on by any savvy socialmedia skills on her part, though.

“I was just really lucky,” she says. “A comedy outfit called Comedy Here Often? posted a clip of me and it just went viral. I’m not very good at social media. And I prefer Instagram, I think.”

Kelly also believes that the success she’s finding at such a young age is partially due to the help she got from certain Vancouver comedians who embraced her from the get-go.

“I really do look up to a lot of the people on the local scene,” she says, “Erica Sigurdson and Graham Clark. And Ivan Decker. They’ve all really given me lots of advice and a lot of mentorship, and I’ve been really lucky for that.”

As fortunate as she feels right now, Kelly admits that Vancouver’s comedy scene has faced some major hurdles, like the recent shuttering of a longtime venue near and dear to her heart.

“Little Mountain Galley was a huge loss, for sure. I used to run a show there for years, and I think a lot of people got their start and found their own audiences being able to run their own shows there. It is really sad that we don’t get to have those opportunities.”

Overall, Kelly remains positive about the Vancouver comedy scene, though, adding that it’s done a great job of finding new venues. It’s easy to stay positive when you’re only 25 years old. Or is it? With all that life left to live, is it hard to do comedy when the unfunny spectre of the Third World War looms so large?

“I mean...yeah!” she replies. “I think that first week when all that [war in Ukraine] was happening, it was very weird. We were announcing Let’s Make a Sci-Fi, and it was so embarrassing to be promoting an entertainment comedy podcast when a lot of other people were sharing resources.

“But I also think that I relied really heavily on comedy in tough times,” she adds. “I watched so much comedy during the pandemic, and some of my worse times during that, so my dream is that I’m, hopefully, providing some sort of relief for other people.”

And should the state of the world ever get sorry enough that she needs someone to make her laugh for a change, Kelly knows who to call.

“I’ve got funny friends,” she says. “Yeah, that’s my whole thing. You can’t be my friend if you’re not funny.” g

Maddy Kelly is only 25 but she is fast making a name for herself on the Vancouver comedy scene and will soon go nationwide with an appearance on CBC Gem. Photo by Emily Cooper.

I’ve got funny friends… You can’t be my friend if you’re not funny.

– Maddy Kelly

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