Sandra Battaglini takes a hard look at the business of comedy in Canada

Sandra Battaglini is an actor, stand-up comedian and writer. She is also the founder of the Canadian Association of Stand-Up Comedians, an organization that represents comics in Canada and lobbies for them to be recognized as the brilliant, culturally significant artists that they are. I just wrote an article for The Breach that features Sandra, among other comedians, and looks at some of her efforts to push for fair pay, government recognition from the Canada Council, and organized resistance against the pull of American media imperialism. Her left political perspectives are in many ways written in CASC’s DNA. She talks here about how CASC was imagined as a kind of “rights movement” focused on stressing the right to be “included” among other communicative arts that we consider culturally more ennobling or important. She insists that we really take a hard “look at the system” and objectively assess the extent to which it is tilted in favour of already economically massive players. She wants us to ask the material question: “How many opportunities are there?” And to what extent are performers being sold certain fictions that make them more vulnerable to being exploited? For example, she says that performing just for exposure is basically “a big lie.” As she puts it: “what are you exposing yourself to?” if not a market in which “there are no standards.” Efforts like the ones that CASC organizes, like the #PayComedians viral campaign, work to establish standards of equitable pay and recognition of structural inequality. These campaigns are showing what is possible: giving comics a bigger piece of the revenue they create, exposing the power of a few players that, Sandra points out, “feel like they can” corral and control comedians, and reckoning with the fear that individual comedians may have, which tends to work against solidarity and take away their power to resist monopolistic control. The main theme here is probably autonomy. Sandra has this sense that building “our own stuff” here means that you’re generating the “spirit… to move forward.” I appreciated all of the detail she gave on the struggle to gain official recognition and government funding. Ultimately, she says that she’s not interested in having a theoretical argument about whether comedy is art; the question, for her, is “should it be supported?” For me, the answer to that question is definitely yes, because I agree with Battaglini that comedy is a more everyday, accessible artform than most. This is such a central part of its power: humour makes people more open to having difficult conversations, it’s “non-elitist,” in Sandra’s words, and so it often allows for a more lively form of connection to occur. I loved the point she makes here about how comedy is also way more immediate than many artforms: happening every night, and expresses in real time what it means to live in a particular place. That immediacy is a huge part of its appeal, its relevance, and a reason it should be better supported by the public.