Monty Scott laughs at the abyss and enlightens us on comedy in Canada

Monty Scott is a brilliant stand-up comedian from Scarborough, Ontario. His album The Abyss Stares Back was nominated for a Juno Award in 2019. And while it didn’t win Comedy Album of the Year, it still represents a real victory: Scott recorded it in part as a response to a near-death experience. We talk in this conversation about bouncing back, the lives and livelihoods of comedians in Canada, speak to the politics of comedy today, and try to imagine ways of thinking about comedy as an art. There are practical reasons for trying to figure out a way to define comedy in these terms. As I discussed in my article for The Breach (https://breachmedia.ca/comedy-and-solidarity-in-canada/), getting comedy recognized this way would open up funding opportunities for a creative community that was hit very hard by the temporary and permanent closure of many venues during the pandemic. But it’s also a theoretical question: there are entrenched assumptions about what art is and what it should do. Changing the definition is slow, difficult work. And yet, Scott suggests, there is a path to comedy getting perceived as a legitimate art. He emphasizes, first of all, that it’s already an obviously relevant art form. It is a live conversation. It’s popular. People need it. He says it may even be “foundational to our existence.” Nonetheless, getting comedy recognized as an art is still a major objective of the Canadian Association of Stand-up Comedians, the organization for which Monty currently acts as president. A shift is already happening on the provincial level, but it remains a struggle. His gut tells him that the important thing is to listen to the people, to take them seriously, and trust that the work comedians can accomplish when they move out of a purely individualistic space and into solidarity with one another can actually achieve something transformative. Another area where he says we gain a lot of clarity from listening to the people is on the question of shifting levels of tolerance, and the politics of comedy. While he admits that his own comedy is, in many ways, grounded in being truly silly, he gets that there is a changing political climate around comedy. Still valuing the power of humour to go to uncomfortable places, while also understanding that there is a fine line between challenging norms and seeking shock for its own sake, is a tricky thing. But I appreciated his point that shock value has little real value, and that there’s an important contradiction between people casually laughing at stereotypes and then getting offended by the willingness to explicitly identify racism. He admits that, in Canadian comedy, being a person of colour means facing a real struggle to avoid being stereotyped. In the fact of that push to simplify one’s perspective and make one’s comedy digestible, he points out that there is a real fusion in Canadian society and that we need a shift in perspective on immigration, on inclusion, and to radically embrace diversity. This also means taking seriously what sorts of racially stratified impacts the pandemic has had in Canada, and really worldwide, as well. This is bigger than comedy, but it also implicates humour in a number of different ways.