Can you learn to be a comedian? A diploma course at a schoolof creative and performing arts in Toronto is trying to teach comedy, writesDesmond Devoy.
In this classroom, everyone is encouraged to be the class clown. It may well be the only classroom on Earth where the students are actually encouraged to act up, make rude noises and heckle the teacher. It's all part of the curriculum at the world's only diploma course in comedy.
"It's the only programme of its kind, period," says Joe Kertes, the dean of the Humber College School of Creative and Performing Arts in Toronto, Canada, which oversees the programme. "I'm hoping that it becomes the Juilliard School of Comedy."
Before founding the school, Kertes researched universities and colleges across the globe for a course that was in any way similar to the one he was proposing. The closest he came was a course probing the psychology of humour.
"This is a programme I truly gave birth to . . . and the word is getting out in the industry. I think that there is some scepticism that it can be taught but there's a difference between making your friends laugh and making strangers laugh. That's the difference between a funny person and a comedian. We don't teach people how to be funny. But we can teach funny people how to be more funny," he says.
The Humber School of Comedy was founded in 1994, and the summer workshops began a year later. The school started off with the blessing of comedy legend Steven Allen. The former Tonight Show host acted as the school's first advisory board chair from 1996 until his recent death. In 1999, it was decided to expand the school into full-time courses. It was first offered as a one-year postgraduate programme, with a two-year undergraduate programme added a year later.
Although it is still new, it is already attracting a lot of attention and competition for admittance is fierce. Last year, 700 people applied for 60 places on the undergraduate course and 80 people applied for 20 postgraduate places. Tuition costs from from 3,250 Canadian dollars (€2,131) for the two-year programme to Can$3,800 (€2,492) for the one-year course. It has already attracted students from across Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Belgium.
The courses cover every possible aspect of the comedic sphere, from physical comedy to drama, from TV production to stand-up and improvisational humour. For the students, making people laugh may be a very serious business, but when telling their family and friends what their post-secondary plans were, many had a lot of explaining to do.
"Most people think that you're joking, when you tell them you're taking comedy, and you have to explain," says Curtis Diehl (20), who recently graduated from the first two-year course. "But for the most part, they've been pretty supportive."
For him, part of the draw lay in the big names the school had attracted to teach. During the summer workshop last month, Diehl took a sketch writing and performing class taught by Robin Duke, a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1981 to 1984.
"It's nice to see that they're just regular people and that they're not full of themselves. They just want to come down and teach," he says. His postgraduate comedy partner, Mike McAuley, agrees. "It's a polishing course in which you come in with your skills and polish them and they make you a little bit more professional," he says.
But McAuley is realistic about his chances now that he has graduated.
"If you think you're going to be Mike Myers in Hollywood with an agent [after taking this course], you're going to be really disappointed," the 37-year-old former sign language interpreter says. But, he adds hopefully, "a lot of us felt proud when we first got accepted". He hopes to work in television as a writer.
One of the new faculty members who has already conquered the world of writing comedy is Joe Flaherty (61), who has worked on stage in Chicago and Toronto with the likes of John Belushi, John Candy and Martin Short as part of the acclaimed Second City improv troupe. As the school's new artist-in- residence, he is looking forward to passing on his knowledge of comedy to a new generation.
"I'm so surprised that so many people are taking these courses. There must be a thirst for comedic knowledge," says Flaherty, whose grandmother was born in Co Galway. "Teaching improv is a little more different from teaching the other disciplines. It's more of a process than a product. Although there are rules, you are dealing with the person on stage. It's just a process of getting people to open up and not edit themselves. It's hard to teach students to go with their own instincts, to trust their own instincts." However, the programme isn't only about pratfalls and pie fights.
Allan Guttman, the programme's artistic director, likes to think that while not every graduating class will produce the next Jerry Seinfeld, the students will learn valuable skills that they can take with them into other fields, not necessarily comic.
"It's a process of self examination. It's a real personal growth process. That's the thing that satisfies me the most," he says. "I'm very optimistic about the graduate students."
