Stage/Comedy

What: Andrew Phung and Friends: A Night of Improv, part of Comedy Is Art Festival
When: Fri., Oct. 25, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen St. W.
Why you should go: Phung returns to his roots with a night of live improv comedy at the Comedy Is Art festival, alongside yet-to-be-announced special guests.

ANDREW PHUNG is thrilled to be performing live comedy again.

You’d be forgiven for assuming the star of CBC’s Run the Burbs and Kim’s Convenience might be feeling a bit jaded about the state of the industry after CBC chose not to renew Burbs for a fourth season — a move that Ann Pornel claimed in the Toronto Star was a “death knell” for Canadian TV.

His role as Kimchee in Kim’s Convenience led to him becoming a five-time Canadian Screen Award winner. CBC’s decision not to renew Burbs came on the heels of yet another Screen Award nomination — just as the show was finding an audience in the United States on CW and Hulu.

That disappointing news came only a few months after the Just for Laughs comedy festival — a behemoth in the industry for over 40 years, for better or worse — declared bankruptcy, closing off yet another avenue for up-and-coming Canadian talent to possibly find wider, mainstream audiences — even if it was usually as the opening acts for the more famous U.S. stars headlining the festival.

Yet Phung’s enthusiasm for comedy is dauntless, most especially when discussing his favourite sketch and stand-up performers in Canada right now.

Talking about his Burbs co-stars, Phung repeatedly compares the show’s cast to assembling the Avengers of Canadian comedy. He recalls a moment in the first season when he found himself remarking on the “dynamite lineup” he was surrounded by.

“It was myself, Jonathan Langdon, Aurora Browne, Ali Hassan, Chris Locke, Dakota Hebert, and we were celebrating Candy Palmater,” a veteran performer who had a recurring role on Burbs and tragically passed away in 2021. The show’s second season is dedicated to her memory.

It’s clear throughout our conversation how much Phung enjoys not just performing comedy but also sharing the spotlight with other talented performers.

“I keep a Rolodex of funny people I see out in real life. When I finish the improv show, I’ll pop in for, like, the last 20 minutes of the stand-up show, just to see who’s doing what. Or, with improv, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ve never played with you before,’ and I’ll make a note of who that person is,” Phung says.

Phung has been reviewing that Rolodex ahead of bringing Andrew Phung and Friends to the Comedy Is Art festival at the Theatre Centre in October.

“When they asked me to do it — they’ve asked me for a couple of years now — whenever I looked at the lineup, I was always like, ‘This lineup is so good,’” Phung says.

But it was performing his Friends show at Edmonton’s Improvaganza festival in June that reminded him how much fun performing live comedy can be. “So, when this opportunity came, I was feeling it, and I was ready to hop back in.”

The Theatre Centre festival’s message — that comedy is worthy of support, like any other kind of performance art — is one that resonates personally, Phung says. “Comedy is art. Comedy changed my life. It was a low-barrier art form I could access,” he says.

It was attending free improv classes at the Loose Moose Theatre in Calgary as a teenager that opened up the world of performance art to him, Phung says. “If I had asked my parents for money to take, like, a drama class, they would have given me a hard ‘No,’ right? But, with comedy and improv, we did it for free. They trained us for free.”

Phung describes how he and his friends would ride the bus from Calgary’s suburbs to get stage time at Loose Moose. “We were called ‘The Asian Invasion’ because the theatre had never seen so many Asian kids show up to do comedy.”

“There’s no barriers to it,” Phung says. “It was really the only art form that we could participate in where there were no barriers. I’ll say, all these years later, those improv classes changed my life, and they changed the lives of all those kids because we’re all working in the creative sector in some way, shape or form.”

There’s a sense of urgency to the festival’s message this year, Phung says. “I think that comedy, right now, is coming in a time where we need it the most, where the world is very serious. Things in the world aren’t very good, and comedy has a way of processing that.”

It’s also a time when many Canadian performers are feeling the pressure to leave for greener pastures and the allure of achieving mainstream success in the United States.

“We have this thing in Canada where we love supporting comedians — once they leave the country and make it big. When they come home it’s like, ‘Oh, they’re Canadian!’ But let’s support them while they’re here,” Phung says.

Kim’s Convenience introduced stars like Phung, Simu Liu — now an internationally recognized member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Shang Chi — and Star Wars and Avatar star Paul Sun-Hyung Lee to mainstream audiences. “But people don’t realize Paul Sun-Hyung Lee had been grinding it out in Canadian theatre, television and film for decades.”

Phung graciously points out, despite CBC not renewing Burbs, they still deserve credit for New Wave of Standup on CBC Gem, which has featured rising Canadian stand-up stars like Zabrina Douglas, Tamara Shevon and his Last One Laughing Canada co-star, Brandon Ash-Mohammed.

“Let’s just shout each other out. Let’s recognize there’s not enough opportunities for all of us, so let’s go out there and share everyone’s stuff: their work, their shows, their content,” Phung says. “Let’s be each other’s biggest fan.”