Toronto-based comedian says her ordinary life isn’t Justice League material
Did Courtney Gilmour feel any pressure about producing a follow-up to her JUNO Award-nominated debut album?
She tells me she felt a different kind of pressure: “It was simply trying to ignore this nagging feeling of, like, ‘Okay, so you recorded your debut album, it’s all no-hands jokes,’” she says. Gilmour is a congenital triple amputee, and on her first album, Let Me Hold Your Baby, much of her material is about her lived experience as a person with a disability. “Now, you have to prove yourself as, like, a comic who can talk about anything else.”
Instead, Gilmour says she decided to go “completely the other way” with her new material. “I was like ‘No. Hell no. I’m just going to do a whole other album, completely full of all of these disability jokes because this is what I want to do. This is what’s on my mind right now.’”
That theme — having to navigate the expectations others have about her disability — is clear throughout Wonder Woman, in which she explores ideas such as “Disability is performance, disability is a superpower — or is it? — or, you know, things I’m conflicted about within my experiences,” she says.
In the album’s titular track, she talks about how people in her life will call her “Wonder Woman” for wanting to do basic things for herself, which leads to a hilarious comparison of her day-to-day life to that of Wonder Woman, concluding that these people need to show the latter way more respect.
Wonder Woman is her first album since making it to the finals of Canada’s Got Talent in 2022, an experience that brought her national recognition as a stand-up. Talking about her newfound Canadian celebrity, she tells me, “I occasionally get recognized in airports, so I’m really living large over here.”
“It was all filmed during the pandemic, and COVID protocols were still pretty rigid,” she says about her experience on the second season of the show, lamenting that the series was still finding its footing in the post-pandemic media landscape. “I do feel like my run on it was just what I, personally, needed at that time as a comedian who hadn’t really spoken to or seen people on a regular basis in a long time, but it was maybe not as like, you know, rocket launching as it could have been,” she says.
Instead, it’s an experience she rates as an important milestone for her career, saying, “It was the first big thing I did in Canada that really reminded me that, yeah, I do have big goals. I do want to do, you know, TV stuff, and I do want to get my name out there.” Among those goals she achieved, she says, “I got to make Jason Braceley laugh, which is, like, honestly, one of my biggest to date.”
Her performances on Canada’s Got Talent featured bits from her first album, Let Me Hold Your Baby, which she describes as “a compilation” of all her most polished material from across her career up to that point. “Basically, everything I’ve ever written to date, let’s just get all of that recorded. It was all quality material that I totally stand on and could rely on because I had done it so many times.”
With Wonder Woman, Gilmour was starting from scratch. As a result, she says she found it became a much more “intentional” album. “I was performing at the Winnipeg Comedy Festival back in February, and I was writing an eight-minute set centred around a theme. I noticed that my theme was all sort of coming together in a very specific way that felt personal to me and was touching on subjects that I really wanted to talk about,” she says.
On Wonder Woman, she discusses being rejected by a major label when going to record her first album. While she won’t name names, she says it “wasn’t, like, a small-potatoes label” that told her they didn’t believe her disability material would translate well in an audio-only medium. “I was just surprised by the lack of willingness to strategize that.” In contrast, she has nothing but praise for Comedy Records, the label she’s worked with for both this album and her debut.
Gilmour deftly rebukes the pressure she was feeling not to focus her material on her own lived experience with a line that hits the nail on the head: “People will listen if it’s funny.”
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By William Molls