This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

Yuk Yuk

Posted by Miro

The secret to living together in a bus together is to not hang out with each other. In preparation for our long backwoods sojourn (and potentially long periods of time with just us) Ehren went to a Hostel last night. Seemed like a smart idea to me, and so I resisted the urge to retreat to the Walmart parking lot and wallow in a pile of Smokey Bacon flavored potato chips.

I checked into the Hostel across the street from Ehren’s. Same Sun was a pretty well run, deliberately funky place with country flags painted on every door and a bar downstairs. The activity for the evening was discount tickets to YukYuk’s, a comedy club with several locations across Canada.

Attending a show at YukYuk’s was mildly disorienting. My mother used to play YukYuk’s back in the 70s when she was doing stand-up comedy. I don’t think there was one in Vancouver when my parents lived here. I think she played the one in Montreal. We had a small table top with the YukYuk’s logo on it hanging on the wall of the TV room for a decade. When I was young it scared me. I had no idea what it was. About three feet in diameter, the table top looked like an oversized novelty-record to me.

The only example I have of my mom’s act from back then was a micro-cassette recording of a fake news program called Cause for Question: mostly topical Canadian political humor from the 70s. Between the accents and references, I didn’t understand a word.

Last night’s comedy at least made more sense to me. I even got a few of the topical Canadian political humor jokes. Of course, it’s easy to laugh at anyone’s impression of a French Canadian toddler smoking in the sandbox and complaining about “those fuckers at City Hall” banning smoking in daycares. I know enough about Canada to think any joke about Jean Chrétien being crazy is funny.

The show was a combination of pros and amateurs, which made it pretty hit or miss, but the weekend headliner came out after the evening’s headliner to warm up for his next two days of shows. He killed. The act was dense with pop cultural references only recognizable to people born between 1977 and 1982: Sunny Delight, the difficulty of keeping your original Nintendo working, the cheat code to Contra.

Afterward a bunch of us at the show headed back to the bar in the Hostel. I ended up amongst a group of two New Zealanders, one Australian and a Spaniard. I’ve been traveling for 7 months. I’m one of the best traveled people I know. In this group I was positively parochial. They had all lived in at least two different foreign countries.

We’re giving them all a ride to Whistler tonight where two of them are working for the summer season.