By Thomas Miller
Lakeland College put together several events this week as part of Frost Week, an orientation for new students this semester.
Tonight at 8 p.m. the college is hosting the Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Tour, with headliner Jennifer Grant, who has also performed at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, the Halifax Comedy Festival, and was a finalist in the Boston Comedy Competition.
In a conversation with the Source on Wednesday, Grant said she took a chance on stand-up comedy 12 years ago and never looked back.
“I always wanted to perform since I was a little kid, I had taken some improv classes and acting classes, was kind of going in that direction. I had a friend that was doing stand-up (comedy), and he thought I could do it,” she said. “I was really scared, really nervous, but he said, ‘I really think you naturally think like a comic.’ Very apprehensively I wrote my first five minutes and I forced myself to get up there but I was really scared.”
She said it’s a difficult art to master and early in her career she had to endure the ugliness of heckling.
“The first couple of years it’s really intense, it’s either intensely satisfying or intensely mortifying,” she explained. “I take things a little more sensitively than other people. One of the things you get better at, growing thicker skin, you have to.”
Grant, who has a bachelor’s degree in communications and worked as a reporter for a short time, enjoys being on the road.
“Comedy has taken me places where I have never thought,” she added. “For instance, I went to Egypt and Israel to entertain the troops. That was pretty amazing.”
She still harbours ambitions of reaching a greater audience and one day being a name-brand star.
“I guess the goal would be to get to the position where people are coming to see me specifically,” she said. “Because if you go on any night to a comedy show, there are going to be some people who know me and are coming for me but it’s not going to be the majority of the audience at this stage of my career.
“Everybody has different tastes in comedy. It’s a very subjective thing. Even if I’m confident in what I do, maybe some people don’t have the same sense of humour as me. That would be the best feeling. For instance, Ellen Degeneres, when she fills a theatre it’s all people that love her and have the same sensibilities. That’s what I would like to be.”
Tickets for the show are $5 for students and $10 for the general public. Doors open at 7:15 p.m.
Alanna Negri, an enrolment specialist at Lakeland, said events like these help students adjust to university life and give them an opportunity to meet new people.
“It’s a great way to get to know your new classmates and it’s a great way to get involved in the community and do something fun on campus to ease into the start of classes before they get too bogged down,” she said. “It’s a great community, we’ve got all sorts of fun events that happen throughout the year, but this is a great way to kick off starting off a new semester.”
When asked what to expect from her show, Grant responded: “Hilarious jokes. I wish there was one quick way for me to describe myself ... My point of view on life, my perspective. You can make something up there.”