Hear No Evil Comedy Tour (with Jared Borland, Byron Bertram, Kyle Jones and guests)
Where: Club 9one9
When: Tonight, 8 p.m. (doors 7 p.m.)
Tickets: $15, $20 door (Lyle’s Place, Ditch Records, Strathcona Hotel or ticketzone.com)
Growing up Mormon was a boon to Jared Borland’s comedy career.
The Vancouver comedian performs at Club 9one9 tonight on a multi-comic bill. Borland, 35, was raised in a Mormon family that lived in small-town Saskatchewan before moving to Nanaimo. His religious upbringing now provides grist for his standup comedy.
“There’s guilt,” he said. “Even as an adult, I’m so paranoid and second-guessing all these things. Even when I’m drinking beer I’m feeling a little guilty.”
Borland and his family eventually left the Mormon church. For this, they were excommunicated. The ramifications were profound. It meant, for instance, that Borland stopped communicating with his best friend for years (they later reconnected as adults after his pal also left the church).
Borland became a comedian relatively late in life, at the age of 27. He’d always been interested in comedy, but never believed in the viability of a show-biz career.
Then one day he saw a YouTube clip of an actor friend performing at a Yuk Yuk’s amateur night.
“He proved to me it was possible to pursue that,” Borland said.
Deciding to follow his instincts, Borland left a solid gig as a sales rep in Nanaimo (“I had a good job, played golf, barbecued”) and moved in with his actor pal in Vancouver. There he started performing at open mic evenings. Borland acknowledges he wasn’t particularly funny at first. But he kept at it — and succeeded.
Eighteen months ago, Yuk Yuk’s in Vancouver offered him a contract. Joining the roster of a national nightclub chain has been a major career boost, Borland says. He must still supplement his income as a comic by working as a bartender at an Irish pub. However, Borland enjoys the work. And it’s better than some of the supplementary jobs he’s held over the years. Past part-time gigs include being a blue-jean salesman and selling debit-card processors door-to-door. Borland even worked at Brandi’s, a Hornby Street strip club.
He wasn’t the announcer, however.
“I had the more glamorous job. I wiped the poles after the girls had danced on them.”
Once he become a comedian, Borland not only tolerated his crummy jobs, he revelled in them. That’s because they provided funny stories for his act.
“Even when I meet super weirdos on the bus, I embrace it,” he said.
His comedy career has had its glamorous moments. Borland has performed on a CTV Comedy Now special and gigged with many of Canada’s top comedians. He also opened for former Saturday Night Live comic Jon Lovitz on a Vancouver Island tour.
For Borland, who grew up loving the late-night comedy show, that was a dream come true.
“[Lovitz] is a very quiet guy, kept to himself. But he’s a very nice man. After I opened one time he said, ‘Did you save any laughs for me?’ I thought, from a pro like that, it was pretty awesome.”