“Innocence wrapped in barbed wire. Can I use that?” says comedian Nikki Payne, referencing my description of her stage persona and unique style.
Well, why not? I assure the Nova Scotia comic that two Timbits per fifty t-shirts sold seems like the appropriate form of currency for such an exchange. She agrees and a deal is made. Now to just sit back and await the sweet, jelly-filled goodness to start pouring down like rain in Mawsynram!
Payne will be the first to tell you that she was sort of born into prime comedic material akin to, say, van Gogh being birthed onto some tubes of paint and a blank canvass. The stuff was just there at the ready.
First there was her upbringing in the quaint sounding Sackville Estates, not the posh residential area the name might suggest but, in actuality, a trailer park. Payne says though it sounds like a winery, the only thing ripe for the picking there was the comedy that later worked itself into her act.
The comic was also born with a cleft palate giving her a prominent lisp. Rather than try to hide this, her voice has been a trademark part of her act. She’s still waiting for her parking space, she says, if her voice classifies as a disability.
Showbiz was just in her blood or, perhaps, her feathers. Payne would slip on the suit of her college mascot The Hawk in the first of her alternative twists into comedy.
“I was in college and I had a problem. I had not yet met the physical activity component of a recreation course. My school had a problem too. They lost the budget to pay a mascot. We made a fair trade,” Payne tells Ottawa Life on how she capitalized on the opportunity because, hey, who doesn’t want a free mascot?
Not everybody gets into a flourishing career by way of mascot but Nikki Payne is anything but conventional. The gig would prove far more valuable in the long run than the obtained course requirement as Payne would get her first taste of being “a goof for the public’s enjoyment”, a sample that led to a far tastier buffet that has netted the comic three Canadian Comedy Awards and appearances in Comedy Inc. and Last Comic Standing.
Her choice to vacate the Sackville trailer park, head to Toronto and pursue comedy is one she now swears by. No, for real, she swears a lot. Don’t let the outward appearance fool you. Her tongue’s so sharp it could clear-cut half the Taiga before the end of her act. Seriously, a few minutes into any given Nikki Payne show and it’s hard to believe that she was once a shy Sackville kid and not somebody spawned from the engine room of a 1940s frigate covered in ash and profanity.
Fear, charm, inner rage and a smile that would melt corundum, somewhere in the middle there’s Nikki Payne. Or, as I said, innocence wrapped in barbed wire. Okay, Nikki, where’s my Timbits?
I had a chance to chat with the comic this week before her four shows (February 23- 25) at Yuk Yuk’s. Tickets are online sale now online.
Ottawa Life: Where do you find you draw the most material from?
Nikki Payne: Usually, I would answer this question with situations from my own life experience. Things that frighten me, things that make me angry. This that are happening in my own life, like when I gave my Dad a kidney.
Recently, however I was approached by UNESCO Fundy Biosphere Reserve and VideoBand Productions to write a stand up show for a documentary about connectivity issues for wildlife on the Chignecto Isthmus. So yeah, that took me out of my comfort zone in a totally good way!
From inspiration to stage, how would you describe your process?
Well, it’s not very exciting but I rarely get asked this question so thank you. First I sit around and write random garbage. Rants, weird thoughts etc. Then I clean the house, take the dog for a walk or do chores. As I do that, the random garbage starts to form into slightly more coherent communication. Then I sit down and try to form these random thoughts into joke for: a set up that’s approximately 2-3 lines long with a solid punch line to end. I take these hopeful joke sprouts to an open mic, a comedy club or slip them into a longer theatre set. I record myself performing them. Now it gets even more tedious. I write out the jokes double spaced word for word how I said them in the recording. With a highlighter I mark where people laugh (if they laugh). I fix the jokes that are working to be better. Rewrite/edit the ones that aren’t working and get rid of the ones that are just garbage. The whole process starts again at the next show. Record, dictate double spaced, highlight and edit. I do this until the jokes are as good as I feel they can be. It’s work.
There’s this whole persona to your stage presence, this innocence wrapped in barbed-wire. How much of this is actually you and / or how did you develop this presence for the stage?
Oh I like that description. In comedy, as with other art forms, you usually develop “a voice” over time. I’m not very much like how I am on stag off stage but I still feel like stage me is me…just BIGGER! My persona is a combination of my inner rage and frustration and my total fear of getting on stage. Regular me likes to rescue animals and draw.
At lot of the clips I’ve seen seem to be impulsive, like you’re one of these unpredictable comics that can just work in something new at any time. How much of your act would you say is written out verses how much you change things up on the fly?
Well, you’ve heard my process so a lot of the impulsiveness is an illusion. However, I find I’m more impulsive and willing to play with the audience when I’m well prepared. So, I have a set line up of topics/jokes I would like to tell but because I have that all prepared long before show time that gives me the confidence to move away from the plan. Preparation is the key to my impulsiveness.
Audiences can be weird sometimes, right? What’s been the strangest thing that’s happened to you while on stage?
Oh my God! So weird!! I had a woman flash me. Showed me and everyone else her boobies. What’s funny is the venue was all worried I was going to be too inappropriate for the audience. No one saw my boobies that night. I walked away a lady.
You always hear these stories of comedians, right, the clowns outside but racked with, no pun intend, pain. Have you found that to be true working in comedy either for yourself or others?
I’m no Psychiatrist but I think comedians are humans having the same human experience as all of us. Something like 20% of Canadians will personally experience mental illness in their lifetime. There was a study at McMaster that suggests that 1 in 10 Canadians have experienced post-traumatic stress at some point in their life. That’s heavy trauma.
I wonder if comedians are just people that have dealt with these experiences in a slightly different way than others that changes our perception of the world just enough that we make it funny? Because if we were these clowns masking all this pain that the average person doesn’t have, nothing would connect with the audience. We have to be experiencing the same emotions as the audience or they wouldn’t understand what we’re doing.
I think maybe whatever our brains did to protect us from, y’know, just life gave us a slightly skewed view of the world that we get to share with others so we all feel better.
