JON LAJOIE + Nick Brazao @ Club Soda

By Brian Hastie - Countdown To Armageddon - 03/12/2009

Seeing Jon Lajoie live at Club Soda in front of a sold-out crowd proved to me that the age of transcendent internet stardom is truly at hand. The comedian’s videos have reached millions of views on Youtube and Funny or Die, and he’s self-admitted been able to spend time in L.A. developing projects thanks to those videos. The big question, though, is whether or not internet fame could translate into a viable live event that people would show up to. The answer, of course, is an enthusiastic yes, although it didn’t hurt that he was playing to a hometown audience. And to top it off, Lajoie himself is quite an adept comedian in a live setting.    

Opener Nick Brazao, on the other hand, offered what would be considered a merely pedestrian set. The comedian opened up with a 5-minute bit about body hair, and then seguewayed into a number of topics that have become the standards of observational humour, such as relationships, fecal matter, television and sticky tack. Brazao has a good stage presence, but his material needs work in terms of finding something truly original to expand upon to make his act memorable.    

Watching Jon Lajoie live is definitely a multimedia affair. Equipped with a projecter and backdrop, an acoustic guitar and friend Renaud Paradis (who he introduced as “Jodie Foster”, leading to several Foster-ccentric jokes during the set) on keyboard and drum machine, Lajoie makes the best of his time up onstage, delivering scattershot commentary in-between video and comedic bits that took chances and forced his audience to question their level of comfort with relation to tastefulness (jokes including a bit about a racist T-Rex who hated Asian people went over surprisingly well).    

Thesplit in-between English and French audience members was pretty down the middle, which was a refreshing slice of Montreal life. Although Lajoie spoke primarily in English, he also acknowledged his French audience and tried his best to speak to both overlapping segments.    

He started off the night with a quick video joke involving the swallowing a pinecone, and then another recorded bit involving the comedian drinking too much while preparing the intro video. He then came out and rapped his way through “Everyday Normal Guy” before a video (a segment entitled “Not Giving a Fuck”) was played before he returned. He re-appeared and did what he said was new material, which covered what a comedian is “supposed” to do onstage (smile, wave at audience, launch into a joke about something personal, etc.) and then launched into some songs.    

Lajoie’s level of musical adeptness is surprisingly high; if he chose to take a serious stab at trying to become an actual artiste (that’s not to say that as a comedian he is not one already, all I’m saying is that public perception views comedy below the threshold of what is considered “artistic”, generally) he would have a pretty good chance at succeeding. Songs such as “Alone In The Universe” and “High As Fuck” demonstrate a strong, earnest voice whose musical accompaniment is enjoyable and catchy. He also managed to do a raucous cover of the Ghostbusters theme song, “Too Fast”, “If I Had Wings”, a new song with lyrics supposedly written by his uncle Rick about being disabled, a song about giving advice to Michael Richards (which appears in his “Bootlegs and B-Sides” video) and ended things off with a one-two punch of his “2 Girls 1 Cup” song and then “Show Me Your Genitals”, both of which found the entire audience singing along to the entire pieces.    

A friend I was with who had previously seen Lajoie live a few months back commented that apart from the first 15 minutes of his set, the rest (song choice, videos shown, stand-up bits) was exactly the same. She wasn’t disappointed, though, as she explained that Lajoie’s joke stood up to multiple viewings, and the slight differing deliveries ensured that it wasn’t a true carbon copy of her first viewing. All in all, an enjoyable evening from a man who is destined for continued internet fame.

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