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| Tue Jan 5, 2010 Brent Butt: working hard to be funny Publisher: The Globe and Mail Author: Marsha Lederman | |
| Brent Butt knows his new sitcom, Hiccups, is going to be compared to Corner Gas, but he's not losing any sleep over it. He can't afford to: while in production, he's wearing so many hats (creator, executive producer, writer, director, star) that his days are jammed. He generally arrives on set by 7 a.m., shoots all day, attends production meetings during breaks, and then heads to the editing suite at night. This while also touring his stand-up comedy act. Oh, and training a puppy. Of course, he'd be delighted if Hiccups matches the success of his previous series, with its millions of viewers and multiple Gemini Awards. "I'm conscious of that," Butt says during an interview over a quick lunch on the Burnaby, B.C., set of Hiccups , which is scheduled to debut later this year on CTV, "but there's so much that goes into doing it that you just put your head down and plow through. There's so much to get done, there isn't a lot of time for reflection or thinking: 'Oh, I wonder how it's going to do.' There's nine million things to do or 40 questions to answer in any one minute. So you don't really get a chance to reflect and worry about it. You just worry about the jokes. You worry about making it good." Hiccups is built around the idea of a children's author who has anger issues. Butt liked the overt dichotomy of that, the same way, he says, that the notion of a short basketball player instinctively makes him laugh. Initially, in Butt's mind, the author was a man -- but he switched gears when the character of a life coach, which he thought should be male, entered the picture. The now-female author character grew into someone with not only anger issues, but outburst issues; a vibrant, energetic but emotionally off-kilter woman who acts without thinking. As the character transformed, Butt began to envision the perfect actress for the role: Nancy Robertson, his Corner Gas co-star -- and real-life wife. "I was relieved, because I love playing characters like Wanda, but I was ready for a change," says Robertson, whose Corner Gas character was a caustic, tightly wound know-it-all. "I would leave the set with my shoulders very tight and my neck very tight, because I played her that way ... I was looking forward to playing somebody who was just a little more free." Robertson's new character, Millie, is wildly successful, selling millions of books around the world. But she needs help dealing with her embarrassing social outbursts. Enter Stan, the life coach (played by Butt), an understated yet funny guy with no actual life-coaching experience, training or education. That doesn't keep him from what he thinks is his calling: It's always been his dream to help people. Stan will no doubt remind viewers of Brent Leroy, Dog River's gas-station proprietor from Corner Gas . Butt is the first to admit that his characters are "always me" (in the Bob Hope oeuvre, he says). "I kind of have the one thing that I do, so I'm kind of doing that again." In addition to Robertson, Butt has surrounded himself with some of the core creative team that helped make Corner Gas such a smash success: the director of photography, the co-executive producer and two writers, including Andrew Carr, who on Hiccups doubles as supervising producer. Carr didn't initially jump at the opportunity --he had concerns about taking on the post- Corner Gas challenge. "The bar is huge and raised high here," he said, adding: "I spoke with my wife and threw it back and forth, going, 'I'm not sure if I want to do this.' And then I kind of went, 'Screw it, to hell with it, I'm going for it.'" One person without any Corner Gas baggage is Paula Rivera, who plays Stan's wife Anna. She's not just new to the team -- she didn't even watch the old show. "I think that helps because if I had an awareness of how huge Corner Gas was, I think I might be even more nervous than I've been," Rivera said during a break in shooting. Even though most of her scenes are with Butt and Robertson, Rivera -- who was trained as a dancer in her native Mexico, and has appeared as an actress in Flashpoint and The Collector -- says she in no way feels like she's crashing a party that started long before she arrived. "I feel for them this is a clear slate, a new page in their lives as artists and storytellers," she says. The comedy on Hiccups may seem familiar, but the new show is built around an urban setting and storylines. And each episode ends with an animated segment, a sort of moral-of-the-story conclusion arising from Millie's adventures. Late one night, while on the road doing stand-up, Butt decided to watch one of the first completed episodes of Hiccups . Despite having little time for sleep, he watched another and another and another. "It moves nice, it looks great, Nancy's hilarious," he says. "I think I'm doing a good job, and I'm pretty critical usually of myself." Objectively, he says, it is his new favourite show, and that's enough for him. He is far less focused on how others will receive it. "I kind of treat Hiccups the way I treated Corner Gas in the beginning, which was I didn't think anybody was going to watch anyway," he says. "So I said 'Let's just make a show that we really feel proud of and then people watch it or they don't, it doesn't matter. Make a show that we really like and we think is funny; a show that we enjoy.' And then you can walk away, and cross your fingers." | |
