Juno nominee Ivan Decker says live comedy can help Canadians through turbulent times

After growing up in the Delta, B.C., community of Ladner and years of living in Vancouver, comedian Ivan Decker decided to make the move east. 

To New Westminster. About 16 kilometres away.

"I was living in Los Angeles back in 2016, but during the pandemic I came up here and settled down, had a family," he told CBC's The Early Edition Stephen Quinn. 

A Juno Award winner, Decker is nominated in the comedy category again this year, for his comedy album Popcorn. 

He sat down for an interview with CBC Radio ahead of his Just For Laughs show in Vancouver, and ahead of the Juno Awards, also due to be held in Vancouver, on March 30. 

WATCH | Ivan Decker shares how life has changed, but his style of comedy remains steady:

Comedian Ivan Decker on using humour to cope in turbulent times

2 days ago

Duration 4:56

B.C.’s Ivan Decker is a Juno Award-winning standup comedian and has two shows this weekend as part of Just For Laughs Vancouver. He says using comedy is cathartic when times are tough and that one positive thing coming out of current events is the increased attention on Canadian entertainment and creators.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Your life has changed substantially over the past few years.

Two children now. It's kind of crazy. I have a two-year-old and a four-month-old. No sleep on my current schedule.

Do you talk about your kids in your comedy? 

I started doing comedy quite young and so it's been interesting watching the audiences age with me and the kind of things that I talk about connecting in that sense. And definitely, talking about, like, kids, family, certainly appeals to a certain demographic — but younger people, I can watch their eyes sort of glaze over when I talk about having children. So you have to choose, based on your crowd, what you talk about.

You're a proud Canadian. How are you doing these days?

CBC has been huge for me. That's the only source I've been getting my news. I love what everybody's doing down here, so thank you for that. And then just trying to limit my social media doom-scrolling because it's very easy to go down a hole.

Going to see comedy really helps because I think when you're in that room and you're with other people and you're laughing, it's cathartic. You can get a little bit lonely if you're just reading the news by yourself on your phone at home or in bed. I really love the feeling of live comedy and trying to do as much of that as possible. 

WATCH | Ivan Decker performs at Just For Laughs:

Slow internet is way worse than no internet | Ivan Decker

5 years ago

Duration 1:27

Nothing makes our phone addiction feel more like a drug addiction than just a little bit of internet.

Has it been different performing in front of a Canadian audience over the past couple of months?

I think overall I've noticed a little bit more of a bump. It's been nice. The "buy Canadian" movement is sort of shifting as well into a "watch Canadian," which I really like. People are starting to support Canadian artists a little bit more and, yeah, it's been good.

You're nominated for a Juno Award — Comedy Album of the Year for Popcorn. 

I think that was my first exposure to stand-up as well, listening to comedy records. And it's really fun for me to get to make the record as a whole, you listen to it from start to finish.

A lot of people can have a tendency, because of the rate at which you push out content now, to put things together quickly, just like a bunch of jokes in a line with not really any specific thread. I've always enjoyed putting together the album in a way that has an overarching narrative and structure.

You've won that award in 2018 for I Wanted to Be a Dinosaur. What's it like to win a Juno as a comedian?

It's very cool. I got to meet Fred Penner back in 2018. It's fun to get to see all of these people that I've been watching and listening to since I was a kid.

What are you using as a source of inspiration these days for your material? 

I think people are inundated with a lot of controversial topics, shall we say. It can be a little bit cathartic to hear jokes about that. That's never really been my area of expertise. So I'm sort of staying in the micro-frustrating — those smaller things like, trying to eat cereal or stand in line or even bringing it back to air travel. That's been a subject good for comedians for a while.

I love finding the things I think I'm the only one that imagines this, or focuses on, and then I get people who tell me "I think about that, too!"