MF GALAXY

WHY ACTING ONSTAGE IS SO MUCH MORE SATISFYING THAN ACTING ONSCREEN, WHAT HE LOVED ABOUT WORKING ON MADTV + WHY HE LEFT IT FOREVER LISTEN/DOWNLOAD Ron Pederson. I never worked with him but we crossed paths a bunch of times in Edmonton’s sketch comedy, improv, and theatre community, and then one day I up and turn on my TV and boom! There he is on MadTV , which for me was the funniest US sketch show ever made. I shouldn’t’ve been so surprised he’d hit the big time. Other Edmontonians had made it big, including Michael J. Fox, Jill Hennessy from Law & Order , Bruce McCulloch from Kids in the Hall, and Nathan Fillion from Firefly . And Edmonton was and is English-speaking Canada’s leading theatre and sketch-improv city. Still, to see a kid I knew on MadTV was exciting, and Ron was great. Plus I’d seen him kill in the gonzo science fiction musical comedy Road to Uranus by Dana Anderson and Cathleen Rootsaert. And he’d been a mainstay in the longform impro...

STRATEGY FOR NO-NONSENSE ACTING, LEGENDARY COMEDY TROUPE THREE DEAD TROLLS IN A BAGGIE, PERCENTAGES GAME OF WRITING + RECORDING THE IRRELEVANT SHOW, MONEY VS POWER IN COMEDY LISTEN/DOWNLOAD If you listen to CBC Radio then you’ve almost certainly heard the comedy of Neil Grahn. He’s been a debater on The Debaters, but he’s best known as one of the sketch comics on and lead writer for The Irrelevant Show. Years ago Grahn was part of a pioneering sketch comedy troupe in Edmonton called Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie which included Cathleen Rootsaert, Wes Borg, and the late Joe Bird, which was briefly a television show. He’s currently the writer/director/producer behind the Gemini Award-winning series Taking It Off, and he’s a documentarian with many films to his credit including one about Amber Valley, one of the earliest African towns in Alberta. He’s constantly busy writing pilots and hustling to put new work into gear. The man is a machine, with plenty of wisdom to s...

HOW IMPROV HELPS WRITING, THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF LAUGHS WRITERS MUST UNDERSTAND, THE GAME MECHANICS OF IMPROV, FACING RESISTANCE TO HUMOUR ON MASS EFFECT 3 LISTEN/DOWNLOAD FREE Cathleen Rootsaert is a remarkable creator. She wrote plot and dialogue for the video game Mass Effect 3 by BioWare, and edited dialogue for the studio’s Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 2 games. In the late 1980s, along with rising improv stars Wes Borg, Neil Grahn, and Paul Mather, she co-founded the legendary Edmonton comedy troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, which had a brief run as a CBC television series. She’s the playwright behind Mimi Amok, After You, Legacy, Make Me and Mama Mia! Me a Mama? which won the Sterling Award for outstanding new work. She also won the 2005 Alberta Playwriting Award for Abigail in Twilight. She appeared on the Ken Finkelman series The Newsroom and the Winnipeg Comedy Festival special I’m Becoming a Mother. She’s a core member of the two-deca...