Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter.
Ryan Williams is late. The text that announces this news is both funny and somewhat grave: “I’m running 10 minutes late because I have fucked up time management frequently throughout my life, causing it to affect many professional and personal relationships.”
When Williams eventually does walk into the Georgia Straight offices, the former UBC defensive tackle is wearing sunglasses and big headphones and anxiously rolls into thought after thought like a kid ramming into bumper cars at the PNE.
Williams got into comedy in Vancouver after coming here from the Interior to play football for the Thunderbirds. “My knee exploded,” he says bluntly. “Knowing what I know now, I think I had a mental breakdown. And I started going to open mics.”
He began with amateur nights at extinct venues like the Comedy Mix and Yuk Yuks Vancouver. Then it was guest spots. Then, less than two years in, he started middling, or featuring, at clubs. “It was going amazing,” he says. “I was pretty crazy, had some alternative stuff, misdirection jokes of a bro-y nature. I was someone who’d watched too much Tim & Eric, [Zach] Galifianakis, Maria Bamford. It was like Anthony Jeselnik for people with CTE.”
A Friday night late show bomb at the Comedy Mix, opening for Comedy Central mainstay Tom Rhodes, was a fork in the road. But Williams didn’t give up. “I bombed so bad and lost a lot of momentum,” he says. “And I started reevaluating things. It’s a lot of peaks and valleys. Right after COVID I toured Western Canada as an opener, which people don’t really do. You learn what works in different places.”
For the past four years, Williams has been working as a full-time comedian, headlining his own shows. That’s the result of a lot of time on the road—Williams says that he’s performed in over 86 towns, cities, and villages in Canada, across every province and territory except Nunavut. That constant travel has given Williams a perspective on the city he lives in.
“As someone who tours Canada a lot, people’s perception of Vancouver is mind-boggling to me,” he says. “The idea that it’s a bunch of hippies and people hanging out. There are hippies, but they’re business hippies. Everyone has jobs… The hippies of Kits are old NIMBYs complaining about stuff.”
His upcoming comedy special, which he will perform live over two shows on April 25 at the Revue Stage on Granville Island, will feature a considerable dose of Vancouver stuff (“Like 15 percent,” says Williams), even as it will serve as something of a digital resume for what he’s able to do on stage.
“A comedy special now is spending an extravagant amount of money—as much as a used [Toyota] RAV4 or Honda Pilot—on a YouTube video,” he says. “When you break that down, it’s an insane thing to do.”
In fairness, fifteen percent seems light for the amount of time Williams has clearly spent thinking about Vancouver.
“Vancouver’s only consistency is rapid change—you figure the city out and then it changes,” he says. “Having to explain Tom Cochrane’s ‘Vancouver lights’ thing and what that means—it used to be a violent, gross, working-class dock city. Then it became quite WASPY… The Vancouver Special is now five storeys with retail on the bottom and a taekwondo studio and a dental office.”
He also has a hot take about the city’s parks: “Dude Chilling sucks—it has an aquifer running underneath it; that’s why it’s damper than everywhere else. And then when it dries out, it’s disgusting.”
Asked for his favourite park in the city, he calls out what he’s labelled “micro parks”, like Point Grey Park.
“In Kits and East Van, they’re like the size of a lot of two-lot properties, and for whatever reason they’re public parks,” he says. “They look like somewhere that you’d hand someone money on an HBO show—two benches overlooking the docks or water.”
Despite some of its big comedy clubs going the way of affordable apartments, Williams acknowledges that Vancouver is one of the best places in the country to ply your trade if you’re a comedian.
“It’s all small venues, but you can get more stage time than anywhere else in Canada,” he says of places like Comedy After Dark, Comedy Underground, Little Mountain Gallery, China Cloud, and Chill X Studio.
“Eight months of the year, Vancouver is the best place to do comedy,” Williams says. “People are seasonally depressed. Those four months of sun come around, and it’s not as great for comedians, but you can grab some tall cans and hang out.” At Dude Chilling, perhaps.
Ryan Williams performs his comedy special at the Revue Stage on Granville Island on April 25. Tickets here.