{"id":17201,"date":"2026-04-23T23:43:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T23:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/17201\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T23:43:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T23:43:12","slug":"you-figure-the-city-out-and-then-it-changes-ryan-williams-on-vancouvers-parks-history-and-comedy-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/17201\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018You figure the city out and then it changes\u2019: Ryan Williams on Vancouver\u2019s parks, history, and comedy scene"},"content":{"rendered":"

Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday.\u00a0Sign up for our free newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ryan Williams is late. The text that announces this news is both funny and somewhat grave: \u201cI\u2019m running 10 minutes late because I have fucked up time management frequently throughout my life, causing it to affect many professional and personal relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Williams got into comedy in Vancouver after coming here from the Interior to play football for the Thunderbirds. \u201cMy knee exploded,\u201d he says bluntly. \u201cKnowing what I know now, I think I had a mental breakdown. And I started going to open mics.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He\u00a0began with amateur nights at\u00a0extinct 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. \u201cIt was going amazing,\u201d he says. \u201cI was pretty crazy, had some alternative stuff, misdirection jokes of a bro-y nature. I was someone who\u2019d watched too much Tim\u00a0& Eric, [Zach] Galifianakis, Maria Bamford. It was like Anthony Jeselnik for people with CTE.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t give up. \u201cI bombed so bad and lost a lot of momentum,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I started reevaluating things. It\u2019s a lot of peaks and valleys. Right after COVID I toured Western Canada as an opener, which people don\u2019t really do. You learn what works in different places.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the past four years, Williams has been working as a full-time comedian, headlining his own shows. That\u2019s the result of a lot of time on the road\u2014Williams says that he\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAs someone who tours Canada a lot, people\u2019s perception of Vancouver is mind-boggling to me,\u201d he says. \u201cThe idea that it\u2019s a bunch of hippies and people hanging out. There are hippies, but they\u2019re business hippies. Everyone has jobs\u2026 The hippies of Kits are old NIMBYs complaining about stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

His upcoming comedy special, which he will perform live<\/a> over two shows on April 25 at the Revue Stage on Granville Island, will feature a considerable dose of Vancouver stuff (\u201cLike 15 percent,\u201d says Williams), even as it will serve as something of a digital resume for what he\u2019s able to do on stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cA comedy special now is spending an extravagant amount of money\u2014as much as a used [Toyota] RAV4 or Honda Pilot\u2014on a YouTube video,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen you break that down, it\u2019s an insane thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fairness, fifteen percent seems light for the amount of time Williams has clearly spent thinking about Vancouver.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cVancouver\u2019s only consistency is rapid change\u2014you figure the city out and then it changes,\u201d he says. \u201cHaving to explain Tom Cochrane’s \u2018Vancouver lights\u2019 thing<\/a> and what that means\u2014it 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also has a hot take about the city\u2019s parks: \u201cDude Chilling sucks\u2014it has an aquifer running underneath it; that\u2019s\u00a0why it\u2019s damper than everywhere else. And then when it dries out, it\u2019s disgusting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked for his favourite park in the city, he calls out what he\u2019s labelled \u201cmicro parks\u201d, like Point Grey Park.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Kits and East Van, they\u2019re like the size of a lot of two-lot properties, and for whatever reason they\u2019re public parks,\u201d he says. \u201cThey look like somewhere that you\u2019d hand someone money on an HBO show\u2014two benches overlooking the docks or water.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019re a comedian.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all small venues, but you can get more stage time than anywhere else in Canada,\u201d he says of places like Comedy After Dark, Comedy Underground, Little Mountain Gallery, China Cloud, and Chill X Studio.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEight months of the year, Vancouver is the best place to do comedy,\u201d Williams says. \u201cPeople are seasonally depressed. Those four months of sun come around, and it\u2019s not as great for comedians, but you can grab some tall cans and hang out.\u201d At Dude Chilling, perhaps.<\/p>\n

Ryan Williams performs his comedy special at the Revue Stage on Granville Island on April 25. Tickets here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday.\u00a0Sign up for our free newsletter. Ryan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[415,17,412,413,418,407,414,420,416,423,226,389,419,422,421,417,95],"class_list":{"0":"post-17201","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-vancouver","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-city","11":"tag-culture","12":"tag-dining","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-events","15":"tag-fashion","16":"tag-film","17":"tag-food","18":"tag-lifestyle","19":"tag-music","20":"tag-nightlife","21":"tag-restaurants","22":"tag-shopping","23":"tag-tv","24":"tag-vancouver"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}