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The Bella Concert Hall did not exist at Mount Royal University when Bruce McCulloch attended the school.
In fact, Mount Royal wasn’t even a university in the 1980s, when McMulloch majored in journalism and business and had ambitions of becoming a writer. He abandoned his studies for comedy after discovering improv pioneer Keith Johnstone and Theatresports. That led to him taking advantage of the open-door policy of the pioneering Loose Moose Theatre Company, where he would meet Mark McKinney. The two became the “Calgary contingent” of what would eventually turn into The Kids in the Hall after the pair travelled to Toronto to join forces with Dave Foley, Scott Thompson and Kevin McDonald.
So it is a bit of homecoming for McCulloch whenever he performs at the Bella, which he will do on Sept. 28 with his one-man show, Tales of Bravery and Stupidity.
“I keep coming hoping that they will give me my diploma because I never actually received one,” he jokes in a phone interview with Postmedia. “It’s something about not getting my last two credits. It just seems ridiculous. I mean, I’m a celebrity. I should just be given one.”
While born in Edmonton, McCulloch’s formative years in high school and college and his introduction to comedy happened in Calgary. So some of those memories tend to make it into the hometown version of his acclaimed show, which has continued to evolve since he introduced it in 2019. He has performed it throughout North America, from off-Broadway in New York to Calgary’s High Performance Rodeo. In Calgary, he is much more prone to directly explore his roots in the city, making references to the old 1980s punk club The Calgarian or Tom’s House of Pizza, for instance.
“I thought I was going to be a writer,” he says. “Then I found Theatresports and I thought ‘Oh, I can do this?’ So then I didn’t care. I had found my religion. My religion was comedy.”
McCulloch’s post-Kids career may be the most eclectic of the five members, who have frequently reunited since their pioneering show went off the air in the mid-1990s. It has consisted not only of numerous Kids reunions but also of writing books, directing episodes of shows such as The Trailer Park Boys, Schitt’s Creek and Brooklyn Nine-Nine and developing his own projects, such as the Calgary-shot Young Drunk Punk and roles in TV and film.
Part of the initial inspiration for Bruce McCulloch: Tales of Bravery and Stupidity was his decision to move his family back to Toronto after he spent more than a decade in Los Angeles. That came after the 2017 death of his friend, Tragically Hip lead vocalist and lyricist Gord Downie.
“There is a story that I do sometimes which is (about) being in Halifax and directing Trailer Park Boys and finding out that he had died and going ‘I have to move back here,’ ” McCulloch says. “I was looking at the ocean saying, ‘No, I have to move back here.’ I was in L.A. for 17 years, but that was never the plan. It was just that we kept thinking, ‘Oh, maybe this next pilot will go.’ At a certain point, it felt like we had to be back in Canada.”
McCulloch directed the Tragically Hip’s video for the title track of 2000’s Music @ Work and became close friends with Downie. He is among the high-profile friends and admirers who participated in the four-hour miniseries Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, which was directed by Downie’s brother Mike and screened on Wednesday as part of the Calgary International Film Festival.
At one point, McCulloch would read email exchanges between Downie and him as part of Tales of Bravery and Stupidity.
“I sort of retired that,” he says. “I do it every so often. I was just part of the great Hip documentary that was at the film festival and it feels like my love letter to him is complete, so maybe I don’t have to do that as much. I felt really honoured to do it, but it is also emotional for me.”
Tales of Bravery and Stupidity still packs an emotional punch. There are a lot of elements — “I’m sad to say I sing,” McCulloch says — but it is essentially a storytelling show.
“Someone said it seems like a magic trick,” he says. “It seems like a hilarious stand-up show that turns into a theatre show. It’s humour first, knowing me, but there is some emotion to it now which I think we want when we spend an evening in the theatre with someone. Look what we’ve all been through. I don’t mean even just our childhoods or COVID. We do gather to seek meaning and, in a way, when you’re getting to know someone in a theatrical situation, it can go super fast but you can take your time and connect with people through their experiences. It’s not about me, it’s about us. I think that’s the part that people have told me they come away with, a humanistic feeling of ‘we’re all in this together.’ ”
He says he sees Tales of Bravery and Stupidity as a “beautiful container” where he can add or take out snippets as he goes along. That said, McCulloch wants to emphasize that it is still a comedy show.
“It’s fun,” he says. “It is what my dad would call a gut-buster. It’s not just a theatre-boy show.”