Stage, du Maurier Centre

by Kerry Corrigan

LORNE ELLIOTT bounds up on the Studio Theatre stage at Theatre Aquarius and immediately starts picking out a be-bop rhythm on his electric guitar, singing a jazzy scat accompaniment. Dressed in black pants, white shirt, with that trademark electro-shock hair ("really, my hair is only an inch long - my head is shaped like this!"), Elliott uses his face, voice, legs and parts in-between to punctuate the music, the one-liners and, later, the stories which make up his Collected Mistakes II.

And he comes armed with research on the area, with local references like that "favourite Southern Ontario folk-song, 'Niagara Falls, Ontario/Wonderful place for you to go...'".

Really a stand-up routine, these Mistakes nevertheless captivate, nay, slay the audience. Elliott's roving eyes cast about the darkened room in the same manner that his observant mind casts about the surrounding landscape for tales to tell, habits to tease and bureaucrats to skewer.

He thoroughly supports "Canada's national unity program: everybody hates Toronto!" by taking a lot of swipes at "Hogopolis", and its childish reaction to a little snow. "Manitoba got the army for their flood, then Quebec got the army for the ice-storm, so Toronto had to get it for their snow. Now they're worried about floods - will they call in the navy?"

His black and white guitar is child-size ("it makes me look big!") and Lorne picked it up and put it down a number of times during the evening to sing some rousing comedic songs or to just provide a musical accompaniment to his pointed observations on life. Songs included "Danny Boy", as done by someone who doesn't know the words, a rousing drinking song about granny getting plastered and my favourite, a swiftly sung lyric about what J.S. Bach might have encountered starting out in the music biz today.

Elliott also played fiddle very badly when he was younger, he tells us, but his one and only live performance on that instrument was met first by stony silence and then a laconic voice from the back piping in, "Are you finished tuning up, Buddy or what?" Sort of like the stony silence that met his query, "So does anybody here like Country and Western music?"

One of the funniest stories involved his idea for avoiding that universal problem  faced by all Canadians, how to keep your socks from sliding down into your rubber boots. His elaborate invention, which involved bungee chords which hooked to your socks, ran up your pants into your pockets, and then attached to your wrists, was accompanied by Elliott's hilarious demonstration of what it's like to walk with bungee cords attached to your feet.

Digs at T.O. and Hamilton are interspersed with stories of his life on the family farm, situated north of Montreal. Arriving back to the great ice-storm from a Caribbean cruise, Elliott found "spring-loaded thorn trees" on his property and darkness inside, where you needed "120 candles just to read the paper." Still, it's always nice to "sit around the woodstove and enjoy a nice, warm chimney fire."

The opening night audience was full of appreciative fans, including one guy who cued Elliott in his encore to finish a joke from earlier. That was the explanation of the three stages of a woman's anger: Huff; Conniptions; and  Dreaded Hairy Cat fit, which Elliott refers to as "the doors of Hell opening." 

Lorne Elliott's manic stage presence and self-deprecating manner makes for a night of laughter that will leave your guts aching. But it's a good hurt! 

The Brockville Recorder and Times

By Ronald Zajac, Staff Writer

Any comic can get a laugh by swearing on stage. The better comic is the one who can keep them in stitches with a monologue on swearing - and not use a single swear word. Lorne Elliott topped off his show at the Brockville Arts Centre Saturday with that kind of routine, a story that included the word his brother tricked him into saying at age four, by making him stretch his lips on both sides with his fingers while saying the word "puck."

The 47-year-old funny man, best known for his CBC radio show Madly Off in All Directions, kept the small but spirited crowd roaring with his live show, The Collected Mistakes. Elliott's self-deprecating standup comedy included anecdotes about the ice storm of January 1998, tales of tree-cutting and home improvement mishaps and a sonnet bemoaning the death of a car battery in the middle of a blizzard between Thunder Bay and Wawa. He broke up the monologues with some of his better-known songs, including a side-splitting anthem for lawn-art lovers.

People who know Elliott only as a voice on the radio aren't getting the full package. While his rural Canadian inflections and impeccable delivery were in top Madly Off shape Saturday night, it's his physical comedy that distinguishes him among comics. Tall, thin and lanky and sporting his trademark electro-shock hairdo, Elliott turned stand-up into theatre with imitations of "soakers" - clumsy steps in the melting ice of spring - and his terror at placing booster cables on his car battery, an experi- ence he likened to flossing a wolverine.

It's easy to believe the jokes come as naturally as the goofy grins and yodels, but that isn't the case. "I don't think of myself as being naturally funny," Elliott said in a pre-show interview. "For me, it was a trade I had to learn." The Montreal native, who has spent two decades on stage and writing plays, had to be persistent to make it as a comedian. "It's just something I thought I could do, against all the evidence to the contrary the first couple of years," he said. The blending of music and monologues has always seemed a perfect fit. "I didn't see a reason why not to do it, because the audiences liked it," Elliott said. "They like variety."

The touring, meanwhile, goes hand-in-hand with the radio show, which is taped in front of live audiences across Canada. Canadians have their pick of current events-based or political comedy acts, but Elliott has found himself a niche in a more earthy, Everyman brand of humour, one as seemingly apologetic and self- effacing as the stereotypical Canadian temperament. His comedy points to human foibles audience members can see in themselves. "I guess what I'm saying is: 'I'm an idiot. Are you an idiot, too?'"

Madly Off is now in its fifth season and it's keeping Elliott busy enough to forget some of his material. "Once the show is done and it's on the air, I have to think about the new stuff I have to write," he said. So he is continually surprised - pleasantly so - when excerpts from shows past are replayed on the CBC's weekday afternoon program, Richardson's Roundup. "I still don't really recognize the person that I hear on the radio," he said.