Q Comedy

It’s hard to find a comedian quite like Elvira Kurt. Perhaps best known in the States for her painfully hilarious insights about growing up as the gay daughter of Hungarian immigrants in her native Toronto, she is also a seasoned television personality with a unique knack for bringing audiences directly into her equally unique world.

Not only is the stand-up veteran a cheeky performer with all the right resume highlights - the tours, the films, the television, the Second City stint - she’s also a vocal advocate for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and a seasoned performer of Eve Ensler’s iconic ode to every-women’s “down-there,” The Vagina Monologues. With a recent appearance at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival and an ongoing gig as a Canadian TV superstar, the  Canuck-of-all-trades checked in with Punchline Magazine to wax philosophic about performing, feminism, and dying with a bit of sushi on her plate.

So what stage of development is your career in right now?
I would describe it as…ongoing! I’m always working. I feel like I’m someone who has not been able to enjoy any kind of success, so I would say that professionally I’m doing everything that I want to be doing. And on a personal level, I’m trying to appreciate that. In the past, I used to think that I was never doing enough, and that’s what happens when you spend most of your life looking forward instead of living in the present. I feel like I’m trying to enjoy what I’m doing and what I’ve done, and I feel like that’s successful; it all depends on how you measure it.

There was a time where I was definitely living my life, thinking that I had to be incredibly successful, but then when that’s all I was doing, it felt like I was missing everything else. I neglected all my relationships, not just romantic relationships but even with friends. That was all I was doing; I moved to Los Angeles and since I didn’t know anyone there, I was thinking about my career. It’s not much if all you have is your professional success, right? It may seem like a lot, but in the end I was incredibly lonely and unhappy and working more than I had in my entire life; that wasn’t doing it for me.

So you’re taking a Devil Wears Prada approach - in that, like the heroine from the book, who became so career-focused she forgot who she was - to where your career is right now?
Sure, let’s go with that! [Laughs]. I think that you get smarter as you get older, and I’d like to think that I’m on par with some of my colleagues in the field right now.

How has your tenure with Second City affected the role that comedy plays in the outlook of your life?
I don’t know that it changed my outlook. I gained an appreciation for collaboration, which I hadn’t done much of before. It was an awesome experience to be a part of a gang or a troupe, so it was a great experience in that sense. In that type of comedy, you get to flex a completely different muscle, and in sketch work even more. When I do my stand-up, I tend to because, you know, I’m not very disciplined, I have to make every show interesting to me. I never try to find the perfect way of saying something and try to mess with the formula, but when you do sketch, it has to be done the same way, every night, but still keep[ing] it fresh every time.

It’s an incredible thing to watch people who are really good at it, too. I admire it whenever I see someone who works in a completely different style then me - Kathleen Madigan, for instance. She can do the same set several different times and it sounds like the first time, every single time. I would give anything to be able to do that.

Is Kathleen a friend of yours?
Yeah, yeah. Colleague for sure, yeah.

You’ve worked in both the writing and performing fields of comedy. Do you prefer one over the other?
There’s nothing like performing. It’s immediate gratification, and an immediate barometer of what you’re doing. So I love it; I don’t know that I could ever not do it. But writing is difficult for me; it’s something that I really labor at, and that’s almost why I like stand-up better, because I can’t agonize over the best way to convey an idea. It’s however it comes out, and…good luck. But with writing, like I said, it’s very laborious for me, but it’s immensely gratifying when I can finally walk away [from an idea].

That’s something I try to do every time I write something: learn when to walk away and accept that something’s good enough. I think it’s unhelpful to have an insane need or standard to perfect something, and I think that things at a certain point are great the way they are. I understand it intellectually, but I’m not able to do it that well.

What sorts of lessons have you learned from performing in The Vagina Monologues?
To be respectful of someone else’s writing. You really have to honor someone else’s work, and do the best job you can with it; do that very thing, and then do it again the next night, and make it seem fresh. I think that was a huge lesson to learn, and it was interesting the first time I did it. There was a span between the first and second times I did it. The second time doing the work I felt like I’d learned more about acting. It was almost from having that time in between, I felt like I was able to do it even better to my own standard, and I guess the director was quite happy with it. And that was unexpected. I didn’t think that I could improve. There’s a growing period an actor has that I never really as a stand-up. But [in The Vagina Monologues], where the material was actually consistent, I got to see some improvement, and that was pretty cool.

How do you prepare for each role?
Honestly, it’s not really something that I put a lot of thought into. I suppose I familiarize myself with the work and get to know whoever the director is; you sort of rely on them to steer you in the direction  …

The interview continues here …

Tags: canadian, comedy, elvira kurt, Lesbian, stand up