So an accountant and a chiropractor stroll right into a comedy membership

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Ottawa Jewish Comedy Competition
When: Tuesday, March 21, 8 p.m.
The place: ByTowne Cinema, 325 Rideau St.
Tickets: $37.61 together with charges and taxes at jewishcomedyfestival.com or eventbrite.ca

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Cease me if you happen to’ve heard this one. A chiropractor and an accountant stroll right into a comedy membership. The chiropractor cracks them up. The accountant tallies up some laughs.

OK, I gained’t stop my day job, and neither will Michael Friedman or Michael Lifshitz. However among the many grains of fact within the ostensible gag above is the truth that Friedman, an Ottawa chiropractor, and Lifshitz, an Ottawa accountant turned entrepreneur, can be on the invoice at Tuesday’s Ottawa Jewish Comedy Competition.

On the one-night occasion on the ByTowne Cinema, the headliner can be Sheba Mason, daughter of comic Jackie Mason. However Lifshitz and Friedman can be amongst seven comedians previous her. Every Michael can have an eight-minute spot to fill.

Exterior of their careers, each Michaels every have been doing stand-up units for at the least a decade, performing a number of instances every month at Ottawa comedy haunts and past. Friedman, 52, has carried out at golf equipment in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Kingston. Lifshitz has carried out on the Ottawa Fringe Competition and eventually yr’s Canadian North Arctic Comedy Competition in Iqaluit.

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“When individuals are laughing, there’s a excessive to it,” Friedman says. “I’m positive there’s some dopamine launched… while you’re having a very good set, time is slowing down and also you’re within the zone.”

Friedman says he was fascinated by comedy since he was rising up within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties in Toronto, seeing films like Airplane! and committing its script to reminiscence, or tuning in to TV reveals akin to SCTV and Saturday Night time Stay.

“I bear in mind watching standup on TV and anticipating the punchlines,” he says. “Typically I used to be proper, generally I used to be flawed. Typically I believed mine was higher.”

However Friedman says it might take a few years for him to work up the braveness to inform jokes for audiences. “I couldn’t have carried out it in my teenagers or 20s. I used to be mortified about getting up on stage,” he says. One measure that he says helped embolden him was becoming a member of Toastmasters Worldwide some years in the past, which eased him into public talking.

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Lifshitz, a Montreal native, had fewer worries when he fell fairly casually into doing standup about 15 years in the past.

“Like many comics, I misplaced a guess and I needed to do an open mic night time,” he says. “I did an open mic night time and simply fell in love with it.”

Friedman says that he additionally began doing comedy to have an “outlet for sarcasm and smart-assedness,” which he has to maintain in test whereas working on the Again in Steadiness clinic in Westboro.

He provides that telling jokes, like being a chiropractor, is therapeutic. “Laughter is the most effective drugs,” says Friedman, earlier than quipping that seeing him carry out just isn’t coated by OHIP.

However critically, Friedman says he was coping with despair when he began doing comedy in the past, and the brand new sideline helped. “Getting laughs helps vanity,” Friedman says.

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Lifshitz was born with a situation known as a number of congenital musculoskeletal abnormalities. Due to it, he wears a man-made leg and makes use of a cane or a wheelchair to get round. A lot of his comedy, he says, is predicated on his situation.

In life, Lifshitz says, “You possibly can both be the good one or the humorous one or the athletic one.” Being athletic was “off the desk,” he says, and regardless of his MBA from the Edinburgh Enterprise College, he downplays his intelligence. “That sort of left me with being the humorous one,” Lifshitz says.

Friedman admits his gags have been initially off-colour. “Once you’re making an attempt to get began, your writing just isn’t as polished. There’s a tendency to go soiled. I used to be fairly soiled to start out,” he says. Now, his humour is commonly self-deprecating, with plenty of sarcasm and absurd observations, he says.

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“I like comedy that challenges you and calls out stupidity and hypocrisy. I don’t suppose I’m assured sufficient in my jokes to do this, however I’m engaged on that,” he says.

“That, and an excellent d — joke.”

Friedman says there’s a historic custom of Jewish comedy that’s borne out of collective struggling as a approach of coping. He says he normally doesn’t do plenty of materials associated to being Jewish, however he’ll add just a few traces Tuesday night time.

Lifshitz says he grew up immersed within the Jewish neighborhood inside Côte Saint-Luc, a west-end Montreal municipality. He was introduced up in a Jewish family and went by means of the Jewish faculty system. It was solely after leaving highschool that he made associates with individuals of different backgrounds, he says.

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“Each comic does what they know and what their background is,” Lifshitz says. “Jewish materials doesn’t essentially come into my act, however I do have the odd joke. I’ll up the Jewish content material for Jewish audiences.”

Each Michaels say they look ahead to taking within the work of their friends.

“I hope that I’m early within the lineup,” says Livshits. “The enjoyable half is when your half’s carried out and you’ll calm down and simply take pleasure in the remainder of the present and chortle with the viewers.”

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