Avenue

Rolling with the Punches

By Lynda Sea
Photography By David Dean

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Punching cats, donairs, attention deficit disorder, Canadiana, penis jokes, his own celebrity — nothing is off limits for Calgary-raised comedian Ryan Belleville.

His hilarious tangents and say-anything exuberance catapulted him from the Loose Moose Theatre stage to stand-up shows around the world before he was 21.

Now 28, Belleville is flexing his comedic chops as an actor-comedian by way of his surrogate home in Los Angeles.

In February, he returned to Calgary for a one-night workshop. Belleville says that whenever he’s touring near Calgary, he always makes an effort to come back to the Loose Moose.

“When I get on stage here, it all comes back and I feel like I’m 17 and 18 again, coming by after school,” he says. “It’s just this huge spark of creativity and the idea that anything’s possible. Not just on the stage, but off the stage, too.”

Creativity is something Belleville knows a thing or two about. When he first hit the scene in the late ’90s, the buzz was immediate. He was the youngest comic in Canada to tape his own comedy special for The Comedy Network, he appeared on CBS’s The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn and was also recognized with the Phil Hartman Award for outstanding young comics in Canada in 2001.

In 2005, on the cusp of his third return to the Just for Laughs comedy festival, he received an offer from the Fox network to become a regular on its short-lived sitcom Life on a Stick, a show about a group of 20-somethings working at a hot-dog-on-a-stick joint in the mall.

“It was a real whirlwind,” Belleville says. “One minute you’re on a show, you feel like the king of the world thinking, ‘this is awesome,’ but then all of a sudden, it gets cancelled.”

After its premiere in March 2005, the show lasted five episodes before the network pulled the plug.

“You can never let yourself think it’s an easy ride,” says Belleville of the experience.

Although still pursuing acting — he’s been part of several TV movies since and his latest project is the family picture Finn on the Fly, out later this year — Belleville is currently taking his comedy act to stages across the United States. He says he enjoys performing in Canada, but that here, “there’s only so much you can do in a club, only so many cities you can go to, only so often you can go back.”

Much of his U.S. tour touches down in Midwest states in places such as Appleton, Flint and Livonia, but even in these lesser-known cities, Belleville is still getting the last laugh — in Livonia, oddly enough, he did it by reviving some old jokes about the CBC.

Despite being fully immersed in show business, Belleville seems to keep an arm’s length from the Hollywood hype. As he puts it, in Hollywood, everyone wants to be an actor — and not just any actor; they want to be stars.

“It’s a city that’s all caught up in capturing life and putting ‘real life’ on the screen that it almost becomes this weird offshoot of reality,” he says.

Staying grounded with a comedian’s sensibility and skepticism, Belleville attributes his level of commitment to his work and sense of play to the training he got at the Loose Moose. As a nod to his roots and improv’s emphasis on spontaneity, he even has the words “Don’t be prepared” tattooed on his arm.

“[Loose Moose] has such a great approach to comedy and performance. I hope it’s here for a thousand years,” Belleville says, then pauses. “Well, that would be kind of weird, ’cause then you’ll be playing for robots and they can’t laugh. Even if they do learn to laugh, you don’t want to hear, ‘Ha-ha-ha-beep-beep-I-enjoyed-your-humour’ — that would be strange.”

You know what he means.