Comedian Lorne Elliott has never been great at sports and he isn’t afraid to admit it.
“My sports stories are all about personal failures in sports,” he said.“I don’t follow professional sports much at all, but I have a long history of being really lousy at any sport.”
On Sunday (Nov. 1), Elliott will be cracking jokes at the Port Theatre. He’ll be touching on topics such as the recent federal election, weather and of course, sports.
“I’ve got 40 years of material behind me. I’ve got this huge body of material that I can draw on,” he said. “The service that I am providing to the audience is selecting that lifetime of, hopefully, making people laugh, and shaping it into a show for Nanaimo.”
Elliott’s pathway into comedy began more than four decades ago when he started writing and singing.
“I’ve written stuff since I was like 15 years old and I don’t know where that started,” he said.
Elliott found himself performing as a folk singer-songwriter at various bars and venues, where he would crack the occasional joke.
“Being a singer-songwriter was the accepted form of self expression,” he said. “You could do it, you could get up there, write a few songs and the audience would fall in favour of them and you’d have a living.”
But by the 1980s, Elliott was discovering that “people weren’t listening to the songs, they were listening to the jokes.”
That’s when the Quebec native decided to focus more of his energy on comedy.
“It was a normal set of choices for survival for me to get into comedy,” he said. “I guess I must have some sort of a feeling for it. I have always appreciated comedy.”
Since then, Elliott has made a living as a comedian and musician.
Elliott’s performance Sunday at the Port is at 2:30 p.m. For ticket information, please visit www.porttheatre.com.
arts@nanaimobulletin.com