A dead-serious chat with Kevin Blackmore about Buddy Wasisname, busting guts and being funny
Believe it or not, Kevin Blackmore never expected to make a living from making people laugh
Laughter has followed Kevin Blackmore over the years.
As titular front of Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers for the last 40 years, Blackmore has made a career of poking fun at the world around us.
Weekend AM's Heather Barrett reached Blackmore in Glovertown for a chat about the dead-serious business of being funny for a living — and how at the time he was preparing a talk earlier this week in Corner Brook.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did this talk come about?
A: When they opened up the Laughing Heart Musical Society at 62 Broadway in Corner Brook, they wanted me to come in and do a speaking segment on humour and music. But as for my availability, I couldn't. It was just a conflict of dates, but I said to them that I would gladly come in at a later date and do something more substantial than a 20-minute guest speaking spot. Because the subject of humour and music is too big. I've been making my livelihood from it my whole life. Humour and music has been my raison d'etre, my study, my expertise, if you will.
What do you want to present?
What I wanted to look back at was all the influences in my life which have led me to humour and music. YouTube is a wealth of these things. You can find everything there. So that's where I started.
And then I wanted to speak about how the various pieces and artists I'm going to talk about have influenced me. And then I wanted to speak extensively about how humour and music is both approached by various people, and also utilized by artists to get laughs. And then I wanted to speak about how humour has influenced people who are Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers fans. I have a bunch of letters and testaments from people from over the years, some of them very heart-rending. So that's the basis of what I want to do.
You and Buddy Wasisname are very different people. I find it hard to think of both of you in the same body, to be honest. I'm wondering, where does Buddy come from?
Buddy was never singular. Buddy was anything that I wanted to bend the character to. And, of course, having a funny man and two straight men in an act — like, that was just a good formula that worked for us. But years ago, before Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers, I accidentally slammed into Lorne Elliott. And he and I had three years of playing in a duo called Free Beer. That was never something I could have foreseen nor planned. It just sort of happened. But it was entirely insane and very much over the top, like two young fellows in their 20s are apt to be at. And that's where humour and music started really as a performance art for me.
But later, when I started with Ray and Wayne, we had very deliberate ideas about how we were going to approach it, and it was almost planned. The whole Buddy moniker was just something that occurred to me one day when I was driving, the idea of Buddy Wasisname being its own sort of paradox. By forgetting my name, you would automatically reach for something that made you remember.
What do you get out of being Buddy?
I got a livelihood. I've really enjoyed it. I find an interesting artistry in it. I love the humour.
But to have made my life in an obscure corner of comedy is kind of a beautiful thing. I never, ever thought I was going to do that. I had seven different trades and trainings and professions before I even went at this, trying one thing after another.
It's serendipity, I suppose. These things land in your lap and you're not able to escape from them. These are orbits into which you're sucked. More like black holes rather than something you're trying to achieve. I could never achieve this on my own, and it never would have happened without Ray and Wayne. And the accident that the three of us ended up in the same town was serendipitous in itself.
Creatively, what do you get out of being Buddy?
The ability to compose, not just musically but comically, and the ability to perform in front of people and make people enjoy it. Those are the biggest things.
Why do you think comedy is so important for us?
That touches on something I wanted to speak to. The ability of people to find paradox, joy, fun, ridicule and especially self-deprecation is a very important part of development as a human being. It can't be overstated the effects of infusing humour into something which makes others laugh. Those things are all very important and sadly, we don't see as much of it as used to exist. Broadband media in everybody's pocket has diluted the effects of high-quality comedy rather than accentuating it. It's given us more availability, but it's also diluted it. Especially with recordings of music.
Gone are the days when novelty songs were an accepted format and you expected to hear one on every hit parade. Those were the days that I came out of, the '50s, '60s, '70s. It's a little torch I carry, that it's hugely important in everybody's life to be able to laugh and make fun of oneself and to find beauty and humour around you.
You need the purveyors of these things, people like me, to bring them forth and thrust them at you or else it becomes a pretty humdrum life.
What makes you laugh these days?
My wife, mostly, or my daughters. I've got three of them. I generally find around me lots of little things which tickle me. When I was doing a lot of this research for this, I've made a lot of really fun discoveries. And who knew that YouTube would be such an incredible reservoir of the most complete repository of all this stuff that's ever been recorded, in the order of three million videos being loaded in there daily. An extraordinary number of things that you never would have seen without it. Recordings of The Nitwits or Leslie Sarony, old British Music Hall or American Music Hall stuff.
I find myself laughing at a lot of that. I find it very, very refreshing all over again. I generally do find myself getting tickled by everything around me. I look around and I see things which make me chuckle all the time. You have to foster a sense of humour, too. I'm not sure if it's innate or not.
I know some people find things funny and and other people find those same things very dreary or droll or boring.
And maybe humour needs to be fostered in people. Just maybe.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Melissa Tobin and Weekend AM
