How Derek Seguin Rode the First Wave

The 50th Annual JUNO Awards will take place June 6, with various celebrations, online performances, and ceremonies throughout Juno Week. In its 50 year history, the Juno’s Comedy Album of the Year award has been presented only seven times. We caught up with the nominees for 2021 Comedy Album of the Year category, including Derek Seguin for his album PanDerek 1st Wave.

Congratulations on your Juno nomination. What does this recognition mean to you, and in Quebec, what do the Junos mean?

To me, it means everything. To me, I can't help but think this would be the highest honour available to us in Canadian comedy, so it's pretty fantastic. Sadly, I think in Quebec it doesn't mean as much, I think, that it does in the rest of Canada. Here in Quebec, we have a thing called The Olivier, which is, basically the equivalent of the Canadian Comedy Awards, but we all know that it doesn't carry a lot of weight, but the Olivier, it’s the awards for stand-up in Quebec. I think they got 3 million people watching that award show. It's a really big deal, but it's only for French stand-up and I'm not as famous in French as I am in English. But, I’ve got to take a Juno and I'm super, super happy about it. It's something that I'll have the rest of my life. Whether I win or not, I was nominated for a Juno, which is pretty big too.

When and where was your album recorded?

That's a great story. It was recorded on March 14, 2020 - the last day we did live shows. So I actually have another album just I'm waiting to release it. I'll probably release it in the next couple of months. I recorded both shows that night. The idea at the time was to splice them together at some point and edit it to make one really long CD. But then, when I realized, "I may never do stand-up again, maybe I'll save it. I'll save it and make two albums out of it." It was taped at the Yuk Yuk's in Ottawa.

What was your most memorable experience in recording and releasing this album?

That it was my very last show. In fact, both sets, I have the first few minutes of it because COVID-19 was so fresh and big and new, I was just riffing on the fact that, "What the hell is this? What it is this cough that's shutting everything down?"

So I got very lucky. It had been planned for months to tape the album that night and it just happened to fall on the very last night of live performing of any kind forever. 10 days later - just because I get irritable and I freak out a little bit if I don't do standup regularly – I did my first online show, these things I call 'PanDerek shows.' I did the first one on March 26 or something like that. My girlfriend looked around and she was like, "Derek I think you're the first comedian in Canada to do an online show, like a Zoom show." So I have that going my way too.

What advice do you have for other comedians who want to release a comedy album?

Well, first I would like to think that “make the material ready”, but that's not even good advice anymore. There's people that are very new, but they can get through 30 minutes and really do a good job. I think the best business advice is make sure you get it in the hands of Ben Miner or anybody at the SiriusXM. With the help of CASC, we were able to protect the playing of Canadian content, original content, our content, not just shows that Just For Laughs have recorded or whatever. So getting it in their hands and getting it at least considered to be played on the JFL Canada, SiriusXM station, it can be life-changing for people. It can generate thousands of dollars of revenue. So that's a huge deal, but I would also say it's relatively cheap to record it. If you record it and you're not happy with it, you're not happy with the chemistry that you had with the audience or whatever, I would say invest the couple hundred bucks to do it again and try to capture something that's really magical, that's something that you'll be proud of for years to come.

Which fellow Juno nominee, in the comedy or music categories, would you like to go on tour with and why?

Well, it's odd this year. I've been touring around the country for 15 years now and there's Shirley Gnome. I don't think I've ever even met her. Nick Nemeroff, I have met him once or twice and he's very shy, so I didn't get to know him very well. But I listened to a lot of that album and he's a very, very, very funny guy. So I guess being that Matt Wright is the guy that I know the best, he's actually stayed at my house for weeks at a time, and I've stayed at his house, so we're friends. He'd be a good guy to go on the road with. I already know how crabby he gets in the morning. We know that we can sync up at all hours of the day. He's a very, very funny guy and I'm lucky that I've known him since he started quite early. So I've been able to see the wonderful progression of his career to working at 22 Minutes. Actually, while he was staying at my house is when he was preparing his writing package for 22 Minutes and then he got the job and I was like, "Oh wow. This is so great." So I was able to watch this kid go from super enthusiastic new guy to now, a very accomplished, sells out big theatres in Newfoundland and everywhere, so Matt's a friend. So if I don't win it, call me a nepotist, but I'd like it to at least be at a house that I could see it in person.

Did you, or do you, have any mentors in the Canadian comedy scene?

I definitely did. I'll be honest, I've been so lucky since day one in this business. I was 31-years-old when I started, which is pretty old considering the nature of the business. So where I got lucky is that my contemporaries, socially speaking, were guys that had eight, nine, 10, 12 years experience. I got lucky in that I ended up becoming fast friends with people like Sugar Sammy, Steve Patterson, Joey Elias. These guys were immediately friends that we'd hang out. Then the question you asked, "Who would you be most comfortable to go on tour with?" Well, these guys would give me the tap to go open for them. Even though I was brand new, I had a car, they knew that I wouldn't fuck up and that I had kids to get back to. So these guys gave me opportunities way sooner in my career, I think, than a lot of people might get, so I was very, very fortunate.

David Acker is another guy. I actually went to high school with him, and then you show up and he's one of the top guys in the city, so I got very lucky. Mike Ward was another guy that really kind of scooped me along. So he got me exposed a lot more on the French side because when I started, I was doing any show. I was so hungry to possibly make a living out of it, that French, English, bilingual, say clean, dirty, whatever you needed me to do, I'm like, "Whatever you want. I'm just so thrilled that people are going to give me enough money to pay my bar tab to do this silly thing that I do” that I was willing to do any of it.

For that side, for mentors and people that helped me along early, I was very, very fortunate. I think I was two years in, Russell Peters asked me to do a show at Place des Arts, which is the big theatre in Montreal for this fundraiser for Al Gore. So I'm meeting David Suzuki and Al Gore hanging with Russell Peters. George Stroumboulopoulos and I are going shopping at the Canadiens souvenir shop. I was like, "What is happening. I've been doing dick jokes for less than two years and I'm meeting the royalty of Canadian show business?"

How have you been navigating the comedy scene since most shows moved online? Has your comedy changed as a result?

I don't know that it's changed my comedy. I think my sense of humour has stayed the same. It definitely was an adaptation. I'm lucky that I have a knack for being adaptable and I think, again, it comes back to when I was starting that I needed to do whatever I could, any circumstance, any way to generate money from dick jokes, because I have three kids to feed. So when I did the first online show, I thought, "Well, I probably won't be able to do stand-up for another few weeks. So let's just keep the muscles sharp. I enjoy doing this. Let's see what this could be like,". It was my mindset at the time because I ended up getting a ton of online corporate work. But I was very happy and lucky. I feel lucky that I was able to discover it as early on as I was to be able to continue doing this thing that I love to do.

I love stand-up comedy so much that I need it. It's like I said, if I go pre-pandemic, I think all of our mindset has changed and we've become a little bit more tempered. But if I would go two weeks without doing stand-up pre-pandemic, my children notice. They're like, "Geez, oh, dad hasn't been on stage in a while. He's a little bit crabby." I was very fortunate that I've been able to work steadily throughout the pandemic, both for that reason, for the love of stand-up, but also financially, I know that a lot of my peers and colleagues and friends, both in comedy and in music have not been as fortunate and it's been financially quite devastating and daunting. So as much as I could throughout this, I've tried to share my fortune a little bit, starting with that first show. The first show sold way more tickets and made way more money than I thought. So I was like, "I'm going to give some of this money away."

Which Canadian comedy album, besides yours, should readers check out?

You know what? I've listened to little tastes of it all because the internet is a wonderful thing. I can say that all four of the other nominated albums made me laugh out loud. You can listen, a lot of them are being featured regularly on JFL Canada on SiriusXM and every time one comes out, I'm like, "Yeah, I could see how this guy is nominated. This is very, very funny." On a personal level, like I said, off the top, if it's not going to be me, I would like it to be Matt Wright just because I have a deep affection for him and I love him, but everyone is equally deserving, I think.

Shirley has the benefit. First of all, she's the only woman and second of all, it's a different comedy style. The jury will have listened to all these submitted stand-up albums. So say there was 80 stand-up albums that they narrowed down to five. Shirley, at least, would've been in that. 60 hours of stand-up, you're like, "Oh God. I can't listen to another person talk," and then, "Oh, what's this, a song? I love this!"

I have a prediction. It’s not just because he's my friend, but there's been little hints that I think Matt Wright has already won. Obviously, the winners have been decided, they just haven't opened the envelope and released it. But this is a scoop for a Parton and Pearl. In April, they unveiled a giant billboard in Newfoundland saying, "Congratulations, Matt Wright, on your Juno nomination," near where Matt lives. Now, this is my CSI coming out. The original broadcast date for the Junos, for the prize winners or whatever, the award winner was supposed to be right around that time.

So in my head, the Juno had pre-booked these billboards around the country for all the winners, but then, because they had to postpone the show, they're like, “Tabarnak, we already bought all this media space, let's just use it to bring visibility to the show. So we'll just put “nominee” instead of “winner”, but we'll still put up the billboard." So that, and Matt did a show this weekend where he was performing the Juno-nominated album in its entirety and the Junos retweeted that. I did a show called PanDerek 10 last Friday. They didn't retweet me. You know what I mean? So I think the Junos are already trying to hook their trailer to who they know the winner is already. So I predict Matt Wright is going to win the Juno because of those two things. If I'm wrong, well, I will be wrong.

No, I'll tell you what, if Matt Wright doesn't win, I will commit to this. If Matt Wright doesn't win the Juno, I will donate $100 to a charity of your choice.