Episode: 38

Dean Jenkinson

Transcript

Toban Dyck  00:03

This is The Extensionists. Conversations with great thinkers in agriculture. I’m Toban Dyck.

Jay Whetter  00:08

And I’m Jay Whetter. Hey, Toban.

Toban Dyck  00:14

Hey, Jay.

Jay Whetter  00:15

How’s it going?

Toban Dyck  00:16

Good. Good.

Jay Whetter  00:18

How are you feeling this bright early morning with the podcasting?

Toban Dyck  00:22

Yeah, I’m feeling great. I mean, I love them. I love the early mornings. Yeah, I’m sure after lunch, no, yeah, everything’s down.

Jay Whetter  00:30

Morning is better.

Toban Dyck  00:31

You Know.

Jay Whetter  00:31

But this is probably the earliest we’ve recorded. It’s started at eight.

Toban Dyck  00:35

That’s true, 

Toban Dyck  00:36

Which again isn’t super early, especially during seating season,

Toban Dyck  00:38

Bu,t we got to have a sleepover. So, Jay Jay spent the night at the farm last night, so that was fun. That was fun. We should, we should have recorded something last night.

Jay Whetter  00:50

So, we Toban has a hot tub, so he sat in the hot tub and had a drink and talked about our families and who was the funny one, and had an idea for a podcast for next year.

Toban Dyck  01:01

That’s right, we did, we did. What was it?

Jay Whetter  01:03

Can we share that? Yeah, we can, having our fathers on.

Toban Dyck  01:05

Oh, yes, we did. But then we also said we’re gonna have our mothers on too, and we talked about that. So let it.. it’s now out there in the other race, 

Jay Whetter  01:13

So it’s got to happen. 

Toban Dyck  01:14

It’s happening. I think I think that’ll be good.

Jay Whetter  01:16

Who is the influence on your funniness?

Toban Dyck  01:20

Do you think I’m funny, Jay?

Jay Whetter  01:21

Yeah, well sometimes,

Toban Dyck  01:23

Sometimes, yeah, I can be. So, but this is a good question. So, comedy, like, I feel like I’m funniest when I’m

Jay Whetter  01:31

Drunk.

Toban Dyck  01:32

No, maybe

Jay Whetter  01:33

Tired,

Toban Dyck  01:34

But no, but like when I’m comfortable.

Jay Whetter  01:37

Oh, okay.

Toban Dyck  01:38

Like when I, when I’m super comfortable, and I can be aware of my, like, I can take myself out of, like, I’m sitting here right now, and I can actually just have the confidence and comfortability, or comfort, and just to kind of take myself away, and like, look at myself sitting on this couch right now, and then I can, then I can kind of maneuver things, and I can get the pace right, and get the delivery exactly how I want it, and if I can do that, I feel I can be funny, and then I know that I’m funny too, instead of being accidentally funny.

Jay Whetter  02:10

Right. Well, I think what people don’t realize is that comedy, for the most part, it requires a lot of practice.

Toban Dyck  02:17

I think so much.

Jay Whetter  02:18

like, not very well, I shouldn’t say not very many people are naturally funny, of course they are, and we all like to laugh, and it’s good for our souls, but like to when people don’t just get up on stage and start rattling off jokes, and their timing is perfect, and everything else, they, they practice, practice, practice. Yes, it’s there’s a really good, I would say, a public speaking kind of lesson in that.

Toban Dyck  02:39

Absolutely, absolutely, I think, yeah, I do think they’re the, they’re some of the best communicators, because you kind of, you just have to be, and it’s all, it’s all you up there, and it’s all kind of your own material, and yeah, I feel like Ag Extension, I mean, I has so could, could learn so much from that, yeah, and I mean, I say that, like, ag extension exists outside of this, this other thing I’m thinking I’m going to learn so much, right? Like, I want to, I want to learn about how to, how to do things better, and practice, and, and I think, I think I read a lot about practice, because it’s one of those things where I feel like I should do it more, so that’s why I tell people it’s so important.

Jay Whetter  03:24

Yeah.

Toban Dyck  03:24

You know, it’s one of those things where it’s like,

Jay Whetter  03:27

Well, I like, I like it, it’s your, it’s your,

Toban Dyck  03:29

My buzzword,

Jay Whetter  03:30

Your trophy, yeah, which I think there’s.. I really, and so I often throw to you when I mention reference practice.

Toban Dyck  03:37

Yes, you do. Yeah,

Jay Whetter  03:37

But just because I know you like talking about it, but I.. but I totally agree with you, like it’s.. I’m not, I’m not making fun at all. I actually, I like, I like that suggestion that good communication requires practice. I think that is, that is key and essential,

Toban Dyck  03:52

And I fully like it, is because I know I want to do it more, and I know that it’d be.. I’d be better at it if I did it more, right? If I think of, like, writing, speaking, these are things that, that are part of my day-to-day, and yours too, that I know that if I go, like, you know, dude, should I take a Toastmasters course, or should I, you know, you’ve done some writing clinics in the past, I think about, you know, about that, and I think I tell people to do it, because I know that I should do it more, which is kind of unfair, but also just a little bit telling. Yeah, anyway.

Jay Whetter  04:26

I just like the idea of getting up and telling jokes makes me really nervous, because I don’t want them to be terrible, but at the same time I think, well, maybe that’s actually a good reason to do it.

Toban Dyck  04:40

Yeah.

Jay Whetter  04:41

Is that work on a couple of jokes, sort of warm up the audience with, with some interesting kind of funny stories. I think it’s good training from a communications perspective. I feel like I need to try it out.

Toban Dyck  04:54

Yeah, yeah,

Jay Whetter  04:55

Yeah.

Toban Dyck  04:56

Well, let’s get into it.

Jay Whetter  04:57

Yeah. Do you like what you’re hearing, and what. Support The Extensionists. If you are an agriculture company or association looking for a powerful way to get your message in front of Canadian farmers, then partner with us. Our listeners are farmers from coast to coast.

Toban Dyck  05:11

When you advertise with us, your brand isn’t just another commercial break, it becomes part of our story. Ads on the extensionists are personal and trusted. Our listeners value what they hear on the podcast.

Jay Whetter  05:23

Whether you’re looking for a 60-second ad somewhere throughout the podcast or even an exclusive episode sponsorship. We have options that will work for you.

Toban Dyck  05:32

So, if you’re ready to get your message out there and connect with farmers across Canada, let’s talk. Visit theextensionists.com for more information.

Jay Whetter  05:42

Welcome to the podcast. Our guest today is Dean Jenkinson, and Dean is a comedian, well-known Canadian comedian, and did a lot of work with CBC over the years, and so you might know him from there, and he’s also now artistic director of the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, which has been going on for, I think, it just had its 25th year, and Dean, you’ve probably been involved for all of those years, and now is you now the artistic director. Welcome.

Dean Jenkinson  06:18

Thank you very much for having me. Pleasure.

Jay Whetter  06:21

Right on. So, so, Toban, what were you gonna say?

Toban Dyck  06:23

Well, just before you clapped and got this podcast going, you were talking about kind of comedy, and you said, you said, you know, why, you know, talking about me and my love of practice and all this, all this kind of stuff. But long time ago, we had a, we had a podcast guest, he’s an MLA in Winnipeg, Diljit Brar, and he talked about, he talked about, we were talking about agricultural extension, which is basically just a communications, it’s an, it’s a extension, is a term that the ag community is kind of adopted and made into like research communications, extending research to farmers, essentially, and he often talked about, like, how we’re, we’re, we’re not creative enough with our extension, like, we could do, and he’s often said we could do, like, singer songwriter, like, we could get a research up there playing guitar and doing a singer-songwriter, writing songs about weeds in wheat, and I think, I think he, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think he even said comedy. I thought, how fun would it be to go up there, go to Ag Days in Brandon, and have a stand-up routine around like, like Sclerotinia, or like some sort of really specific disease in a crop. Anyway, I just want, here’s an idea, here’s an idea, Dean, for your next time.

Dean Jenkinson  07:42

I’ve got, I’ve got so much on Sclerotinia,

Jay Whetter  07:46

So much material. He’s never had a chance to use.

Dean Jenkinson  07:49

That’s right, it doesn’t go over terribly well. The normal audience, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

Jay Whetter  07:55

Yeah, so, Dean, you, you’ve got a couple of teenagers, did they do they find you funny? Yeah, this is a good, this is a good question.

Dean Jenkinson  08:06

No, I think they find you about as funny as any teenager finds their parents. So, no, but you know, I also lean into doing what dads do, which is trying to make them groan and roll their eyes. So,

Jay Whetter  08:18

Yeah,

Dean Jenkinson  08:19

It’s all, you know, we all play our parts in the house.

Jay Whetter  08:22

Are they funny? Have they have they picked up on the family business?

Dean Jenkinson  08:28

I mean, they’re funny in their own way as people, but I don’t think any of them have the bug. My, my, what is she now? 16 year old daughter, Kara, she’s into musical theater at Grant Park, so she likes to be on stage and perform, but no, I don’t think she has aspirations to go do five minutes at an open mic when she turns 18.

Jay Whetter  08:48

Well, should we all do that? Is that, should we have that aspiration?

Dean Jenkinson  08:53

That’s a good.. I’ve got a buddy who I sing with on Wednesday nights, part of a group neighboruhood like a cappella course, and he’s decided when he turns 65 that’s when he’s gonna go do his first open mic stand-up comedy thing, and he’s like, it’s a real milestone for him, so maybe, maybe we should all say, hey, you know, on this date I’m going to get up in front of a bunch of strangers and tell them a few jokes and see if it’s for me.

Toban Dyck  09:18

Can you talk about that time, like the first time you did it.

Dean Jenkinson  09:21

I was in university. I was like a year and a half out of high school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was a good student. I was like, I was like a nerd, like almost top of the class. I went to IB at Silver Heights, and you know, I was good at math and science, and I was good at English and history, and I didn’t have any kind of clue what I wanted to do career wise or what I wanted to study in university, and I saw architecture and said, well, that’s kind of creative, and it’s kind of math and science, and it’s kind of engineering. Hearing it’s got a little bit of everything, maybe I’d, I’d like that, and a year and a half in, I was like, I don’t have any particular talent for this, and I see people in my classes who do, and they’re going to be great architects, and that’s not me, and I’m just like trying to find, I’m just trying to like copy ideas, there was there was nothing up here that said architecture is is for you, so I had no particular challenge or passion for it, and I was flipping pizzas at Sbarro’s at Bolo Park as a summer job, and when it was down and we’d be just, you know, shooting the breeze, I was the guy who would make people laugh from time to time.

Jay Whetter  10:39

Right on.

Dean Jenkinson  10:40

and somebody said, “You should go do the open mic night at Yuck Yucks, and you’re 19 and full of, you know, stupidity, you’re young and dumb and full of bravery, you got no fear, and I’m like, yeah, I should go do the open mic at Yuk Yux, and so I signed up, and I did, and I made a little poster, and I put it up in the break room, and said, “Hey, this night, yuck, yucks, come on down and see me do comedy, and everybody came, and people from school came, and the first night was like great, because I had all these people there to support me, and I was all full of bravado, and I prepared my five minutes, and it like went over really well, so much so that like the headliner kept like calling back to me and my thing, because he thought it was hilarious that I thought I had crushed the room when all I had done is make my friends laugh, right? And and it wasn’t, it wasn’t till like the third time I got on stage that I was like, oh, this is, it doesn’t go great every time, does it? Like, this is this kind of bombed, I kind of bombed my third time out, and then you sort of, you know, keep doing it, and you find, yes, some nights are going to do really well, some nights they’ll do six out of 10, and some nights you can’t buy a laugh to save your life, and you feel like I’ve never been funny, and I’ll never be funny again, and what am I doing? But yeah, that was my first time, it was yucky, acts in Osborne Village, 1990 I think and I can’t

Jay Whetter  12:04

Yeah, yeah, so you and I are pretty much exactly the same age, but so what did you tell jokes like, like someone else’s jokes, or did you write your own material, did you tell a st

Dean Jenkinson  12:17

My own little five minutes, I think it was like I think some of it was about like movie sequels. They were like a bunch of movie sequels out that summer, and I was, you know, on the cutting edge of telling people these are just, you know, remakes of things, and they’re silly, and there’s Die Hard, and then there’s Die Harder, and what’s next, Die Hardest. Oh my gosh, and I think I did some, I did some like bad celebrity impressions and stuff, and yeah, it was amazing. It was a thing.

Toban Dyck  12:49

So, what is what is studying for a routine or stand-up routine look like? Rick, what is what does research look like from you, from your perspective?

Dean Jenkinson  12:59

I mean, everybody’s got their own process, and I think the process is always kind of fluid, unless you’re somebody who’s very, like, you know, locked into this is how I do it, but I think in general, you know, you just try to have your antenna up, and when something funny happens, or you think of something funny, or an idea strikes you as interesting, you know, jot it down, and then come back to it, and think about it, and think about what your angle is on it, or how you want to present it to an audience, and you know, whether you want to come at it straightforward or come at it from the side, and, and you know, you can sit and actually write, or you can sort of just sort of talk it through, so that you’re saying it the way you would actually say it, rather than, you know, a lot of the comics I admire are ones who, you know, the joke wording is very precise. There’s a comic out in Vancouver named Jacob Samuel, and he won a Juno Award for his album Horsepower, and I saw an interview with Jacob, who I, who’s, you know, joke writing I really admire, and they were asking him, like, you’re very specific about the words, right? You don’t deliver a joke differently from night to night based on just sort of how it comes out of your mouth, and he said, you know, I appreciate that, and that actually comes from a weakness, which is I can’t ad lib at all, like if I stray from my script, I’m going to like screw it up, so I write it down the way I want it, and then I deliver it exactly the way I’ve written it down, and I keep that going from night to night, and it totally works. I really admire that, and some of the time I can be that way, and some of the time I’m more somebody who says, well, I kind of know what I want to say, but I might not say it exactly the same way each night.

Toban Dyck  14:40

That’s yeah, yeah, that’s super fascinating. I, in my head, it’s like I feel like I would find it very hard to be present when I knew the crowd wasn’t with me, like, you know, yeah, I’ve spoken, and Jane and I both have spoken a lot, never done anything remotely close to comedy, but. To like it’s hard, like I feel like it’s disruptive, and then I find like I don’t even have access to my memory, and it just, I guess, really difficult to ad lib in those situations. So, I imagine, yeah, maybe walk us through a scenario, or talk a little bit about that, because I imagine you have to be good at that.

Dean Jenkinson  15:18

Yeah, well, I mean, what you’re identifying, I think everybody can relate to. I can relate to it. Where you’re on stage and you’re like nothing’s getting through, nothing’s landing. I feel like I’m speaking a different language. Everybody’s looking at me like, what do you, who is this, and what is he doing up there, and what is he talking about? And it’s a very like, it’s like nightmare fuel, right? It’s like, oh, I had a dream like this, where you’re on stage and it feels like everybody in the crowd speaks a different language than you, and they’re all on the same page, going, we don’t like this, and we really wish you would stop. 

Jay Whetter  15:55

Is that when you talk to farmers? Is that your small town experience?

Dean Jenkinson  16:00

I mean, it’s.. it happens everywhere, it happens everywhere from time to time, and it’s very hard in those moments to even.. like, it kind of feels out of body, where you’re just like watching this train wreck, and you’re like, oh, that poor guy up there talking away..

Jay Whetter  16:20

Well, so. so, is there a way out of that, or once you’re locked into that with an audience, it’s really hard to get it back, and you just like talk through to the end of the set.

Toban Dyck  16:29

You know you have extra amount of minutes to kill, and

Dean Jenkinson  16:32

Yeah, I mean, there’s there’s a variety of, you know, things you can try, like I’ve seen comics pull out of a skid just by staying the course and not getting flustered and not commenting on the fact that this is not going well, but sometimes you can break the spell by just acknowledging this isn’t working, and then you’ve said something true and honest that they can connect to and grab onto and say, okay, this guy’s not an idiot, he’s not crazy, we’re not crazy, yeah, right, every what we thought was going on, he thinks is going on too, and then you can kind of reset with them and start from a little bit of common ground, where you just acknowledge that it’s not going well, but it’s a risky thing to do, because if you acknowledge it and nothing improves, then you’re all just sitting there talking about how, yeah, how awful it is, and the other thing that can happen is, you know, when a comic gets on stage and you’ve been on stage a bazillion times, you can be having a good show. It’s not an amazing show when you’re not like crushing it. It’s not like the best show you’ve ever done, but in your brain you’re kind of comparing it to the best show you’ve ever done, right? That’s the bar that you’re trying to reach, so you know, when you throw out a joke that kind of works nine out of 10 most of the time, and it gets a six out of 10. If you comment on how that joke didn’t do well, as far as the audience knows, that joke did fine. We laughed. What were you looking for? What were you looking for? And now it’s weird, because what is he talking about that he’s making? He’s making a comment on the fact that we didn’t like that, but we like that just fine. So now you’re again, you’re right, so you got to be careful not to like sink yourself by saying, oh yeah, that didn’t go over.

Jay Whetter  18:14

Yeah, the audience, who is probably well, I’m just thinking of a small town audience, they all know each other, they know what’s landing and what’s not, and what what isn’t, but you assume that it’s not landing. Meanwhile, they probably laughed harder than they’ve ever laughed in their whole lives, but they’re just, they’re bars, and there’s

Dean Jenkinson  18:28

And there’s lots of idea, yeah, and there’s lots of audiences that aren’t going to be terribly vocal, but they’re, they’re smiling, and they’re enjoying it, and you see their like chin go up every once in a while, little acknowledgement, but yeah, so you always just have to sort of put yourself in their shoes and try to imagine what are they thinking of this right now, because you don’t want to be assuming anything that could be like grossly wrong, because you’re going to just bring water into the boat.

Jay Whetter  18:56

My, my uncle’s girlfriend, let’s say, she went to Sloan,

Dean Jenkinson  19:04

Let’s say, like this fictional person describing the relationship label.

Jay Whetter  19:13

The only thing I’m getting at is that my uncle’s 80, so I don’t know when you stop saying girlfriend, you know when you’re 

Dean Jenkinson  19:20

Right, right, 

Toban Dyck  19:20

Okay, okay, okay.

Jay Whetter  19:22

Woman friend

Dean Jenkinson  19:22

Sweetheart,

Toban Dyck  19:23

Thank you for clarifying

Dean Jenkinson  19:24

His lady friend.

Toban Dyck  19:26

Yeah. 

Jay Whetter  19:26

Anyway, she went to Sloan in Brandon, the band Sloan played in the Westman Centenary Centennial Auditorium in Brandon a couple months ago, but they had it was a make good show because they had canceled during the winter a year ago, or so, anyway, so, but the audience was just dead. She said it was embarrassing how quiet they were. And so Chris Murphy from Sloan gets up and said, “Yeah, so we didn’t show up the first time, and you guys didn’t show up. You guys didn’t show up this time. 

Toban Dyck  19:56

Have you ever done that? Yeah,

Dean Jenkinson  19:57

It reminds me of there was a. Kind of famous at the time, interview with Joaquin Phoenix on David Letterman. Oh, I remember that came out, and he’s like, just wasn’t like he would give like these little grunt kind of an answers. And during the break, one of the writers gave Dave a line that he closed the interview with, which was, well, Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t join us tonight.

Toban Dyck  20:19

Yeah, 

Jay Whetter  20:19

That’s perfect. 

Toban Dyck  20:21

I remember that.

Dean Jenkinson  20:24

Yeah, I mean, it’s.. it’s.. yeah, it’s a strange.. like, sometimes you can tease a crowd and they’ll.. they’ll enjoy it, and sometimes you tease a crowd and they’re like, ‘No, we’re not.. we’re not into that. And as an audience member, I’m never.. I don’t.. I don’t really respond well when a comic or a music artist is going, come on, you guys, you can do better than that. I’m like, we’re not the ones who were performing, right? We’re like, and I don’t like when comics are like, you know, so I’ll tell you some autobiographical fact. So just, I don’t know, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, like, pick a bad example, but, like, I’m dating now, and then there’s, like, you know, the crowd is waiting for the next sentence, and they’re going, that’s the appropriate response, right? Yeah, you guys didn’t like that, or whatever, you know, and you’re just like, no, we’re not, we didn’t, we didn’t offer any opinion, we’re just waiting for,

Toban Dyck  21:19

yeah,

Dean Jenkinson  21:20

to do the next thing, right? So,

Jay Whetter  21:22

Funny part,

Dean Jenkinson  21:22

Don’t tell us what, don’t tell us what we’re thinking, right? Yeah, we’re just thinking, keep it going.

Jay Whetter  21:27

Yeah, well, so we did. You get enough on the practice?

Toban Dyck  21:34

Yeah, I’ll come back to it.

Jay Whetter  21:36

So, there’s a few things

Dean Jenkinson  21:37

I don’t even know if I answered the question.

Toban Dyck  21:39

Don’t tell me what to do today.

Jay Whetter  21:40

Practice. practicing telling you what to do

Toban Dyck  21:43

Exactly.

Jay Whetter  21:45

So I want to talk about just the art of public speaking, because the last guest we had was a guy named Owen Roberts, who actually teaches communications at the University of Guelph, or he did for a long time, and he taught, we were saying, like, what, what, what are some practices that people should think about it with communication, and he feels like we’ve lost the art of public speaking, and so, as a comedian, you mean you, you are actually public speaking, you know, you’re not, again, I’m delivering a speech, but, like, is there, are there public speaking skills that, like, comedy skills that, that you would recommend any, any, anyone doing a presentation somehow incorporate, is that a risk, or is that something people really should be doing, trying to be funny?

Dean Jenkinson  22:31

I mean, I think if you can tap into using humour in whatever you’re doing, I think there are lots of advantages to it, but there’s obviously a lot of, you know, minds you can step on if you’re thinking, oh, I’m going to make my work presentation funny, you know, it’s kind of, you’ve kind of increased the risk reward ratio, right, it’s higher risk and potentially higher reward, play it safe and just deliver it straight, or you can be like, I’m going to do a joke off the top, and then you know, or I’m going to try to, you know, make some funny asides and some funny comments, but you know, I think there are definitely ways. There’s there’s a great comic out on the East Coast named Peter White that we’ve had to the Winnipeg Comedy Festival a number of times, and he wrote a book about using humor in your everyday life, and like a good friend and companion and coworker, I ordered a book, and I’ve yet to read it, but Peter White has a book on using humor in your workplace and your everyday life. I think, as far as you know, public speaking skills and practicing, I mean, you can. I just did it. You heard it. I do a lot of ums and stuff, but don’t do that. Don’t do that. I’m still bad at that. I still do that aren’t strategic in comedy timing or anything else. They’re just lazy placeholders. I think the best advice that comics get is record yourself, record yourself, and listen back and be horrified by all of your bad habits that you have that you maybe don’t even know you have, but you know, slow down, and good advice that I got early that I pass along, whenever anybody says, ‘Do you have any advice for me? I just say, like, don’t go on stage like thinking about trying to get the laugh, go on stage, thinking about trying to relate what it is you’re trying to say, right, trying to connect them to what you’re trying to say, and, and not like race through the setup to get to the punch line, because that’s that’s the part you want to land, right, it’s only going to land if you make everything else land, so take your time, slow down, and have in your mind I want to say this thing, this thing that I want to say. I want to make them understand what it is, and to understand what my perspective on it is, and understand how I feel about it, and to communicate that both in the choice of words that I use and in the way I say it, and the emotion that I convey, um. And sometimes you do that by right, if you want to communicate that you’re mad about it, you let that be there. Sometimes you want to communicate you’re mad about it, you take the backdoor route, and the punchline reveals that you’re mad about it. You don’t give that away up front, but you know, just to be intentional about what you’re doing, I guess.

Jay Whetter  25:16

Well, that’s that makes me think about, you know, coming into being being a comedian with something to say, or something like, you, you’re not just up there telling jokes, but you actually have an opinion about what’s going on in the world, and you use comedy to send that message, like I’m just thinking about, like, agriculture extension, like they’re always trying to send a message to say farmers about how to do a practice differently or new way, and I was thinking, yeah, so you’re approaching, so maybe that isn’t your, like, do you, with your comedy, are you trying to share an opinion about the world? 

Toban Dyck  25:53

Yeah.

Dean Jenkinson  25:54

Not necessarily, and you know, when I say, when I, you know, say what I say about communicating what you want to say to the audience. It doesn’t even have to be like I think this is bad or I think these right. It doesn’t have to be a take on the world or a commentary on the world, but just whatever the joke is, whatever the story you’re telling them, whatever the ride is, like make sure you get that across to them. Like I think about there’s a great comic in Toronto named Todd Graham, and it’s all very short, absurd one-liners, and so it’s not necessarily a take on the world, but in order for the jokes to land, he has to make sure that he takes you on the story, takes you and does the reversal in the punchline that you will land like a great Todd Graham joke, because he says, “I was walking by my neighbour’s house the other day and I smelled toast, and I was like, ‘Oh, I hope nobody’s having a stroke in there. So,

Jay Whetter  26:54

Yeah, so what do you think of your routines over the years? Like, do you have jokes that you go back to every time, and could you, would you be up for sharing one? I know it’s early in the morning today.

Dean Jenkinson  27:09

I think a joke that I’ve been doing, like for forever in a day, and it reveals itself to me how long I’ve been doing it, is because I say my dad just got bifocals, so my dad probably would have gotten bifocals 25 years ago. Now I’m a 55 year old guy, and my dad’s in his 80s, and so when I say my dad just got bifocals, I’m like, that’s.. I don’t even know how credible that is. So I.. so I’ve changed,

Jay Whetter  27:37

Yeah.

Dean Jenkinson  27:38

But, but the joke is, it’s just. it’s just a slightly disguised d*ck joke, which is, my dad just got bifocals, so you know, you lift the head, you look at the words on the page, it jumps right at you, he loves them, but the other day gives me an elbow, and he says, “Now, now your mom’s breasts look huge, and I’m like, “That’s not a bonding moment, father and son. And then, and then the little tag is, “Now my mom wants bifocals, so I’ve been doing that joke forever and a day, and it used to be about a, you know, a 60 year old guy knows about an 80 year old guy,

Jay Whetter  28:16

And now my mom wants bifocals,

Toban Dyck  28:19

So the 

Dean Jenkinson  28:20

She doesn’t even need for those of you who don’t get the joke,

Toban Dyck  28:24

So, do you? Do you? I’m gonna go back to practice. Do you practice, which is, I think, a dumb question, because I feel like you probably do, although you can, you can answer to the contrary. What does that look like for you? Do you try to kind of get, you try to kind of get the words down, like you, you do, you practice in front of a mirror, do you record yourself and listen back, and like,

Dean Jenkinson  28:48

Yeah, I mean, I think for most comics practicing is like you get a sense of what you think, how the joke will go, and then you get on stage and you say it in front of a crowd, and you may, in the telling of it, sort of intuitively or instinctively say a little different, because maybe you wrote it down on a pad and paper, you typed it out on your laptop, and you said it the way you write and not the way you speak, so you might change it into the way you speak, you know, on stage, and then you know most comics have a phone, and you know, I see a lot of comics will like set up a tripod, and they’ll just film it on their phone, and they might post it online, or they might not. It might just be for them, but you know, you watch it back, or you listen back, and you listen to how you did it, and you listen to what works and what don’t, what didn’t work, and you think about how you might change it the next time, and so the practice, a lot is just sort of getting in those reps on stage in front of a crowd and just sort of, you know, keeping what’s working and adding to it and subtracting what doesn’t work, and a lot of the time, you know, you will have a joke that you believe in, you think there’s something funny there, but you can’t. Get it to work, and you might leave it alone for a while, and not try it again, and then you might just finally unlock it one day. Like, I, there’s a joke that I do from time to time, and I can’t remember. I used to word it differently, and it would never get anything. It would never get anything. I couldn’t get it to work, and I was like, I’m pretty sure there’s a joke in here that, like, could actually get a laugh, and then eventually I landed on wording like this, or very similar to this, which is, you know, I’m a big believer in karma. I do think it goes around comes around, so I know if I treat somebody very poorly, they had it coming. The circle, the circle is complete, and so it was that kind of idea that you know, my bad actions don’t result in bad karma for me. It’s

Toban Dyck  30:47

The other

Dean Jenkinson  30:47

My actions are you getting your karma,

Jay Whetter  30:50

That’s great. I love that.

Dean Jenkinson  30:51

And, but I couldn’t, for years, I would like try that joke out, and I couldn’t get it to work, and I don’t remember how I worded it that wasn’t landing, but it wasn’t landing, and then finally I’d stumbled on to that wording, and that seems to land 99% of time to the ground.

Toban Dyck  31:07

Well, I think it’s a great example, though, of public speaking, where you try something you believe that it should work, and that it can work, and it doesn’t work the first few times, but you stick to it, right? You keep, you keep honing it, you keep, keep working on it. And I think there’s something about comedy. I mean, this is preaching to the choir here, but about like the medium kind of belies the, the like the amount of work in the background, right? I mean, you’re up there, you’re making people laugh, you’re giving them a great kind of light experience, but I’ve always found with comedy there’s something, there’s like, there’s so much depth there, more so than then then you know lots of presenters I listen to, and I think that’s a, that’s a really, there’s like, there’s a strong takeaway there, I think, for for the ag community, and for communications, where it’s like that, yeah, to get it to that point requires so much comfort with your material and with yourself and with the interaction between audience, and I, you can, you can correct me anytime, Dean, but I, that’s that’s the feeling I get when I, when I see a good comic, like there’s so much that,

Dean Jenkinson  32:17

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, it’s tip of the iceberg kind of stuff, right, you get to see the tip of the iceberg, but you don’t necessarily see everything that goes on underneath, and I think it does vary from vary from person to person, right? I mean, there are these extraordinarily charismatic, gifted people who you know can just go live their life and then get on stage every night and just sort of talk and kind of create stuff on stage from night to night without sitting and you know doing any kind of, and yeah, so it varies from person to person, but I think like everything else in the world, right, it’s all getting the reps in, right, and you know every night you get up and you’re, you’re, you’re working on it, and in a perfect world, you know, the, the image I have in my head is like getting on stage and doing your jokes every night is like putting your blade on the sharpening stone, but if you’re doing it wrong, or you’re not, you’re not doing it thoughtfully. You’re not going to end up with a sharper blade. You can just, you can just dull your blade down to nothing, right? Because you’re just getting up and saying it, and you’re not really connecting with it, and you’re not.. and your act becomes something that’s kind of calcified, and you no longer connect with it. It’s just words you say from night to night to night, and you lose a connection with it, and it becomes stale and dated, and you know your takes are all very 15 years old and kind of cringy, and you, you, and you’re just completely unaware, because there’s all this stuff used to work, and you just get up, and you say it, and you say it, and you say it, and you say it, and every night it gets less and less and less potent, and so you’ve always got to try to be like, you know, an expression that my wife uses, who’s a writer right now, she works writing in the PR department at United Way Winnipeg, but she says you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to reinflate the tire, and so that’s an image that I try to hold on to, because I think that’s a great metaphor, which is I don’t need to like start from scrap, but I just need to make sure that I’m keeping everything pumped up and working and inflated, and, and so that you’re not, you know, you’re not driving around this old thing that from day to day just gets more and more wear and tear on it until it just blows out and goes in the ditch, and you’re like, well,

Toban Dyck  34:39

Yeah,

Dean Jenkinson  34:40

That was that.

Toban Dyck  34:41

Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, I think it’s something. I mean, I can relate to that, like, kind of, you do something for, you know, decades, and you just become used to doing it. It becomes muscle memory, and you think, tired, trops.

Jay Whetter  34:53

 Yeah, you need to pump those tires.

Toban Dyck  34:56

Yeah, that’s a great.

Jay Whetter  34:58

I was thinking, like, with within. Agriculture extent, and I know this isn’t your world, Dean, but it is now. Yeah, it is now. But what we don’t do..

Dean Jenkinson  35:07

I feel like I feel like we’ve been on parallel tracks the whole time. Yeah, I’m talking about stand up and then go, that’s fascinating for farmers, and I’m just like, I really have no clue how farmers are gonna apply any of what I’m saying to anything they do, but

Jay Whetter  35:21

I do find farmers funny, and they do like a laugh, and that probably is some comic relief, because sometimes their job is stressful, but and you do, we can get into that. I just wanted to just make one comment about in the world of agriculture extension, we were.. I don’t know whether it’s not afraid or it’s if you don’t even think of the power of making it personal or telling stories about how this connects with, we just, we just relate science, we relate science, science, science, science, we don’t, we don’t really get to know the person delivering the message at all, and I think that in comedy it’s the person delivering the message is everything, right, and I think, and it’s in the message is secondary to connecting with the person, and in agriculture extension, I don’t even think we try to make a personal connection in a lot of cases, but I think I think we could learn from from comedy and comics, and that, and the power of of being vulnerable or telling personal stories, and then kind of getting to the message, I think. I think there’s a real, a real art in that, that we could all learn from.

Dean Jenkinson  36:27

No, I think, I think you’re definitely onto something. I think, and yeah, I feel like, despite the fact that this is something I’ve been doing for, you know, three decades of my life, I feel like very late in my life, I sort of like, if you’d asked 25 or 30 year old me what story meant, and what is a story, and what is the power of story, I would have had a very answer, like a really kind of rudimentary kind of right but mostly wrong answer. I think very late in life I’m starting to, in small ways, in emerging ways, open my eyes to the power of telling stories, and what that means, as far as just civilization. Like, it’s enormous when you start peeling back layers of the onion and understand what stories mean to human beings and human civilization and the culture you’re in and how we see ourselves and where we think we’re going and where we think we’ve been and so yeah I and I think you know if I if I had it to do over again, I think I’d go back and try to figure all that out much earlier, because I feel like I’m just starting to understand it, and I don’t think I apply it terribly well on stage. I think the best comics are the ones who, whether they know they’re doing it or not, are telling a relatable story that has a beginning and a middle and an end and a lesson, whether it’s articulated or not articulated, but just sort of implicit and understood. I think that’s where the real connection and the real magic lies. And when I see comics who get up and just, you know, are extremely memorable, it’s because they’ve connected what they’ve said to a story that resonates with the audience, and not just they made me laugh three times every minute for 45 minutes, because you know that’s just like in a way that’s just like sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, and then at the end of it, you’re like, yep, that felt good, but you don’t really, it wasn’t like a meal, you know, there was nothing necessarily satisfying or nourishing about it, and I think the secret sauce is in figuring that out or tapping into that.

Jay Whetter  38:51

Are there? Yeah, you go ahead, Toban. 

Jay Whetter  38:53

Is there, is there something specific to what you just said that you’re working on now?

Dean Jenkinson  38:58

The short answer is no. The short answer is, like, at the moment my life is mostly behind the scenes in comedy. My day-to-day bill paying work is mostly producing the Winnipeg Comedy Festival every year, helping Frantic Films produce the five TV shows that get made at CBC Comedy Festival every year. So we just finished the festival, but right now we’re in the process of turning these, you know, two hour live tapings into a 44 minute show, so there’s, you know, three steps in every, in every each of the five galas to, you know, go from here to down here, and then I’m also helping to produce the debaters on CBC Radio, and so all that work is not me on stage talking to a crowd and telling my story or giving my take on anything, so I’ve kind of stepped away from that a fair bit over the past few years, whether it was intentional or just that’s the way life has gone, we could discuss some of its. Essential, and some of it’s just like, oh yeah, I really don’t perform as much as I used to do, and I’m kind of fine with that, I’m kind of sad about that, but yeah, but so, no, at the moment, at the moment, if you ask me, what are you excited about talking about on stage, I’m like, ah, I gotta like, I’m that guy who’s like, I’m gonna get back into the gym and get in shape any day, any day now I’m gonna start.

Toban Dyck  40:21

Oh my god, that’s very relatable. That’s hilarious.

Jay Whetter  40:30

Just gonna say I’m glad you brought up the debaters, because that’s a show that’s between Comedy Festival, I think they did a number of tapings of that show there, but and I do try to listen to that to that every week, but my question is, like, it comes across as ad lib, you know, to the audience listening, but there’s a lot of prep and practice. Can you give us a bit of a behind the scenes?

Dean Jenkinson  40:55

Yeah, I mean, at the risk of making you wish you didn’t know how the sausage was made, you know. Yeah, I remember my mailman at my old address. He recognized my name from hearing me on Debaters, and he said, ‘You’re the guy from, like, your comedian, you’re on the Debaters. And, well, yeah, and he says, ‘So tell me, because I think I know, I think you know the topic you’re going to debate, but you don’t know which side you’re on until Steve tells you, and I had to burst his bubble and say no. So, the process is, you know, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a team of people that I get to be part of that pitches our senior producer ideas for topics. What if it’s cake versus pie? What if it’s fork versus spoon? What if it’s nothing beats a night at the karaoke bar? What if it’s, you know, brothers are better than sisters or grandparents are a bad influence, right? So we pitch all these ideas, and we’ve been doing it for 20 years, and there’s how many episodes in a season, how many debates in a season? I can’t even tell you off the top of my head, but it’s dozens and dozens, and you know the show creators have told us that in their first season or two there was an executive who was like, your show is great, but you’re going to run out of topics in two years, right, and 20 years later we’re still like startled, we’ve never done camping, what, like, look through the database, we there must have been a camping debate anyway, so we pitch topics, and then you know we have a city that we’re going to go to, we’re going to do two nights of tapings, there’s going to be five debates each night, so there’s 10 topics we need to select. They need to have a variety of right. It can’t just be like cake versus pie and chicken versus beef, right? You got to have some. They can’t all be the same, so he’s got to say, okay, is there too much that’s about family? Is there too much that’s about this, right? We need a little variety, so the audience isn’t getting more of the same, more of the same, right, the same, so there’s a lot of care that our exec producer takes in making sure that every night has variety, and then we need to cast two comics for each debate, and a lot of care goes into figuring out, okay, well, this guy’s got, you know, material in their act about their kids, or whatever, they might be a good fit here, and yeah, so basically, and we go through the casting process of figuring out who’s going to be on what side. We don’t want it to be all, you know, straight white dudes, so we got to make sure there’s diversity, we got to make sure there’s some representation, we got to make sure that there’s different voices, that there’s female perspectives, right? You can’t have a debate about marriage that’s like two 40 year old white guys, because who cares, right? So get some different takes on stuff, and then once you cast it, you set the comics to work. Here’s your resolution. Here’s how we see the debate kind of being about right. So if it’s like there’s one coming up that I pitched, that’s movie theatres are still the best way to see a movie, right. And so our exec producer is like, okay, well, we did home theaters five seasons ago, so we got to make sure we tell them, like, it’s not just about watching it in your living room on your big screen TV or going to the movie theatre. We got to make sure that they, like, you can watch it on a play, you can watch it on your phone. Now you got kids who watch it on their tablet, right? You got that right. So make sure that we cover all that ground, right? And so you get all these like kind of wishlist instructions out to people, and then you want them to submit a draft of their opening argument and their closing argument, and there’s word count restrictions. 

Jay Whetter  44:40

Oh, wow, yeah. 

Dean Jenkinson  44:41

Content restrictions, because it’s CBC, and you know, so we’ll get drafts in, and I spent yesterday reading first drafts of people’s stuff and sending notes back saying, you know, this is terrific, or this seems like you seem to take a long time. Like, there’s 130 words of your 270 word opening that’s just getting to this first joke. Could we tighten that up so that you get to that joke and then you still got more real estate you can use? So, it’s quite an involved process. And then on the night, there’s there can be a lot of stuff that happens spontaneously. There can be a lot of funny reactions and asides and ad-libbed lines and stuff, and Steve, God bless him, we deliberately don’t show Steve anything the comics are planning to do.

Toban Dyck  45:32

Awesome.

Dean Jenkinson  45:33

So, that his reactions are entirely authentic. Okay, and his, you know, and his responses aren’t, you know re-rehearsed, but yeah, they’ve got a structure to work in, so that on the night, if nothing funny happens spontaneously, there’s still something to fall back on, right? 

Jay Whetter  45:56

Sometimes it seems like nothing happens funny spontaneously, like it doesn’t always, doesn’t always work as well as you with all that prep, even. Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Dean Jenkinson  46:07

And you know it’s, it’s kind of, I guess, a let down to know that it’s that structured and practiced and rehearsed and written and scripted in, you know both the good ways and bad ways that that implies, but you know I think it’s equally fascinating when you tell people and you see their reaction that a 30 minute episode of Whose Line Is It Is It Anyway is a distillation of a taping that might have gone 2-3-3 and a half hours, where they’re just like throwing stuff at the wall, throwing stuff at the wall, throwing stuff at the wall, and you might, if you’re lucky, get 22 minutes of gold that you can distill into that episode, and then people think these guys are just the funniest people in the world, everything they do is funny, funny, funny, funny, and yeah, the stuff that you see was really, really funny, and what we didn’t see is all the stuff that they threw that didn’t quite land or didn’t quite work or wasn’t quite gelling,

Jay Whetter  47:13

Just your movie theater thing, I’m looking forward to that debate, I hope you’re doing it, but I was at Grant Park Theater, and you’ll know it well, because that’s like your sounds like it’s your neighborhood, but so they have these beautiful couches now, where you see you’re at the movie theater, but you’re in this, you’re in these two-seater loveseat couches. The guy, so people bring their blankets from home.

Toban Dyck  47:33

That’s your joke.

Jay Whetter  47:37

And anyway, so the guy right beside me, he’s got his blanket on, and he’s got these huge stinking bare feet sticking out the end, no bare feet.

Toban Dyck  47:48

Oh, bare feet, not like not bare out, like bare feet, like

Dean Jenkinson  47:52

cow feet, horse feet.

Jay Whetter  47:54

Yeah, but there’s like curled yellow toenails, and his like varicose veins, and that’s like, God, like this isn’t really what I had signed up for when I paid the premium price to watch this anyway. Yeah, so

Dean Jenkinson  48:08

That is, that’s atrocious manners. That is atrocious.

Jay Whetter  48:11

That is atrocious manners. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  48:15

Dude, you wrote for This Hour, not yeah, This Hour is 22 minutes for 15 years. Did you say?

Dean Jenkinson  48:22

Yeah, you know, there’s probably five years, six years that I was like full time on the ground in Halifax, you know, in the office every day, and then started having a family back here in Winnipeg, and so there was a season where, you know, my wife and I at the time, my wife at the time, because the I have a blended family now, but the woman I was married to at the time, the mother of my biological children, she, she and I brought our newborn out for a season, God bless her, she was like, let’s go and we’ll be out there for a few months and I’ll take care of the kid during the day and you go to work, and we’ll come home, and we’ll make dinner, and we’ll go for a walk in the park, and that’ll be our life. And so we did that for a season, and then you know, over the summer break, we were like, is this like, do we see ourselves doing this with a two year old and a three year old, and what happens when, you know, so we made the decision. I said to the show, like this has been wonderful, and what an opportunity, and thank you so much. But I don’t think I can see myself like coming back, and it’s like sort of three months in the fall, and then another three months after the Christmas break. I can’t see us doing that again and again and again, and they said, okay, well, totally understand and appreciate you, and see you down the road, kind of thing. Yeah, and then maybe like three four weeks later they emailed and said, would you consider contributing from Winnipeg? And I said I would absolutely consider contributing to Winnipeg. I didn’t think that was an option, and I thought, you know, and I kind of. I’m not sure if I’d pitched it, if they would have said yes, but I guess in a weird way, there’s a possibility that you know my being willing to walk away was a great negotiating tactic. I didn’t know I was employing 

Toban Dyck  50:11

Power play. Yeah, that’s right.

Dean Jenkinson  50:13

That was a total power play. All right, I’m out of here. You guys come crawling after me, but no, I guess they you know, and for them it meant, you know, they don’t have to fly me out, they don’t have to put me up, they don’t have to give me a per diem, right? So, they can still get a contributor, but yeah, so I did that kind of full time for a few seasons, and then I kind of stepped down and just did it like, like a point six kind of job, where I was given sort of a, you know, they wanted this much from me each week that I would like pitch to them, and I think you know the same people who might be surprised to find out the debaters is scripted, or would also be surprised to find out, like when you see the 22 minutes that are on this hour has 22 minutes. How much material got generated that week that didn’t move forward at all? Right, you might hear, like, you know, eight sketches, but the writing room wrote 55 sketches, Right? 

Toban Dyck  51:14

Right,

Dean Jenkinson  51:15

And you know, you might hear like 10 jokes, those desk jokes about, you know, this happened in the news this week, and here’s a punchline, and the next anchor, and the Prime Minister had said this, and here’s a punchline, right? So you might hear like 10 or 12 of those jokes, and we wrote literally hundreds and hundreds of words, and you know, like every week I would submit to the show from Winnipeg, like a minimum of like 75 jokes, like wow.

Toban Dyck  51:40

Every week.

Dean Jenkinson  51:40

And every week, and so you’re just like you’re trying to churn out, like I would just try to churn out, like, about, you know, 20 a day, and sometimes I can do it, you know, fairly quickly, and sometimes you’re just like pounding your head against the wall, going, I don’t know anymore, but, and so, like, in a good week I would, having submitted 75 if I got like five or six in the show, I was crushing it. I was just crushing it, right? I was just like, but you know, sometimes you don’t, you get one or two, and sometimes you get none, and you’re like, well, I guess I got to practice doing the thing I love, and get paid for. 

Toban Dyck  52:22

There we go. 

Dean Jenkinson  52:23

The best thing I could put on it.

Jay Whetter  52:24

I just wonder if there’s an extension message in there, like I don’t know, I guess, because I think we have an idea, like there’s five things that we want to get across to farmers, but like to think of writing 75 jokes every week, just like, like, is there something? Like, I’m just like, how do we, how do we take that notion of like sort of overloading the system and finding what works rather than just like trying one thing doesn’t work, one thing doesn’t work, one thing doesn’t work. I don’t know, I feel I feel like I feel like there’s something there. I just got to write the punchline.

Toban Dyck  53:00

Yeah, yeah, but I also think it’s, you know, also something that we read in your notes, Dean. It’s like, or the notes Ashley had for us. I was like, it’s kind of what, in what you, what you, what you don’t say sometimes is where that is, what is where the meaning is. And I feel like something like that, your listeners will, will hear this, and they’ll get, they’ll get what they,

Jay Whetter  53:20

Well, your bifocal joke is, yeah, your bifocal joke is a classic example of not actually having to say the punchline, or not having to say, not having to say the joke. Oh, I like that. Yeah, but so not what you don’t say, can you? I want, can we? I think, 

Dean Jenkinson  53:37

Yeah, I mean, you know the way I would explain it, and it might be straying from where you’re intending to take this, but you know, I think a tried and true joke structure is saying exactly enough and not more than saying just enough that allows the audience to infer what it is that you’re wanting them to infer, so if I had said, you know, if you say, and now my mom would like bifocals, so that my dad’s d*ck looked bigger. That’s mildly funny as an idea, but it’s not. It’s not going to get half the laugh, because I’ve explained the joke right, and comedy is all about allowing the audience to make that connection from right what you’ve said to what that means, and once they make that connection, and they all make it at the same time, that’s what creates that, that aha laugh moment. It’s a fascinating, mysterious. I’d be curious to see the science of it, because there is a science aspect to it. 

Jay Whetter  54:46

It’s kind of like when you’re reading, when you’re reading a book, and you’re, you create the scene in your head, you know, so the author doesn’t have to describe every minute detail, you kind of, you. Create an image, and it’s probably the same. Not as, not probably, I would say it is the same with comedy. Is that you? You just kind of lay, and it kind of goes back to your brevity point that we really, we kind of touched on, but really hadn’t dug into, is the importance of saying as few words as possible, and then just letting the audience fill in, fill in the joke. I kind of like that message.

Toban Dyck  55:24

I want to go back to sorry, Jay. To this hour is 22 minutes. Just like, is that show kind of the.. is it like, you know, you listen to comedians talk about kind of where they cut their teeth, in you know, in this, you know, the states, they talk about like groundlings, they talk about like these kind of crucibles, right? What were you, were you in one, were you in like the Canadian comedy crucible?

Dean Jenkinson  55:52

Yeah, yeah, I mean, there aren’t a lot of those in Canada, unfortunately, but that is definitely one of them, and 22 Minutes, I think, does a really good job of, like, there are tons and tons and tons of people who have 22 Minutes writing credits in their bio, which is a testament to the fact that the show is always looking for, you know, they’ll, they’ll, if you’re, if you’re a funny person and you apply, and you know people who have been in the room vouch for you, and you’re willing to come for a two week tryout. You know they will give so many funny comics a tryout in the room, and a lot of them, you know, swim and don’t sink. A lot of them like it and don’t hate it, but if you, if you sink or you hate it, then you know, go do not that, but yeah, I was, I found it really like being thrown in the deep end in terms of the amount that you’re asked to generate every week, and just be funny, be funny, be funny on demand, and it got you like I really credit it with helping me not be precious about, you know, like before that I was like, oh, you know, I’ll just wait for inspiration to strike, and then I’ll write it down, and then I’ll, you know, tinker with it, and you get really precious about everything, and that experience really just taught me just sit down and start working and just put something on the page and just keep right, Roger Ebert would say that inspiration strikes while you’re doing the work, you don’t like, wait for inspiration to strike, you sit down to do the work and it’ll come, so it just, you know, it really helped me to get over that hump and get out of my own way, and you know, years later I would go to work with a team at Montreal at Just for Laughs, writing material for celebrity hosts who aren’t comics, and by that point I felt comfortable enough to just go, here’s a bunch of jokes that might work, and here’s a bunch of premises that might work, and if you don’t like any of those, I’m not going to freak out. I’ll just go, okay, I’ll go come up with a bunch more and pitch you a bunch more, and so you just stop being precious about it, and you stop taking it personally, and you just go, I’m just going to keep generating stuff off the conveyor belt, and you pick the ones you like, and you throw the ones that don’t like in the garbage, and sometimes you know you get frustrated because you keep throwing stuff against the wall, and it’s not sticking, but I get past that point where, like, panicked, I don’t know if I can do this, I don’t know if any of this is good, like you just, you know, a lot of it’s not going to be good, but I’ll just trust that some of it will be

Jay Whetter  58:48

So, with these 70, just back to these 75 jokes. Would you read the Globe and Mail or listen to CBC News and just say, okay, such and such did this? How do I make a funny twist on that, and you just kind of just work through the news of the day?

Dean Jenkinson  59:03

Yeah. You just, you know, you just keep scrolling through the news, and you know, top headlines, science discoveries, weird things, right? This crazy thing happened in this town, and then the challenge is you got to have a punchline that’s funnier than the crazy thing that happened, you know, and you just, you just keep, and half the battle is like shaping the setup, so that it sets you up for a punchline. There was a great tweet from a late-night writer who had written for, you know, Seth Meyers, and all the all the American late-night shows, where she just gave you, she just said, for like, for any aspiring late-night joke writers, here’s a list of, like, 40 turns that can help you find a punchline, and so it would be like it would be something as simple as. But to be fair, right, something as simple as that, right, so you just say, okay, here’s the setup, President Trump said this, but to be fair, right, or but on the other hand, right, just these little phrases that would help you turn from the fact to what the joke might be, so you just kind of, you know, you can just sort of cycle through these and say what comes to mind. If I say, okay, to be fair, what’s the, what’s the other side of this story? What’s the, what’s the right, what’s the ridiculous alternative to what we’re talking about, kind of thing. 

Toban Dyck  1:00:30

Yeah.

Jay Whetter  1:00:32

Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. I like that. I might have to try to find that.

Toban Dyck  1:00:35

Yeah.

Jay Whetter  1:00:36

So, Dean, when you think about all your favorite comics, or even just any presentations that you’ve heard, maybe even not comic related or comedy related, like what are the communications skills that two or three things that you think are essential to getting a point across.

Dean Jenkinson  1:01:00

Yeah, I mean, I think the essential things would be I’m trying to.. I’m trying to.. like, I want.. I want to not miss any obvious ones, but you know, obviously, I think being present and just sort of feeling what you’re saying is essential, I think. Slowing down and not racing through is essential, and I think sort of knowing what your endpoint is might be essential, because you know, I, I’ve something I’ve noticed about myself is when I’m from time to time interviewed, like I’m being interviewed now, I will start talking, and I have no idea where I think I am intending to go, I’m just like talking because I’m being expected to fill some time, because they stopped talking, and now it’s my turn, and so you know, I think when you step up in front of people to say something, to know how will I know when I’m done, basically, and where is it that I want to take them, and when will I know we’ve arrived, and how do I let them know we’ve arrived? 

Jay Whetter  1:02:22

I know I’m done. That’s great. Yeah, sometimes people are done within the first 10 minutes, which is okay. They’ve got an hour long slot to fill, and so they give us a bunch of boring slides to look at.

Toban Dyck  1:02:34

Yep, so I think. I mean, I think this.. it’s been a great.. I mean, I’m not wrapping up right now, maybe my producer is telling me to, but there’s been so much good stuff here, like I know you asked Dean to kind of distill things, and just watching your response, Dean, I’m like, I bet he’s, you know, it might be one of those things where you walk away from it, you’re like, oh, but I didn’t say that, but I didn’t say that for essential skills, but there’s been so much covered in this that I think, like, a lot of our listeners will get a lot from this conversation, and I just, I just love the juxtaposition, if it is one of comedy and an ag extension, I think, I think it’s, I think it’s great, and I think I think ag needs more of this, like kind of like bringing in from other, other sources, and I think I think comedy is just such a, such an excellent,

Jay Whetter  1:03:28

My dad, so my great uncle was a guy named Jack Forbes from Winnipeg, and he worked for Manitoba Agriculture, and he would start off every presentation.. I never heard him speak, but my dad talks about this with just a running litany of jokes, and you would just, and everyone would just be so into it, and then he would go on to, like, and now we’re talking about how to control your wild oats, and why it’s important to tank mix your herbicides, and it was like, okay, well, yeah, you got us, Jack, like, we’re we’re here for the ride now, but no, like I’m gonna say nobody, nobody, but to be fair, his jokes are terrible. No, but yeah, but but no, people don’t tell jokes anymore. And so, so Toban and I, we were doing this little presentation with this group, and this one, one young woman said, So, how do you feel about telling jokes, and I was like, “Whoa, like that’s risky, because it could fall flat. And I said, “Just like, make eye contact and be enthusiastic. And now I’m thinking, well, maybe that was the wrong advice, because if she’s got any inclination to tell a joke, she probably should just go for it, given what my dad was telling me about this Jack Forbes character, who some people might remember, but because, because if you can, if you can do it, boy, you can be effective, especially because nobody else is doing it. 

Toban Dyck  1:04:51

You made it sound like you shut her down. I was there. I don’t think you..

Jay Whetter  1:04:54

I didn’t. Okay. Good. Yeah.

Dean Jenkinson  1:04:58

I mean, it’s.. yeah, I’m. And it’s a risk-reward thing, right, because yeah, it’s not fun when you try to say I’m just gonna like grease the wheels with a joke, and then it doesn’t land, and now you feel like you’re digging yourself out of a hole you made for yourself, and then you know in 2026 there’s also the risk that you tell a joke that you think is totally on side, and somebody’s like, that was really not.

Toban Dyck  1:05:19

Yeah.

Dean Jenkinson  1:05:19

A workplace appropriate joke and they might be right, or they might be, they might have an opinion that you know that isn’t necessarily right, but you know, I, it’s what was coming to mind right now is I remember being a kid, and I don’t know who the mayor at the time would have been if it was Bill Norie, but there was a controversy because he got up to do a speech at an event and he thought I’ll open with a joke, and the joke went, you know, there’s this boy and his parents are getting divorced and the judge says, Do you want to live with your mom? and he says, No, my mom beats me. Do you want to live with your dad? No, my dad beats me. Well, who do you want to live with? I want to live with the Winnipeg Jets. They don’t beat anybody. And as a kid, so I’m listening to the radio when they’re telling the story of Bill Norway being in trouble and asked for an apology because he’s making light of domestic abuse of a child, and as a kid I was like, but he’s not, he’s not making light of domestic abuse of children, he’s making fun of the Jets, because the word beat has two meanings, and that’s all, that’s all that was, but you know, even today we could, we could have a debate about whether that joke is on site or not, and if it’s making light of something that’s not funny and is very serious and impacts families and is horrible and awful, and you know, I think reasonable people can have different opinions about it, but if an audience is uncomfortable with the content of the joke you told, you can be clear of conscience in defending it, and it doesn’t matter. You’ve made your audience uncomfortable, and sometimes the audience will be uncomfortable, not because they personally are offended, they’re uncomfortable because they’re worried other people around them are offended, and they don’t want to be seen laughing at something that could be offensive to other people, and so it’s a very murky kind of pool to wade into, but

Jay Whetter  1:07:29

I watched. 

Toban Dyck  1:07:31

I love that. 

Jay Whetter  1:07:31

I watched the roast of Kevin Hart on Netflix, yeah, to three hours, but they didn’t, there was no stone left unturned, like there was, they broke every possible taboo you can imagine. So, there’s still a place for it, I guess. But it’s buried in Netflix.

Dean Jenkinson  1:07:46

Yeah, and I am a big fan of, you know, truly, truly tasteless roast jokes, because the intention is very clear. The rules are very clear. I always find it really like when, like, I think about, I think there was, like, what was the, what was the reality show with the situation, and remember him, oh, Jersey Shore, they had like some guys from the Jersey Shore as part of a roast years ago, and they had obviously writers, you know, pitching them jokes, and, and just like, just tanking with these horribly tasteless jokes, and when you’re like bombing with something that’s offensive, about like wishing you had committed suicide, or right, it’s just like it’s like the cringiest, most awful thing, but when they land and they’re like so mean and personal, it’s like one of the best things, like Nikki Glaser, Nikki Glaser, like, go to YouTube and look, Nikki Glaser roast highlights, and she just like crushes it.

Jay Whetter  1:08:53

So, Dean, just the last thought, 

Toban Dyck  1:08:57

So you’re, are you, so Jay, are you not gonna.. you, Jay has a joke,

Jay Whetter  1:09:01

Yeah.

Toban Dyck  1:09:01

He’s been preparing. Are you not going to say it?

Jay Whetter  1:09:03

Should I? 

Jay Whetter  1:09:04

I feel like you should. 

Dean Jenkinson  1:09:06

I feel like you’ll regret it if you do.

Toban Dyck  1:09:08

Yeah, I have. He hasn’t. I asked for this. 

Toban Dyck  1:09:12

This a classic case of practicing, anyways. So, my grandma, she grew up on a farm in Mendoza, but for all my life, lived in Winnipeg, and was a lifelong liberal, and so when I was a kid, Pierre Trudeau, the Prime Minister at the time, came to Winnipeg, and he was doing some sort of opening at a new flyer, which makes busses in Winnipeg, I was a little kid, and so Pierre Trudeau is there with his white foreman’s helmet on, and he’s holding this massive wrench, like a wrench the size of me, and so my grandma, she turns to me and said, she said, “Good night, Jay. So, good night was like her. Her swear word,

Dean Jenkinson  1:10:02

so there’s

Jay Whetter  1:10:02

There’s Trudeau with her Trudeau with his white helmet, and this this massive wrench, and she says, “Good night, Jay. Have you ever seen a tool as big as that?

Toban Dyck  1:10:15

That’s good, that’s good.

Jay Whetter  1:10:16

Anyway, so farmers don’t, farmers don’t like this. This is, this is me explaining the joke, but here Trudeau rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, so yeah, so I’ve been working on that one, might need some help, yeah, yeah, I like it, but just a bit of backstory, and I totally, that’s totally made up, and I ripped off that, so I was listening to a podcast about Margaret Thatcher, and apparently she had a slip of the tongue and said that exact line, have you ever seen a tool as big as that? But she was talking about this guy holding this big wrench, but everyone started killing themselves laughing, because the inside joke was that it was about this first, this particular person, not that. Anyway, I appreciate you, you both listening. 

Jay Whetter  1:11:00

I’m glad you did it. I could tell you were a little bit nervous.

Jay Whetter  1:11:03

I was, yeah, 

Toban Dyck  1:11:03

But, yeah it was great.

Dean Jenkinson  1:11:06

It’s like walking out on the diving board.

Jay Whetter  1:11:11

Yeah, anyway, when you got the email from me and Toban saying, could you come on this agriculture-related podcast?

Toban Dyck  1:11:19

Yeah.

Jay Whetter  1:11:20

What were you.. what did you first think?

Dean Jenkinson  1:11:23

I’m thinking the same thing I’m thinking right now, which is.. I don’t think I have anything relatable to say.

Toban Dyck  1:11:30

It’ll never go to air.

Dean Jenkinson  1:11:31

If you want to chat, I’m up to chat. Yeah, do my best.

Jay Whetter  1:11:37

Yeah, well, I have a lot of respect for comedians, because for reasons I’ve said already, where

Toban Dyck  1:11:45

Because you are one.

Jay Whetter  1:11:47

Obviously not well. Hey, I’ll get back up there and try that joke again. I’ll polish it in front of the mirror and record myself, but which is great advice, by the way. Yeah, just practice in front of a mirror, record yourself if you’re up for it, but that is scary, but just about why, why do I think, why do I have so much respect for comics? Is that you, you stand up there, you put your heart on your sleeve, you, you, you try to relate to people, which is so key and so distant sometimes in some of the presentations I listen to, you practice your craft, and you, you work on relating to the audience, and kind of riffing off the audience, and those are all skills, and so you’re thinking, like, what do I have to offer, that those, those are amazing skills that that we need to hear more about in the world of communications in general, and agriculture extension, specifically, so this, this is why we thought you’d be great, and you had, you have been, you nailed it.

Toban Dyck  1:12:47

For sure, and I just want to add to that, I mean, there’s no question in this, but, like, the whole idea, I love it, of comics, there’s just, there’s sort of so much depth, and I’ve said this before during this, this, this interview, but like it’s like thoughts about thoughts, and I studied philosophy at the University of Winnipeg. I did philosophy and politics for my undergrad, so it’s always kind of like second order thinking, like you, you have to be able to be present, but you also have to be able to take a step back and look at yourself inside the auditorium as well, and like there’s so much of that depth going on from a communications perspective, and just from a way to kind of be at, I just love it, and I just, I think, I think you guys are the, you know, the top of the heap in terms of community communicators, I really do. Yeah, and you’ve certainly proven that.

Dean Jenkinson  1:13:39

Very kind.

Toban Dyck  1:13:40

Yeah.

Dean Jenkinson  1:13:40

Well, it’s very kind. I appreciate that a lot.

Toban Dyck  1:13:43

Yeah, thanks so much. Anything that anything you wanted to say on this podcast that you didn’t get a chance to?

Dean Jenkinson  1:13:50

I don’t know, no, I think I think we covered a lot of ground. I’m really grateful.

Toban Dyck  1:13:54

Yeah, it’s it’s bdeen amazing. But thank you so much, Dean, for taking the time.

Jay Whetter  1:13:59

Thanks, Dean.

Dean Jenkinson  1:14:00

My pleasure.

Jay Whetter  1:14:09

Hey there, listeners. If you’re enjoying the conversations here on The Extensionists, you will probably love to get our newsletter.

Toban Dyck  1:14:15

Yeah, it’s the best way to stay connected with us, with Jay and myself. Yours truly.

Toban Dyck  1:14:21

I’m  excited about the newsletter, to be honest with you, because I think.

Jay Whetter  1:14:25

 Why you’re excited about it?

Toban Dyck  1:14:25

Well, so many of our guests have, sorry, why are you excited about? They say that differently, Jay. So many of our guests are, they say so many things of interest, right? And I feel like the newsletter would be a great, will be a great way to share that with our listeners, 

Toban Dyck  1:14:41

Like quick take homes?

Toban Dyck  1:14:43

Yeah.

Jay Whetter  1:14:43

Summaries?

Toban Dyck  1:14:43

Yeah, absolutely.

Jay Whetter  1:14:44

Onelliners.

Toban Dyck  1:14:45

Absolutely, absolutely. I think about each, each guest, we could probably write a whole bunch of articles in each of our guests, right? So to give our our newsletter subscribers like summaries of, you know, the key takeaways of. Of these things, plus plus information on upcoming guests. All they got to do, all listeners have to do is go to the extensions.com and follow the prompts to sign up for the newsletter. I think it’ll be, I think it’ll be great.

Jay Whetter  1:15:19

Well, that was so fun.

Toban Dyck  1:15:21

Yeah, it was everything I had hoped, 

Toban Dyck  1:15:24

and people won’t know this, but we recorded that at eight in the morning, so I’m impressed that 

Toban Dyck  1:15:25

Are we saying? are you saying that’s early?

Jay Whetter  1:15:32

Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, obviously not for farmers necessarily, seating season, you lazy people. I just think sometimes comedians, they stay up late, but Dean’s, he’s a responsible father now, he’s an early riser, not a late night Smokey Bar kind of guy anymore, but yeah,

Toban Dyck  1:15:51

But, he was funny, yeah, and he was good, like I loved how I just got, I just had the overwhelming sense that there’s a lot of content in this episode that didn’t need us to summarize, that didn’t require us to summarize, right? People can grab and kind of use on their own, because I think I feel like I don’t know why this one stood out to me that way, but, but it just, it did.

Jay Whetter  1:16:22

Yeah. And was, was there a memorable takeaway for you?

Toban Dyck  1:16:26

There were quite a, quite a few. I didn’t ask him what, because he sings in an acapella group. Ask him, which,

Jay Whetter  1:16:31

Yeah, you mentioned at the beginning, but you didn’t, yeah, you didn’t dig your, dig into that one.

Toban Dyck  1:16:35

I love, I mean, he didn’t talk about, he did talk about practice a little bit, but, but he talked about practice a lot. He just didn’t use the word practice. I love the idea of just like being like knowing where you want to go with things and getting that down before you get up there, and even some of the examples of comics who are like script out every word and just, just.

Jay Whetter  1:17:00

Because they can’t ad lib, isn’t that interesting?

Toban Dyck  1:17:02

Yeah, I just like figure it out, and then like listen to yourself, like do all do those things that you hate doing, like I have trouble reading my work after I’ve written, after it’s published, I mean, yeah. Anyway, I could go on, I, but I know you have something to say.

Jay Whetter  1:17:18

No, well, I was just gonna just fixated on this fact that he would write 75 jokes a week for This hour is 22 Minutes.

Toban Dyck  1:17:26

So, what I wanted to get, what I wanted to get from him was I was gonna ask him if he would share, because I’m sure he saved those Word docs, or however he sent them, right? If he would share one of them. Oh yeah, like what does 75 jokes look like?

Jay Whetter  1:17:39

Yeah, all one liners.

Toban Dyck  1:17:42

You know, anyway,

Jay Whetter  1:17:42

And these 40 turns, yeah. So, Mark Carney is off to Davos to meet with the World Economic Forum. Well, that I don’t know, that I’m not, yeah, I’m just setting up. Let’s say you just take some mundane occurrence and then you turn it into a joke, and you just gonna go through the paper, go through the news, and like every single thing you find, and he talks about the science. So, this, this one radio show I like to listen to, it’s called Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, it’s a comedy news show, they call it outside of National Public Radio and out of Chicago, but they, it’s just all about joke, making jokes about the news, and sometimes they might find the most obscure scientific discovery, and then they just go to town on that, and it’s really quite fun, and yeah, I could, I should pay attention to how they write their jokes, and then maybe we could start actually doing some agronomy jokes.

Toban Dyck  1:18:36

Yeah, I feel like, yeah, I feel like, why, why not, right? Yeah, why not try to try some of this stuff out.

Jay Whetter  1:18:41

My favourite joke is a man walks into the psychiatrist’s office wearing nothing but saran wrap underwear,

Toban Dyck  1:18:50

But say it again, say it again.

Jay Whetter  1:18:53

Yeah, so that, yeah, so this guy walks into the psychiatrist’s office wearing nothing but saran wrap underwear, and the psychiatrist says, well, I can clearly see you’re nuts, and then, but then, so my son, who was always good at just cracking jokes, and he loved an audience, and he’s, I don’t know whether he still does that, but so he would, he’d get up in front of my family, and he’d say, yeah, yeah, so a guy, and he’s eight years old, or something. Guy walks into the psychiatrist’s office wearing nothing but saran wrap underpants, and the psychiatrist says, “Well, I can clearly see your balls. I totally missed the, the double entendre, the joke, but I.. but I.. it was for me funnier than even the original, but yeah. But so I actually tell that story now, so I set up with the real joke of that. I tell Liam’s version.

Toban Dyck  1:19:46

I couldn’t imagine being..

Jay Whetter  1:19:48

I didn’t say a swear, so I think we can keep that.

Toban Dyck  1:19:50

I think so.

Jay Whetter  1:19:51

Yeah.

Toban Dyck  1:19:51

I don’t know.

Jay Whetter  1:19:52

It’s at the end of.. nobody will be listening at this edge of the podcast anyway. 

Jay Whetter  1:19:54

Exactly, really, really good to go, go based on that. Oh, people. Yeah, people aren’t listening anymore. Dean’s gone. Thank you. You to our sponsor. 

Jay Whetter  1:20:10

We have sacked clear see-through underwear.

Toban Dyck  1:20:20

Giving Abby some editing, editing responsibilities here, but no, it was.. I couldn’t imagine being 18 or 19, whatever old it was, and then going up in front of an audience and doing this.. I mean, I guess that’s twofold. So one is maybe I could, because at that, at a certain age, you just don’t care.

Jay Whetter  1:20:41

Yeah.

Toban Dyck  1:20:41

But I don’t like Doug Darling from Tripwire. He’s a big storyteller, and he, he does comedy once in a while. Okay, goes up and does these amateur.. like, I couldn’t imagine now getting up there and just like kind of facing your demons, and like just being like, you know what, I’m gonna, I’m gonna wrestle with whatever I need to wrestle with, internally get up there and do this.

Jay Whetter  1:21:05

I can feel my heart beating in my chest right now, just imagining it. It is making me anxious. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was a great one.

Toban Dyck  1:21:15

I so many communication tips, and I mean, I really think Dean had a lot to offer,

Jay Whetter  1:21:23

Yeah.

Toban Dyck  1:21:23

Yeah, more than I think he thought.

Jay Whetter  1:21:25

We should take him on tour with us.

Toban Dyck  1:21:26

Well, I was like, I know I was thinking like we should, or like really get, get ag days to, to like.

Jay Whetter  1:21:32

Yeah.

Toban Dyck  1:21:33

you know, be in touch with him over,

Toban Dyck  1:21:35

over a bit. Yeah, I don’t know, I think that’d be, that’d be great.

Jay Whetter  1:21:40

This has been the Extensionists Podcast. I’m Jay Wetter,

Toban Dyck  1:21:44

and I’m Toban

Jay Whetter  1:21:45

Dyck. Until next time,. This has been a Burr Forest Group production.

Toban Dyck  1:21:51

Jay, did you know that the podcast couldn’t happen with the hard work of the people behind the scenes?

Jay Whetter  1:21:56And I’ve got their names right here. They are Abby Wall, producer and editor Ashley Robinson, researcher, and Michelle McMullen, marketer.