Shaun Majumder to return to North Huron with Blyth show
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
Spring has officially sprung, and that means only one thing to the people of North Huron - the return of comedian Shaun Majumder is imminent!
Last year, the Newfoundland-born funny man’s show at Wingham’s universally-beloved Wingham Town Hall Theatre had audiences rolling in the aisles, and now he’s planning to have the same effect at Blyth’s Memorial Hall with his brand new ‘Hardly Dead’ Tour on Friday, April 12. He will also have shows in Fergus and Parry Sound.
For the second year in a row, this self-proclaimed man of the people has graciously agreed to take a little time out of his day to chat with The Citizen about a wide range of topics, from the rural arts to the art of dying.
Majumder currently lives in Los Angeles, but when he heads out on a tour, he tries to make rural stops a priority. “It’s my love for these small places,” he explained. “It feels like you’re sitting down in somebody’s kitchen, and you’re hanging out, and you’re just getting to know everybody. That’s what these shows are like up here - it’s so fun and intimate!”
It will be Majumder’s first time performing in Blyth and Fergus. Checking them both off his bucket list is a prospect that he thinks is really out of this world. “I’ve never been to either of these planets before, so I have no way of knowing what first contact is going to be like. I’m just going to go in with an open mind and open heart, and everybody is going to get a killer show.”
When he came to the Town Hall Theatre last year, Majumder was at the tail end of his ‘Love’ Tour. A packed house of local comedy fans truly appreciated his multimedia presentation about his evolution as a member of his family unit. It was a show that was equally heartfelt as it was darkly comedic. One of the crowd’s favourite bits featured Majumder arguing with an older version of himself about failing as a father via video.
This time around, he’s taking a different approach to an evening of entertainment. “These shows, I’ll be talking about a lot of stuff - it’s going to be straight stand-up, and it could be all over the map, you know? It could be about anything that happened that day, to the current state of my world. The focus is: I’m not dead yet. It’s really live, and in the moment... I am really excited to be going out and just doing straight stand-up! Getting back to the basics.”
Majumder strives to bring something different to the stage every time he shows up. “This is going to be much more conversational, with more interaction with the audience. I would love to see people from the Wingham show there!”
Performing a comedy set that changes as it interacts with the world is all part of Majumder’s philosophy of not dying. “The beauty of stand-up is that it’s a living, breathing, kind of performance. I don’t like locking into one thing and that’s it. Even all the tours that I’ve done, they are constantly evolving, and constantly changing. No show has ever been the same. I like talking to the audience and I like connecting in that way, and exploring new material in that way.”
In this show, Majumder wants to highlight that there is a big difference between trying not to die and fearing death. “I’ve been working really hard to not die. My wife has also been working really hard for me not to die. Because we’re getting older, and we’ve got to take care of ourselves. She’s obsessed with longevity - the number of supplements that she’s making me take! I’ve been reading a lot about them, and I’m bought in. I’m all in. I want to live to be 120.” He finds that this desire to live is not driven by a fear of death - in fact, it is rather the opposite. “Death is not something that I fear, or have ever feared. There’s just something about it coming that makes you up your game. It’s the realization that we are here for a split second. Not even a split second - a millisecond. I can see why Buddhism talks about that. I don’t study Buddhism or anything, but one of the things I read about is that one of the pillars of their beliefs is to always check in with your mortality, and the finality of things. And when you do that, it really puts you in the moment. The longing to stay alive and to be healthy - it’s not so much that I want to live to be 200 years old, it’s more about my healthspan vs lifespan. I want to be healthy right up until the day I die.”
The comedian’s appreciation of life and death has been further deepened by the expansion of his family. “Creating a life, bringing in another life - that’s a whole other layer, right? Because now you have to think about the future of that life along with your life, and if your life is no good personally, you can’t give to anybody else. The importance of not taking this life for granted is elevated when you have children.”
One may wonder how Majumder has had the time to put together a whole new tour, what with raising a family and contemplating death all the time, but he builds his shows just like any other comedian - one leg at a time. “For me, because I’m not on the road doing a lot of stand up, I’m sitting at home writing, or thinking of ideas, and kind of framing them as launching off points, or topics, and then I explore those topics on stage. If I know that I’m going to be doing a brand new tour that involves a lot more of the multimedia element like video playback, that takes a lot more work. The process changes and shifts depending on the kind of show I have coming up.”
He may not have come to Blyth before, but Majumder already has a lot of appreciation for the town’s agricultural culture. “I absolutely love theatre! I started out doing rural shows in small-town Newfoundland - rural is very close to my heart, it’s an important thing to keep authentic, which is hard with the challenges of the economy sometimes. With farming, especially, there’s this stress pressing on small rural farms. I believe that these small places, it’s very important to keep them alive. It seems that the Blyth Festival is one of those cultural events that really draws attention and brings people to the town, and does a lot of good work keeping small towns alive.” In treading the boards of Memorial Hall, Majumder will become a part of Blyth’s rich cultural history, forever.
On April 12, Shaun Majumder will be connecting with the audience that comes out to Memorial Hall, to laugh and to truly appreciate the moment that they are together, before the inevitable. “I know that Death is coming, and I want to be able to welcome him with open arms and be able to give him a hug when he comes... because you know it’s coming, life is so precious, when you have it. You can breathe - you can open your lungs up and breathe. When you face death, and put things in perspective on a personal level, it just makes you go - my God, I’m breathing, I’m still here, and that means I have lots of opportunity to do amazing things within the realm of my scope of just me being.”