“When you grow up in a small town in Newfoundland, you see that people have a sense of humor about hard times. I turned that into a career and hit the road.”
That bit of narration begins, and perfectly encapsulates, the premise of the CBC TV series Still Standing. It’s kind of a mix of travel show, stand-up comedy special, and small town documentary.
Think Corner Gas meets Rick Steves, and you’ll be on the right track.
“Now I’m on a mission to find the funny in the places you least expect it – Canada’s struggling small towns. Towns that are against the ropes, but still hanging in there, still laughing in the face of adversity.”
Each episode, comedian Johnny Harris travels to a different rural Canadian town and spends time learning what life is like there.
That means tasting the local cuisine, trying out unusual things people there do for work or for fun, and visiting sites important to the town’s history. He chats with residents to find out what makes where they live special and what makes it challenging.
He then weaves all those experiences and his insights into a stand-up set tailor-made for that particular town. Instead of relying on tired tropes deriding small town life, he celebrates the unique quirks of each place he visits in a way that is both warm and really funny.
Since locals make up the live audience for his set, he can make a super-specific reference about the town or its residents, and everyone gets it. Laughter and nods of recognition ripple through the crowd, because everyone knows what (or who) he’s talking about.
As viewers, we’re in on the jokes too. The show’s clever editing cuts back and forth from Johnny’s comedy set to the experiences that inspired it.
The pilot episode, for example, takes place in Bamfield, a beautiful village on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
At the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, Johnny takes a tour lead by enthusiastic staff member Kelly, and then has an awkward encounter with a sea cucumber.
At the point in the set when he mentions water taxi driver Mark, we’ve already seen him ferry Johnny across the Bamfield Inlet. We’ve heard him talking about the fishing industry that motivated many people to relocate to the town, then drove them away, and why he continues to stay there.
It kind of feels like we were riding along with them.
In fact, by the end of each episode, I tend to feel like we’ve just been introduced to a fascinating new corner of Canada and met some of the lovely people there.
And, in a way, we have.
Still Standing is free to stream on Tubi, Freevee, and Pluto. Even though I just started watching it, there have already been nine seasons of the show and a tenth one is in progress!
All photos in this post are via Still Standing/CBC. Quotes are from Johnny Harris.
