Photos by M.D. Shorter, click here to see the full set

If you’ve ever smoked a joint and found your way to the Comedy Network on a Wednesday night you may have came across an ignorant asshole who has done everything from put on a feminist’s glasses and imitate her as if she was mentally handicapped, to ask his sister if he can blow her for five bucks to invent a stove top hat that serves as a chicken rotisserie so you can cook your dinner at work — if you’ve been high and come across the bearded jackass responsible for these bits, chances are you were laughing your ass off at The Jon Dore Television Show (Ed. note: the rotisserie bit takes an extra half-bowl or so).

See, Jon Dore, the mastermind behind the hyperbolized, skewed TV persona that is Television’s Jon Dore, will do whatever it takes to get a laugh.

“It’s like seeing the sunset for the first time,” he said. “Or like seeing the sunset for the first time,” he adds, “mostly the latter.”

Whether at him or with him (usually at him), laughs come frequently as the spastic Dore starts each episode with an issue that inspires him to spend the next half-hour trying to solve it through mockumentary-style interviews with real-life experts such as doctors, therapists, and male-strippers.

Unlike similar frameworks on The Daily Show or Da Ali G Show, Dore does not feed off the ignorance of the interviewees, but rather becomes the ignoramus himself.

“What’s interesting is when they feel they have to answer honestly because they’re representing a particular point of view, so they can’t really joke around because they know the power of the edit, so they answer seriously, and that’s fun,” he said.

No one has taken more abuse than the recurring guest therapist Susan Lynne.

She has talked Dore through several issues, including depression and misguided sexual behaviour.

“She’s great,” says Dore. “She’s amazing, I love her. She gets it completely. That’s a very different interview, she knows the crew, and she knows me, so when she comes to the set she just treats me like an actual patient. Nothing is offensive, everything is ok, she’s just there to listen and ask me questions. She’s a different dynamic.”

This laugh kick Dore is on went so far as to invite his aunt on the show. As a Winnipeg nurse she was responsible for the episode where Dore requires about his sperm count.

“[The fertility episode] was born out of a conversation with her. I was in Winnipeg and I was asking her about my descended testicles,” said Dore. “And she said, ‘Yeah, well they could be cooked.’”

Regardless of when Dore’s ball dropped, evidence of his addiction to laughter was apparent when he was the straight-laced goofball co-host of the Roger’s Network regional talk show Daytime. Three years later he would carve a niche as the wacky colour reporter for Canadian Idol. There he got to harass the contestants and audience, and play dress up for three seasons.

Last month the Independent Film Channel in the United States bought all of the episodes of The Jon Dore Television Show and will be showing them over, you guessed it, three seasons.

“It’s scary,” said the 33-year-old (to exhaust the useless trend of threes). “There’s nothing you can do. It’s done, it’s out there.”

Dore cringes at the fact that 45 million American homes will have access to a show that has already been produced and viewed.

“I just feel the first season was done so long ago that we changed so much since then,“ he said. “I see a lot of mistakes, I see a lot of flaws because we know them so well I feel like there’s a lot of episodes I’m embarrassed about when I probably shouldn’t be, it’s just hard to talk about. Some worked out better than others. I should let that shit go. Can I? That’s the test of man.”

Forty-five million is a scary number for a kid from Ottawa, just ask Tom Green. But Dore is coping best he can with the opportunity, and although regrets some episodes and bits, he can’t help but feel he’s making a difference in the hearts of 15-year-old stoners from across the country.

“I liked our discrimination episode, I feel like that was fun, when you do topics like that and [when] an ignorant character walks through it you can kind of get away with a lot,” he said. “Those are very sensitive, real problems for people, so it’s fun to walk the line. I like any episode that we can kind of play with things that are very real to me.

Dore’s commitment to exposing real problems may stem from a farming accident that claimed the life of one of his friends a few years back.

“[A friend] and I were cattle ranchers and we actually herded robot cows, and our goal was to open a . . . we kinda . . . I’m going to stop talking about that, only because a friend of ours died while we were herding robot cows and it’s hard to talk about,” said Dore.

After a moment of sullen pause Dore becomes emotional, “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “But yes, he was crushed by a robot cow. He was milking a robot cow and got electrocuted. You’re not supposed to milk while they are charging; plugged in, ‘cause . . . yeah.”

It’s no wonder Dore is making it his life’s mission to get a laugh exposing social and global issues. Having been through so much trauma in his younger days, Dore now seeks to help his audience cope with life’s injustices.

Dore has made it clear, however, that there will be no future episode that exposes the truth behind robot cow farms and the binary milk they produce.

“It’s done, we can’t go back into that; it’s done.”

You can check out the first two season of The Jon Dore Television show here.

You can also catch him drinking beer and yelling at audience members during his stand up routine in Edmonton June 4-6 at Yuk Yuk’s.

       

Written by :

Johnny Elbow