Anchorboy by Jay Onrait

the guy at Ryerson whoactually knew what he was doing. One day in 1997 I told him I was going to try my hand at stand-up comedy at Toronto’s Laugh Resort alongside my much funnier friend Peter Sayn-Wittgenstein. The Laugh Resort was located in an old firehall on Lombard Street. The one-time home of Second City in Toronto, the club would hold an amateur night every week. Peter and I, longtime fans of stand-up comedy, thought we’d give it a shot.
    We had just returned from a weekend trip to New York where we had hit up the legendary comedy club Catch a Rising Star. The headliner that evening happened to be a young comedy writer named Louis CK, who at the time was just beginning his stand-up career. I’ll never forget how Peter and I sat in the front row and literally laughed until we cried at Louis’s incredible set, despite the fact that the rest of the crowd pretty much sat in stone-cold silence. I vowed to follow his career from then on, hoping he might catch a break and make it big someday.
    I made two appearances at the Laugh Resort in Toronto, and my best joke involved an article I had recently read in
Details
magazine (back when people read
Details
magazine, or should I say, back when people read magazines at all) about how gender roles were reversed in the porn industry: The women had all the power and made all the money, while the men made next to nothing and had to wait around all day to get called to the set, leading luminaries of the genre like Peter North and Randy West (why were so many male porn stars named after directions?) to complain that they had “no life.”
    “So let me get this straight …” I said onstage in my best stand-up delivery, “they sit around all day and do nothing, and then get called to a porn set to have sex with beautiful women and get paid for it? No life?
That’s my ideal life!
”
    Needless to say, my stand-up career was short lived.
    Thankfully, though, Jeff Cole kindly attended one of my fewappearances and, as he always did, brought his highly sophisticated VHS camera along to record the proceedings. Afterward he gave me the tape, and I sent it home to my mom for safekeeping.
    Fast-forward years later and I’m on the phone with Darcy talking about the
Big Breakfast
job, and she’s asking me if I have “anything else that might show my personality.”
    “Well, a couple of years ago I did some amateur-night stand-up comedy, and I may have a tape of it floating around somewhere.”
    “I need that tape,” said Darcy, in the same ultra-serious tone she would use to say “I do” during our wedding four years later.
    Soon I was off the phone with Darcy and on the phone with my mom in Kelowna, asking her if she wouldn’t mind digging through their basement and tracking down a VHS tape that said “Jay’s Stand-Up” on it. Luckily, I am the light of my mother’s life, and she managed to find the tape in question almost immediately, shipping it off to Winnipeg later that day. Two days later I got a call from Darcy asking if I would like to be the new host of Winnipeg’s only local morning show.
    I was a steadfast negotiator. I flat-out refused to accept anything less than $48,000 for my first year and $53,000 my second year after initially being offered $40,000 for year one and $45,000 for year two. Read all about my negotiating tactics in my next book,
Zero Leverage: The World of Canadian Television
.
    Truthfully, it was a big salary bump from what I was making at the time, and at this point it wasn’t really about the money anyway. It was time to try something different and challenge myself a bit. I had been given the sports director job in Saskatoon based on the promise that I would stick around for five years, but it was time to move on and Lisa wasn’t too upset about it. She said some wonderful things to me when I told her I was leaving, telling me I had really grown as a broadcaster and she was sad to see me go. I really appreciated how kind she was. I was sad