Comedy Now!: Ron James - Up & Down in Shaky Town

Ron James spent the early 1990s chasing the American sitcom dream, an endeavor that left him broke and doing manual labor in Los Angeles. He returned to Canada and spun that failure into a hyper-verbal, highly specific hour of storytelling. Rather than leaning on broad setups, he contrasts his childhood fantasies of buying a mail-order submarine with the grim reality of digging Robert Urich’s swimming pool just to stay afloat.

Aired in 1998 as an early episode of CTV’s Comedy Now!, the set functioned as a hard career pivot. James had spent a decade doing improv with The Second City before his lean California years, and he used this televised hour to reintroduce himself as a solo performer. The broadcast resonated enough with Canadian audiences that the network ran it on New Year’s Day for the next seven years.