Colin Marshall sits down in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver, British Columbia with comedian and podcaster Dave Shumka, co-host with Graham Clark of Stop Podcasting Yourself. They discuss what everyone in Vancouver is, a little bit; the city’s much-touted “livability”; becoming that icon of fun that is a comedian in “No Funcouver”; the origin of Stop Podcasting Yourself; the newly classic Vancouver lifestyle up in downtown condos versus the classic classic Vancouver lifestyle in his hundred-year-old house; waking up in adulthood to find himself in a reasonably cool city; the pull, for comedians and media people, of both Toronto and the United States; his job overseeing international music at the CBC, and to what extent it puts his finger on the pulse of the Canadian musical consciousness; whether music will always out-cool comedy; the quaintness of the Canadian media experience; whether Vancouver has stories to tell, and how he’d like to see them told; the scarred hookers of the less-scary-than-sad Hastings Street; how many Torontonians it takes to screw in a lightbulb; the struggle for comedic visas; the descent of the stretchpant; Vancouverites’ tendency to luxuriate in the idea that they could, theoretically, ski and windsurf in a single day; how he heard the call of comedy at a Salvadoran restaurant; his strategic conversational use of mundane topics; Vancouver’s stinkiest buses; and the most fruitful sources of ridiculousness he has, including dumbness and his own simulation thereof.
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