Jarrett Campbell: Respect for the Grind

Toron­to based come­di­an Jar­rett Camp­bell came across my radar some years ago when he cohost­ed The Rude Dudes pod­cast and I knew he was fun­ny. I tell any­one that will lis­ten that his Twit­ter bio is still my all-time favorite, but it wasn’t until I lis­tened to his lat­est album, Straight White Fail, that I real­ized exact­ly how skilled a come­di­an he real­ly was. Full dis­clo­sure, I’m late to the game of telling you how good this album is, as it got me through dri­ving around Christ­mas shop­ping with­out com­mit­ting vehic­u­lar manslaugh­ter. Hav­ing now lis­tened at least five times, I thought I would see if Camp­bell would sit down and talk with us at Com­e­dy Wham.

Join­ing me via phone from his shel­ter-in-place in Toron­to, amidst the cur­rent pan­dem­ic, Jar­rett Camp­bell and I had a won­der­ful chat about his com­e­dy start and how it has tak­en him to quite the career, with Straight White Fail receiv­ing a Juno nom­i­na­tion for Com­e­dy Album of the Year. The album also debuted on iTunes at num­ber one and made The Interrobang’s list of 11 of the Best Cana­di­an Com­e­dy Albums of 2019. Inci­den­tal­ly, I agree with them that it is so good for a road trip!

Camp­bell grew up in a small coun­ty out­side a small town. From his descrip­tion, the town of Let­terken­ny looks like a metrop­o­lis by com­par­i­son. To a kid grow­ing up in a town so small, stand up might as well have not exist­ed. Access to it didn’t exist there like it could today. Instead Camp­bell digest­ed com­e­dy in tele­vi­sion form, through car­toons and sit­coms. Giv­en even that lit­tle expo­sure, he knew he want­ed to be a com­e­dy writer. One of his ear­ly expe­ri­ences with standup came in col­lege, watch­ing Jim Jef­fries’ first spe­cial on a plane. Tak­en with the spe­cial, stand up still wasn’t in his mind to try yet. 

For all his self-dep­re­ca­tion, Jar­rett Camp­bell is high­ly intel­li­gent, and pur­su­ing his dream of com­e­dy writ­ing, he grew to under­stand that the best and most imme­di­ate feed­back for joke writ­ing was stand up com­e­dy. He was going to school for tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing at the time and work­ing in tele­vi­sion. Despite his fear of pub­lic speak­ing, he was deter­mined to do it. His first open mic (he still remem­bers his first joke) com­plete­ly bombed, but deter­mi­na­tion kept him com­ing back.

That deter­mi­na­tion turned into an obses­sion for the art itself as he recalls, “…it did not take long for stand up to just take over and become the thing..I was imme­di­ate­ly hooked on it, and then it ruined my life.” It seems that the grind and the hard-fought bat­tles for respect in the world of stand up that some might resent, Camp­bell absolute­ly loves! ​“I just knew that in order to ever get even remote­ly good at this, that it was all about rep­e­ti­tion and stage time.” He adds, ​“I under­stood enough to know that I was going to take a beat­ing for a long fuck­ing time in order to get to a good place.“

Camp­bell also knew a major key to get­ting good was the com­pa­ny you keep. ​“What I did, from an ear­ly age, was I sur­round­ed myself with bet­ter comics than me,” he con­tin­ues, ​“it’s not like I was kiss­ing ass or try­ing to get around these guys, those are gen­uine­ly the peo­ple that made me laugh and that I respect­ed.” Laughs from these guys were earned, not giv­en, and seemed to be a good gage for where he was with his writ­ing. And who were some of these influ­ences? Tyler Mor­ri­son, Dave Mer­he­je of Hulu’s Ramy, and K Trevor Wil­son of Let­terken­ny.

Jar­rett Campbell’s love and respect for the grind have paid off, com­ing off a suc­cess­ful year of award nom­i­na­tions and album buzz. And remem­ber that small town col­lege kid watch­ing Jim Jef­feries’ first spe­cial on the plane? Well he got to per­form at The Jim Jef­feries Gala at Montréal’s Just For Laughs last year.

• Lis­ten to Jar­ret­t’s Straight White Fail is avail­able now on iTunes, Spo­ti­fy, and cdbaby.

Fol­low Jarrett

• Twit­ter @jarrettcampbell