The Guelph Comedy Festival is looking to bond people through laughter this year during the pandemic by offering in-person and virtual attendance options.
“Laughter creates strong bonds,” said Hayley Kellett, a board member of the Guelph Comedy Festival.
“We've been separated from people we love, people we care about over the last 20 months and we're just starting to come back together and so our goal with these shows, is to celebrate that, make it feel good, start laughing together as a community and reminding each other of the connections whether we're in person or virtual."
Kellett said the festival’s focus is always to build community through comedy.
This year’s festival will have stand-up, improv and sketch comedy performers who appeared in several Canadian major festivals including Just for Laughs, JFL 42, Winnipeg Comedy Festival, Toronto Sketch Fest, Toronto Fringe, and more.
The Guelph Comedy Festival has a total of seven shows, one interactive games night, and four workshops beginning Oct. 22. All tickets and performer times and details are available online.
The schedule will feature a variety of local and national stand-up comedians, improvisers and sketch-performers, including Canadian Comedy Award winner Tom Hearn, The Great Canadian Baking Show host Alan Shane Lewis, and local improv artists from The Making Box.
The festival opens on Friday Oct. 22 with Fest-Timers, a long-held tradition celebrating new talent trying stand-up comedy for the very first time and finishes on Oct. 24 with an Improv Jam where performers and audience volunteers close the festival together.
Live shows will take place at 10C. The festival will use a sliding scale for ticket and workshop prices.
“We're also going to be live streaming all of the shows so for anyone that would prefer to keep their PJs on and sit in their living room and join us for the festival, you can absolutely purchase the tickets for the virtual stream," said Kellett.
The festival has been running every year since 2012 except for last year where it took time off because of the pandemic.
“I remember when it passed, I just felt I missed those connections and so I'm really excited to reconnect with the community people I haven't seen in a while and give an opportunity for folks to bring their friends and family together through laughter, more than ever,” said Kellett.
