This week I spoke to comedian, Matty Vu about his experience as a producer and co-host, diversity in comedy, and his recent feature on CBC’s “Next Wave of Comedy”.

Matty’s journey in stand-up began six years ago when he enrolled in a stand-up class with Instant Theatre, a school that you also may remember from our article with Nathan Hare. Prior to this, Matty was a frequent attendee at The Laugh Gallery, a longstanding show run by Graham Clark. As a result of the friendship with Graham that he had established as an audience member, Matty’s first sets upon graduating from Instant Theatre were on The Laugh Gallery; an unusually quick trajectory for a new comedian. But after a run of well-received performances, he parlayed these sets into appearances on more shows, quickly gaining experience as a performer and confidence in his material.

Bloodfeud and Yellow Fever

While taking stand-up classes at Instant Theatre, Matty was also offered the opportunity to supplement his performing chops and take some improv classes. There he met improviser Malcolm McLeod, and over the next few months, they began tinkering with the idea for a collaborative show featuring both stand-up comedy and improv. Having made friends in both genres of performance, Matty wanted to create a show in which they could come together and create a unique experience for the audience. Eventually, this materialized into Bloodfeud; a show that has now run for three years with the format of four stand-up comedians performing material that inspires long-form improv by a team of improvisers. The inspiration for the name came from the online banter between Matty and Malcolm in which they would sign each of their posts with #bloodfeud. As for the format of the show, Matty says that “we’ve basically stolen from every show” they enjoy to form Bloodfeud. Examples of this include implementing dual hosting duties that were present at Jokes Please, as well as ensuring a talent pool of mixed genders, races and backgrounds that Matty enjoyed at The Laugh Gallery.

In addition to Bloodfeud, Matty also serves as a co-host and co-producer of Yellow Fever, a show that was recently featured alongside Bloodfeud in the JFL Northwest comedy festival. He says that the goal of Yellow Fever was to provide a platform for newer, less-experienced Asian comics to showcase their material to a wider audience. When he was approached by JFL Northwest to be included in the festival, Matty says that alongside co-producers Tin Lorica and Ronald Dario, they recognized the opportunity to push the organizers of JFL to promote Yellow Fever as more than simply a diversity act, or a symbolic checkbox on the festival. After several discussions on what this would look like, they were able to negotiate a larger venue in the Biltmore Cabaret as well as a great headliner in Sheng Wang. Matty describes this year’s festival as an amazing experience for him as Yellow Fever opened on the first night of the festival and Bloodfeud was featured on the closing night. I had the pleasure of being on the first-ever installation of Yellow Fever, and would like to credit myself for being the absolute sole reason behind its success.

The Mechanics of Producing Comedy

Between Bloodfeud, Yellow Fever, and another show titled Craft and the Furious, Matty has had extensive experience as a producer and host. (In case you thought you were the only one with this idea, Craft and the Furious is a show in which Matty and other comedians join the audience in making crafts while watching movies from The Fast and The Furious franchise). He says that one of his key learnings as a producer is recognizing that “you have to do a lot of the work,” before you even get to perform. From marketing the event, booking performers and even stocking the bar for the audience, there is a lot of offstage work that goes into producing a successful show. To expand on booking talent, Matty explains that “you can’t just say yes to everybody or reject everybody” either, but he has placed an emphasis on representing voices from people of colour and female comics. When he began performing, he didn’t feel like he belonged or even enjoyed many of the rooms he was in, so improving this experience for other comedians and audiences has been a huge source of inspiration for how he curates talent on his own shows.

Moving to his hosting duties, Matty says that cultivating a good flow with his fellow hosts is often “the thing we worked the hardest on for the show”. For example, through the first editions of Bloodfeud, Matty and Malcolm tried an adversarial approach with one another, but they found that this did not always resonate well with audiences. Eventually, they realized that in the context of a show, “your audience is the guest in the host’s house,” and that it is the host’s responsibility to both earn the audience’s trust and set the following performers up for success. At times, this can mean dealing with unruly guests or as in one instance welcoming an entire bachelorette party who came to a very special edition of Bloodfeud. Aside from all twenty of them leaving five minutes before the show ended to catch their limos, Matty claims that they were a relatively good crowd due to a smattering of light warnings and jabs towards them to open the show. He explains that addressing a potentially rambunctious crowd from the very beginning can help diffuse any negative ideas, and even a simple “don’t be annoying” can help ensure a positive experience for everyone in the room.

The New Wave of Standup

Matty’s most recent accomplishment in comedy was being featured on CBC’s “New Wave of Standup” series that was filmed during the JFL Northwest festival and was recently released online. He was the opening performer when it came time to film, and though he admits he was nervous to go first, it was a relief to be finished as he saw the nerves from the other comics yet to go on. As a bonus for those of you who like Easter eggs, he also says that in some of the subsequent performances you can see him in the background “dancing, or doing something silly” with the other comedians. You have to love content with solid rewatch value. Matty says that this experience was extremely validating to not only be selected for this series but also to be given freedom by the producers to curate his set the way he wanted it to be. More holistically, he considers this one of the highlights of his stand-up career thus far, reflecting on some of the negative experiences he has had in comedy in contrast to “this fun night where you get to feel special doing stand up”.

Six years into comedy, Matty says that his comedic style has remained relatively unchanged since he began. He attributes this to the fact that since he was twenty-nine years old when he started, “I was a mostly formed human person” and therefore still has similar outlooks on life and comedy. In terms of his material itself, Matty noticed that “a lot of comics talk about things that make them mad, where I’m just like no, these are the things I love”. For myself, this positive world-view separates Matty’s sets from most others, and I think audiences who have seen him would share the same notion. Earning opportunities to perform on new shows and with new comedians continues to fuel Matty’s passion for comedy, but he recognizes that the current state of comedy still has room for improvement. He says that while it is great to see more Asian comics onstage, it’s important to continue supporting venues and shows that provide these opportunities, stating that simply “having that space will keep people to stick around and do more”.

In case you are wondering, Matty cites the “silly and terrible” Tokyo Drift as his favourite in the Fast and Furious canon. To keep up with him, look for @themattyvu on social media, and check out his set on CBC’s “The New Wave of Standup”.

Follow A Musing on Facebook and Instagram for more content on Matty and the other creatives in this series.

And don’t forget to check out last week’s article with aerialist, Marianne Rico.

-BF.