There are few Canadian comedians with as much heart and holiday cheer as K. Trevor Wilson. The award-winning comedian is most famous for his role as Squirrelly Dan in the acclaimed comedy series Letterkenny.
In the spirit of the holidays, Wilson will be releasing Christmas with a K — a Christmas comedy album complete with Christmas misadventures, satirical songs and a refreshing take on the “war on Christmas” — on Dec. 6.
“If you’re struggling with being nice to others on Christmas, you’ve missed the point,” Wilson said.
Wilson came up with the idea of making a Christmas album last winter when he was shooting Letterkenny in Sudbury.
“I was […] driving around with my then girlfriend, now fiancée, cranking the Christmas station on the radio and singing along to all the songs,” he said.
“She was like ‘You should put out your own Christmas record, if you’re just going to sing all the songs anyways.’”
Wilson then called up Comedy Records, put together a team and recorded the album throughout the summer. In fact, Wilson’s album was mainly recorded in Winnipeg — which holds a special place for Wilson.
“Winnipeg is one of my favourite places to club,” he said. “My first festival was the Winnipeg Comedy Fest […] I recorded my last two albums at Rumor’s.”
According to Wilson, the famously bitter Winnipeg winters have a lot to do with our need to laugh — especially at ourselves.
“I find whenever I go to Manitoba, it’s a good time because you guys have a sense of humour about yourselves, you don’t take yourselves too seriously, you know what’s weird about you and you’re fine with it and that’s a cool thing,” he said.
Wilson attributed the unique Canadian sense of humour to the history of comedy and storytelling in Canada.
“If you look way, way back into the starting of humour in Canada and the great Canadian humourists, it came out of storytelling,” he said.
“It came out of people sitting around, trying to keep warm and distracting each other from the cold with funny stories […] We know we’re going to be stuck in doors with each other for six months out of the year, so you have to at least pretend to be civil.”
Wilson described Canadian humour as somewhere in between British and American, but added that Canadian humour also comes from having “the Indigenous art of storytelling as part of our natural identity.”
However, at its heart, Wilson believes our humour centres around the stereotypical Canadian “niceness” that comes out as sarcasm.
“Sarcasm is the great Canadian art — being nasty without actually being nasty,” he said.
Christmas with a K drops Dec. 6 on digital, vinyl and double LP through ktrevorwilson.com, comedyrecords.ca and independent record stores.
