Aurora Browne on Laughter, Time Management, and Swearing in Song

By Bob Kerr

There is a saying that goes: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”

Anyone who’s been working in comedy for over 20 years can attest to how difficult it is to make a living from delivering laughs. But with hard work comes big rewards.

In fact, the same thing could be said about parenting.

Aurora Browne has been able to excel in both camps. She is a huge presence in Canadian comedy for over 25 years, working the improv and sketch circuit and she’s the proud mother of a teenaged son. Her television credits include hosting The Great Canadian Bake-Off and being a cast member of the hit comedy sketch show Baroness Von Sketch, which blew up in Canada and America, garnering praise from actor Michael McKean as well as musicians Tegan and Sara.

Achieving TV stardom while raising a teenaged boy is a herculean effort — especially in Canada — but Aurora Browne makes it work with plenty of laughs along the way.

Being a comedy writer and performer as well as a parent sounds like a fun mix. How has being a parent inspired your comedy?

Well, at the beginning it certainly filled my time with way more poop and it’s hard not to laugh at all the silly disgusting things that happen with a baby.  And it was a direct inspiration too; Nadine Djoury and I made a web series called Newborn Moms. It was about the desperation and craziness about being a new parent. I think the combination of being so tired and out of your depth makes for real honesty, the foundation of comedy. These days my son is 15 and I continue to bond with other parents about the ins and outs of every new stage of having a kid.

Let’s go vice-versa now: How has comedy influenced your parenting?

Well I’m very lucky, my husband Kris Siddiqi is also a comedian, so our home is filled with jokes at all times. It makes it so much easier to go through challenging moments when your sense of humour is there to highlight the ridiculous. And I would say that improv, which is the type of performing we do the most, really does teach you to face life with spontanaiety and openness. “Yes and” works when you are hanging with a kid just as much as it does on stage. And our son is very funny too.  We have so many family memes and sayings, we’re always making up songs together and making each other laugh. It makes us closer every day.

Did working in comedy at all prepare you for motherhood or did it feel like completely new and unchartered territory?

Oh my god, no. Comedy is light and fun and is almost always followed by applause and beer. Parenting is mostly a very lonely experience at the beginning. No one tells you how great that diaper change was. I remember my husband saying, “I have to go to work!” and me saying back, “No, you GET to go to work”. It’s very hard to feel like yourself as a performer when you aren’t performing. Luckily the skills of comedy do start to kick in and allow you to find joy in all the weird terrible moments. And then the big payoff is using all that angst and postpartum time as material. The great gift of comedy is connecting with other people over what makes you cry when you’re on your own.

Between your career in comedy and being a mother, which one has taught you more about yourself?

Honestly, it’s about the same! Both are profound and take all of you to excel at. Of course they are very different and the things I learned were wide apart on the map of Aurora. But I’d be a lesser shallower person without either one of them. Actually now that I think about it, parenting wins out, but not by that much.

What were some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a parent working in the entertainment industry?

Biggest by far — child care and time management. God, I think about all the juggling we did so that we could do rehearsals or go to that audition. I never envied wealth as much as I did when I saw people with nannies having multiple kids. The time to work, or to spend time by myself…so hard to arrange. And don’t get me wrong, we had lots of family support, but time was tough to come by. These days, my son is well able to spend time on his own, but then of course, the guilt of spending nights at a theatre kicks in! It’s such a Catch-22.

In your opinion, what does TV and film get wrong about women?

That’s a good question. Everything? For real though, I think the better way to describe it is just incomplete. With few exceptions, most movies are sausage-fests. Sometimes I sit and point at all the guys on screen and just say “paycheque, paycheque, paycheque…” Also I think women are far weirder and grosser than we get to see on screen. We have weird senses of humour.

Have any family members ever been offended by any jokes you’ve said?

Ha! They haven’t told me if they were. My dad was really critical of a blue joke I made once, so I wrote a song about him titled “Fuck You” that I did nightly at Second City. He was very tickled by that and told the audience around him it was about him.

Any new projects on the horizon?

My husband and I are developing a television show based on an old workplace of his, but I can’t say more than that at the moment! If we manifest it properly you will see it on screen.

Last question: What’s one of your favourite jokes that your son has told you?

Oh my god, my son makes us laugh every day. It’s hard to describe though because it reads in person but is so hard to describe to someone outside our household — let’s just say it involves a lot of quoting our favourite Vines to each other.

You can see Aurora Browne on Baroness Von Sketch streaming on CBC Gem.