Recent PhD Jason Wilson on Humour in the Trenches: from the Globe & Mail

Growing up in the cheek-by-jowl townhouses of Keele and Finch in the 1970s, Dr. Jason Wilson couldn’t accept that his Scottish-Canadian pastiness was a bad fit with his Jamaican neighbours’ music. In a city where the gifts of ethnicity are there for the taking, the budding keyboardist ignored the funny looks and grew up to be a Juno-nominated reggae artist. So when this genre-bending 43-year-old took the stage at Hugh’s Room recently and made the Great War his theme, he naturally went looking for the laughs. Stereotypes about what’s appropriate just don’t seem to apply. “People say I’m fearless,” he says, with a strong strain of self-denial. “But that’s not it. I just don’t consider the idea that I’m offending anyone.” If you want to know about the key role played by female impersonators on the front lines, Mr. Wilson’s your man. As the centenary of the First World War approaches, he has devised a tribute show to weird wartime comedy troupes that were the forerunners of modern satire. Or, as Mr. Wilson puts it in his accompanying book, The Soldiers of Song, “The seeds of black humour that inspired the likes of Monty Python, Saturday Night Live and SCTV were sown in the trenches of the Great War.”
Read the rest of the story at the Globe and Mail