Who: Allana Reoch and Filip Jeremic

What: Merciless character-driven sketches poking fun at every walk of life: “We take no prisoners.”

Where: Catch them at The Jokebox the second Monday of every month at Comedy Bar (945 Bloor St.), plus other shows at various venues.

Website: britishteethcomedy.com

How would you describe your sense of humour?

AR: I want to say highbrow, but it’s also pretty lowbrow. A lot of our references our very specific, but they’re specific to the character.

FJ: We have this one sketch where we’re a really raunchy biker couple from Hamilton and the couple themselves are really disgusting and vulgar and have a filthy sense of humour, but the references they make are pretty clever.

What’s your favourite place to perform?

AR: We’ve performed in some really sketchy scenarios and I think those are my favourite just because they’re the best stories. We performed at a birthday party at the Old Mill Inn and Spa, just in one of their rooms, and we had to perform next to the buffet.

FJ: Right before we went up, I whispered to her, “Okay, I’m going to walk in next to the beef, and you walk in next to the cake.” Because that’s what we had to work with.

AR: When we perform at Comedy Bar, a lot of the people who are there to see us are people we’ve invited. But when we perform at places like that, it’s always for people who A.) haven’t seen us and B.) have zero interest in comedy, which I think makes us up our game.

What’s the one joke you’ll leave out of a set if your parents are in the audience?

AR: None.

FJ: It just so happens that a lot of our fans are middle-aged people. They’re friends of ours and people in the comedy community, but then it’s a lot of like, our friends’ parents. We have a group of middle-aged ladies who see our shows regularly. Whenever we have people opening for us, like stand-ups or hosts, they’ll come backstage and they’ll be like, “Um, I see that your audience is a lot of older people, should I keep it clean?” And we’re like, absolutely not. They may not look it, but they love the raunchy shit.

Fart jokes: Yay or nay?

AR: It’s complicated. We do have a sketch that is all fart jokes. It’s about a girl from Finland and her name is Faart Hoole. And the whole sketch is farts. Obviously. It has to do with the language barrier. We don’t really do it in our sets, but I have seen comedy where it’s simply people farting and I’m loving it. Sometimes if you’re in the right mood…

FJ: Go big or go home.

How dark is too dark? Where do you draw the line?

FJ: I really like it when things are dark. We have this sketch where we’re a British brother and sister and we just killed and ate our parents. And we’re like, now what do we do? Because we realized we can’t live our lives without them, because we’re just children. There’s this general rule in theatre that a comedy has to end happily. So I love it when we have a sketch that’s really funny and the last line is horrific. Then the lights go down.

Whose style of comedy do you most emulate?

FJ: We always go back to Catherine Tate. She’s a genius.

AR: It’s simply her ability to be every character she plays, fully. You believe that she is that person, every single time.

FJ: She’ll go from playing an old gay man to a British schoolgirl to everything in between. Her comedy is what we strive to do—she really runs the gamut of all kinds of characters. They’re very specific. They’ve got all sorts of details and idiosyncrasies that real people would have. You can tell they come from an intelligent place and they’re well thought-out.

What’s the one joke that always kills?

AR: In one sketch I say, “You’re all a bunch of suckcockers.”

FJ: ’Cause we’re these French-Canadian school children. Instead of saying “cocksuckers,” they say “suckcockers.”

British Teeth perform at The Jokebox at Comedy Bar (945 Bloor St. W.) on Monday, May 20. $5 at the door. 8 p.m.

Of growing up in Wingham, Ont., Alice Munro has said, “The worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself.’” Some 80 years later, we tend to operate on the opposite assumption (Instagram, anyone?), which is good news for Andrew Kaufman. Although the Toronto-based author comes from the same town as Munro—population 2,875—his writing veers away from her characteristic grim realism. Kaufman’s signature move is to recast mundane truths in an extraordinary light. In his first novella, 2003’s All My Friends Are Superheroes, the protagonist really does belong to a coterie of exceptional friends, although their superpowers—The Stress Bunny absorbs other people’s anxieties; The Battery is prone to emotional outbursts—are simply familiar traits magnified to a comic extent.

“I think we’re finally at a point in the culture where we’re saying, Let’s just be okay with the fact that everyone’s a little weird,” Kaufman says, sitting behind a desk in his tidy office at Artscape Wychwood Barns. Like comedian Louis C.K., Kaufman trades in banal surrealism, using an absurdly distorted lens to explore common anxieties about family. His three subsequent books (The Waterproof Bible, The Tiny Wife, and, most recently, Born Weird) form an arc tracing the lifetime commitments that represent our most significant—and terrifying—milestones. “To me, it’s all one story,” he says.

So when Kaufman’s editor gave him the opportunity to revise Superheroes for its 10th anniversary edition, it seemed almost perverse. “The book is written from such a place of optimism and romance that, 10 years later, it was pretty well impossible for me to get back into that vibe,” the author admits.

Instead, for the recently published new edition, which includes a series of illustrations by Tom Percival, Kaufman tacked on 25 additional “superheroes” to the end of the book. “I could definitely go back in there and write a different story,” he says, “but I don’t feel like what I would create would honour the original structure. It would be Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.” Consciously revising a character’s story, for Kaufman, can feel opportunistic and ultimately dishonest. “For me, writing is really active—there’s something I need to figure out. If I went back to All My Friends Are Superheroes, I wouldn’t be exploring my anxieties around making a lifetime commitment. It would be false.”

At a time when many authors choose to work out their feelings through memoir, Kaufman finds a deeper meaning in allegory. His latest novel, Born Weird, which was nominated for the 2013 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, centres on the Weird siblings, each of whom was given a “blursing”—both a blessing and a curse—by their grandmother at birth. Lucy is never lost; Abba has eternal hope; Angie always forgives. Once again, the author magnifies single traits to fantastical proportions. Yet the characters feel specific, and he builds such a sturdy world around them that the reader has no choice but to surrender to its mad logic.

Kaufman props up his brand of magic realism by setting his books firmly in contemporary Toronto, where he lives with his wife and two children. “I’m really asking a lot of the reader’s suspension of disbelief,” he acknowledges. The accuracy with which he depicts the city grounds the surreal elements of his writing. It may be hard to imagine an invisible man drinking a beer, but if he’s drinking it at Pauper’s Pub on Bloor Street, you can picture it a little more easily. Kaufman also views Toronto as “a blank slate.” He says, “If you set a story in New York, it becomes part of the mythology of New York.” The same can’t be said of Toronto, which in popular film has a history of standing in for cities like Chicago, New York, and Boston.

“When did Toronto start being itself?” Kaufman wonders. “Maybe the late ’70s?” That this question is still up for debate makes the current landscape of Canadian literature fertile ground. “I think Canadian fiction came of age in the late ’60s and ’70s, and what was in vogue then was that solemnness—the understated, the focus on family life. I think that perspective is at the point now where people are writing CanLit the same way they’re writing detective fiction or horror stories. It really is a genre.”

Kaufman’s writing, on the other hand, feels untethered to the typically moody fare that scares university students away from Canadian lit courses. His body of work is contributing to a new syllabus, one that leaves ample room for theatricality—and isn’t afraid to demand a little attention.

Andrew Kaufman reads from Born Weird at Harbourfront Centre (235 Queens Quay W.), May 22, 7:30 p.m.

The only thing in popular music more valuable than youth is that nebulous quality some call “authenticity.” Soul singer Charles Bradley is following a path similar to his label-mate Sharon Jones, who went from being a prison guard at Rikers Island to the jewel in the crown of Daptone Records, a funk and soul label based out of Brooklyn. In 2011, at the age of 62, Bradley released his debut album, No Time for Dreaming. Victim of Love lacks some of the variety of that recording, but it’s nevertheless a passionate and moving collection.

The oft-repeated Otis Redding and Al Green comparisons are spot-on—Bradley’s signature yelp is as well worn as an old pair of jeans. When he sings, “All I’m asking” at the top of “Let Love Stand a Chance,” he unleashes so much anguish in those three words that you don’t even need to hear what it is he’s asking for. Set to a perfectly paced shuffle, “You Put the Flame On It” demonstrates that same yelp’s capacity for conveying joy as well as pain. The title track features sparse instrumentals, a pure showcase for Bradley’s voice.

Daptone may get flak for its pursuit of aging soul singers who missed their shot the first time around—for the cynical listener, a guy like Bradley might sound more like a museum piece than a living, breathing artist. But when the results sound so obviously,  wrenchingly sung from the heart, it’s hard to argue with the label’s approach.

Playlist picks: “You Put the Flame On It,” “Where Do We Go From Here,” “Strictly Reserved For You”

Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires play the Phoenix (410 Sherbourne St.) on May 11.

Arts & Crafts: 2003-2013 is one of many commemorative events marking the Toronto indie label’s tenth anniversary. It’s a fitting timeline—the label formed at a time when people began to “curate” rather than simply organize a show or compilation album. A&C’s two-disc collection is an accurate cross-section of the label’s output, from Amy Millan and Jason Collett’s sunny guitar pop to the scrappy classic rock riffs of Zeus to the introverted ambition of the group that started it all, Broken Social Scene. The various offshoots of BSS—Millan, Collett, Feist, Apostle of Hustle, etc.—make up the bulk of the album (and the label’s roster). The compilation presents an interesting juxtaposition between earlier, brighter material, like the sparkling production of Feist’s two numbers, and the brooding soundscapes of Cold Specks and Snowblink (the song titles say it all: “Demon Host,” “Blue Moon”).

The first disc is a diverse playlist, with relative newcomers like Dan Mangan and Timber Timbre sharing space with early joiners who in 10 years have gone from ambitious upstarts to Canadian indie-rock luminaries. Along with more new artists and lesser-known tunes, disc two features rarities like “Deathcock,” a previously unreleased You Forgot It In People–era BSS track. At two and a half hours in total, the album is not without filler (I’m not sure the second disc needed a 12-minute Kevin Drew song, even if he did co-found the label), but its deliberate sprawl reflects the label’s ethos of inclusion.

The micro-generation of indie fans who were in their 20s when A&C was formed and the excitement bubbled over to the rest of the world will be thrilled to have a physical manifestation of the scene, packaged and mythologized for generations to come. The label’s handcrafted aesthetic is evident in both the choice of songs and the 24-page booklet that accompanies them. Still, compared to someone like Frank Zappa’s compilations, which were full of twisted stage banter and killer live cuts that blended seamlessly—and surprisingly—into each other, Arts & Crafts: 2003-2013 feels more reverential: A snapshot meant to be looked at rather than explored.

Playlist picks: “Are You Gonna Waste My Time?,” “You! Me! Dancing!”

Arts & Crafts host the Field Trip Music and Arts Festival at Fort York and Garrison Common on June 8.

Since its inception in 1994, Vice has expanded from a zine-like Montreal publication to a global media empire—the company has offices in 18 countries and runs several websites, a record label, and a film department. For its latest venture, Vice Media Inc. has joined forces with HBO on a weekly 30-minute news series called Vice.

When it comes to Vice, it can be hard to distinguish news from entertainment. Its charismatic CEO, Shane Smith, is often characterized as a sort of hipster Peter Pan, a prankster who doesn’t want to grow up. Like parents signing off on their kid’s field trip, Bill Maher is listed as an executive producer and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria as a consultant.

As a company, Vice’s mission is to have a good time, which can give its news coverage a disjointed feel, as if we’re having a little too much fun watching other people suffer. As a TV show, Vice aims to “expose the absurdity of the modern condition,” according to its opening credits. Its slapdash aesthetics—reporters appear on air in jeans and flannel shirts, and the narration is conspicuously casual—openly defy the formal, detached reporting style of mainstream journalism. Compared to the stuffy, airbrushed atmosphere of traditional news channels, Vice is scruffily appealing, the underdog Starks to cable’s gleaming Lannisters.

Vice’s unkempt correspondents are the real stars of the show, constantly pointing out the ways in which their reporting puts them in danger: The “Escape from North Korea” segment is ridiculously short for such a huge undertaking, but there’s enough time for the reporter to point out that he’ll probably end up in jail if the group is caught—as if we’re worried about this guy and not the people leaving their families behind in search of a better life.

TV news has traditionally been a bastion of unbiased reporting—it’s this legacy that Aaron Sorkin clumsily advocates for in (ironically, HBO’s) The Newsroom. You could argue that Vice’s bros-on-the-ground approach is as close to unbiased reporting as you can get; this happens because they dispense with the illusion that unbiased journalism is even possible, a precedent set by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. Both of those comedians cultivate an irreverent attitude towards news reporting that Vice has always embraced across its platforms. In the process, the brand has reeled in a demographic that is notoriously tricky to monetize: young people who get their news online.

The show is appealing in part because it is selling a fantasy: Wouldn’t it be great, Vice seems to ask, if world peace were as simple as hopping on a plane and grabbing a drink with a warlord? It’s not that simple, of course, but Vice does have one advantage over its competitors. As a recent New Yorker profile pointed out, the company is a media anomaly in that it makes money rather than loses it. In 2011, Vice was valued at US$200 million, and Forbes estimates it could eventually be worth a billion. It costs money to produce segments shot in remote locations that they may not be able to access legally. It costs money to take risks.

Vice Media Inc. has built its reputation on its willingness to court controversy. Vice offers no shortage of powerful images, but the show is in such a hurry to move on to the next segment that it fails to provide any real context. Talking heads range from professors to warlords, but it’s difficult to know how much credibility to give their claims when their credentials are brushed over to fit in one more shot of a child holding an AK-47.

This is the enduring paradox of Vice: I saw things on the show that I had never seen before, but I somehow felt dumber after watching it. Offering Vice as an alternative to people who don’t like to read the news is like giving a photo album to someone who is illiterate. If you don’t already consume the news in some form, this isn’t going to help you very much, although it will probably give you something to talk about with your friends at the bar—and that’s really all Vice needs from its viewers. The HBO program functions less as a stand-alone show than a televised ad for the company, which has always made more sense online than in any other medium. Vice gets excited about a topic, shows off a quick, titillating glimpse, then leaves it behind—if that’s not a commercial for the internet age, I don’t know what is.

Vice airs Fridays at 11 p.m. on HBO.

Music: It’s not just for ears anymore!

Burlington band Walk Off the Earth wound up in a strange but exciting position last year, when one of their videos went viral. The clip, which featured all five members of the group performing Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” on just one guitar, attracted a ton of YouTube hits—to date, it boasts over 148 million views. Not only that, it arguably launched the original single in North America, where the Australian singer’s hit song had yet to make waves. Walk Off the Earth’s recently released third LP, R.E.V.O., primarily features original songs, but they still view covers as an integral part of what they do. “We share the same ideas about how to be a band,” says keyboard player Mike Taylor of his colleagues. “The first step is, throw the rule book out the window. That goes from the instruments we play to how we let our music be heard.” Vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Sarah Blackwood sees the band’s video output as a natural way to engage with music fans in 2013. “People are visually stimulated nowadays,” she says. “I want to see a picture if you’re going to tell me a story. If you’re going to sing a song, I want to see you sing it to me. People’s attention spans get shorter and shorter, and they’re like, ‘We want more!’”

Covers and originals aren’t mutually exclusive.

“Somebody That I Used to Know” may be their most successful cover, but Walk Off the Earth had put up videos covering songs by The Gregory Brothers, Adele, and even Eminem well before they got around to Gotye. Taylor calls guitarist Gianni Luminati the “driving force” behind the clips: “He’s just that guy,” he says, shrugging. The band likes to put a different spin on the material they post on YouTube. See, for example, their a capella version of Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble,” or their performance of “Little Boxes,” the theme song to the TV show Weeds, on a set made entirely of cardboard. “If you put up a song that somebody knows and loves, you have a better chance of them discovering your band than if you just continue to put up songs that nobody’s going to know anything about,” Blackwood says. “Plus, we like really awesome songs and sometimes those awesome songs are written by other people.” Taylor insists the hyped-up covers aren’t the only songs that appeal to fans. “When we play shows, they’re singing along with our originals just as much as any of the covers we mix into our set. The only people who really seem to talk about it have been the media. No offence.” None taken.

They just might be the solution to the music industry’s woes.

R.E.V.O. was already in the works when Walk Off the Earth filmed “Somebody That I Used to Know.” “Everything that happened around that time was just the perfect storm,” Taylor says. After the Gotye video exploded online—and after the band appeared on Ellen in January 2012, performing the song on one guitar and receiving five shiny new Fenders in return—Walk Off the Earth signed with Columbia Records. They insist that their move to a major label hasn’t changed much about the way they approach music-making. “We’ve all been in bands for so long and we’ve seen things that work and things that don’t work,” Blackwood says. “I was doing more traditional stuff, touring full-time with a band, and Gianni would always be like, ‘You don’t need to tour that much anymore. We’ll make videos and the whole world will see us and it’ll be great.’” Now that that model has proved successful, Walk Off the Earth is trying to negotiate their own kind of distribution model, a hybrid of old and new. “It hasn’t been, like, all of a sudden we’re signed to this label and now we have to tour and put out a record,” says Blackwood. “We can play a show live on the internet for as many people across the world as we want, or we can go on tour for three weeks and reach 60,000 people.”

Walk Off the Earth play the Danforth Music Hall (147 Danforth Ave.) on April 12.

Unseasonable flurries aside, The Bicycles picked the right time to release their first album since 2008. Stop Thinking So Much is an album for patios, backyard barbecues, and good friends.

“Good friends” seems like an accurate description of the members of this perennial Toronto band. They’re pictured in the liner notes wearing matching retro Jays–style baseball jerseys, and the cover design features a giant letter “B” composed of selections of the band’s emails during the album’s planning stages—all details that might lead you to think The Bicycles are a little too adorable. But what else can you expect from a group that titled their 2006 album The Good the Bad and the Cuddly?

Still, despite song titles like “Bandana Cat”—a Hall and Oates–ishly smooth ride—and “Nap Trap,” Stop Thinking So Much isn’t at all cloying. Four out of five members of the group share songwriting credits, with drummer Dana Snell’s laid-back lead vocals bookending the album on opener “Appalachian Mountain Station” and the final song, “Nap Trap.” The band keeps things characteristically short and sweet, with 12 songs that clock at just over 30 minutes in total.

The Bicycles are clearly having a blast on this recording, but more importantly, they’ve created the perfect soundtrack to float you through the summer.

Playlist picks: “Bouncin’ Off the Bay,” “The Sun Don’t Wanna Shine”

The Bicycles play Lula Lounge (1585 Dundas St. W.) on April 4.

On her breakthrough album, released a dozen years ago, the cotton candy–haired singer known to most as P!nk lamented that she was M!ssundaztood. Since then, she’s become a chart-topping superstar. Most people assume that she’s all badass and bravado, but as we’ve determined, P!nk contains multitudes.

Click here for our extensive P!nk lyrical analysis.

P!nk plays the Air Canada Centre (40 Bay St.) on March 11. 416-870-8000, ticketmaster.ca.

Your reaction to the title of My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James’s first full-length solo album may serve as an indication of whether or not you’ll have the patience for its unabashed pretentiousness.

The project is inherently self-indulgent: It’s an album by a guy who took his own first name as his last and who sings and plays almost all the parts. Opener “State of the Art (A.E.I.O.U.)” sets the album’s moody, introspective tone with the murky, underwater feel of the opening bars of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter.” The sense of being submerged contrasts with James’s brand of celestial folk-rock, which feels simultaneously grounded and ethereal. James’s voice is front and centre throughout, smothered in reverb and dripping with shaky vulnerability.

For an album largely preoccupied with the “ticking synchronicity of time,” its tempo doesn’t vary much from a signature slow groove, an annoyance that would make these songs seem unbearably lethargic if they lasted any longer than 38 minutes in total.

Playlist picks: “State of the Art (A.E.I.O.U.),” “All Is Forgiven”

His head is in the Cloud.

Although Bob Saget is widely known for his role as Full House’s neat-freak dad, the actor/director was doing stand-up before Danny Tanner ever existed. But a few things have changed since he began his comedy career in the 1970s: “I have everything floating on my iPhone,” he says. “All my jokes are in the Cloud, so somebody at a Genius Bar could go out and do my show.” A self-avowed control freak despite his “anything goes” approach to show business, Saget’s line of attack is to prepare as much as possible in order to be as loose as he can be in front of an audience. “When I hit the stage at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, I have no concerns over where that hour is going to go. My first 15 minutes is just me going, ‘Hello, I’m here, and I’m really sorry.’”

There are a few more tricks up his sleeve.

One of the touchstones of Saget’s career is the 1998 film Dirty Work, starring Norm MacDonald, Artie Lange, and Chris Farley, which Saget directed. Although it’s become a bit of a cult favourite, he recalls, “Dirty Work did not perform in the theatres. It did not make its money. And that’s the bottom line of how much you get to direct, unless you really fight for it.” He hasn’t fought to direct anything since the 2006 mockumentary Farce of the Penguins, which he also wrote, but he alludes to having another project in the works. Saget is also writing a “memoir-ish” book “about comedy and death,” two subjects that, for him, go hand in hand: “There’s survival, there’s life, there’s death, and then there’s comedy. You can screw up all of those, but don’t screw up comedy.”

Maybe he should have just kept his mouth shut that time.

Saget admits that it can be frustrating to play “the Richie Cunningham part,” something he mistakenly revealed to a journalist at an award show during the Full House era. “I was in Philadelphia getting some award for being a Jew—you know, ‘You’re Jew of the year. Here’s your award.’ I was about to go get my Star of David on a plaque, and this reporter said, ‘Are you ever frustrated by Full House?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I am.’ All of a sudden I’ve got a lunch with my producer and it’s not to tell me he’s going to make my character more funny—he came to take up this article and say, ‘This is in 150 newspapers.’” Happily, Saget has had a dynamic career post–Full House, including an HBO special, multiple TV appearances—he’s the voice of the future Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother, for one—and a stint on Broadway as Man in Chair in The Drowsy Chaperone, a role he got through a former executive producer of Full House, Bob Boyett. “I told him it took him 25 years to get me back in a cardigan sweater.”

He’s not sure how he got away with it.

From the beginning, Saget’s bipolar career has been evenly split between the pure and the profane, but most people were only exposed to his X-rated side after his appearance in the 2005 film The Aristocrats. “I became a bit of a hipster for a moment,” he recalls. “It was like, Who is this guy and why is he planning this career move? I was like, What career move? Somebody asked me to do something and I can’t believe I didn’t get excommunicated from the world.” The movie featured dozens of comedians telling versions of the same joke that was said to be the filthiest ever told, and Saget did not disappoint. “People tell me, ‘You’re dirty,’” Saget says. “I can name you a thousand comedians, 10 of whom are incredibly famous, who are much dirtier than I am. I guess they picture me DustBusting.” The ghost of Danny Tanner—and his OCD-level cleanliness—is a hard one to shake, but Saget doesn’t mind. “You can’t pretend that didn’t happen,” he says of his Full House days. “I was talking to [John] Stamos the other night, and we were saying there are times when people feel like they know a certain character. There’s a comfort; you’re [watching that character] in your living room or in the bedroom. Hopefully we weren’t in too many people’s bedrooms during Full House, because that just crosses all lines.”

Bob Saget performs on March 3 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, 190 Princes’ Blvd., 416-263-3293, queenelizabeththeatre.ca.