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.

When commercial film producer Annie Koyama was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm in 2005, her outlook was initially grim. After a long and difficult recovery, she left her advertising job and re-evaluated her priorities, and, in 2007, using cash from some savvy stock-market investments, she formed her own comic-book imprint, Koyama Press. Despite having no publishing experience before she launched the company, she has won critical acclaim and multiple awards. “I just wanted to give [artists] a chance to make a little money,” explains Koyama, who playfully describes her age as “unknown.”

Originally, she says, she let artists keep all proceeds from sales of their work, so that they could focus on developing their craft without having to take on other jobs. “People sometimes call her Saint Annie,” says Michael DeForge, one of four Koyama Press cartoonists nominated this year for the prestigious Doug Wright Awards for English-language Canadian comics. He’s not alone in his boosterism: After local artist Aaron Leighton made the logo for Koyama Press, the publisher asked other cartoonists to come up with versions of the red-dressed queen of comics they call Kickass Annie. Over 200 Annies later, the idea has taken on a life of its own, with contributions from around the world. You can check out Koyama Press at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival this weekend; in the meantime, here are nine of our favourite Kickass Annies.

AARON LEIGHTON (image pictured above)

Home base: Toronto

Style: More comfortable colouring outside the lines

Portfolio: His 2010 Koyama book, Spirit City, featured friendly creatures hanging out in Toronto’s urban landscape.

And BTW… Created the logo for Koyama Press, which T-shirt printer Toby Yamamoto dubbed “Kickass Annie.” The name stuck.

JESSE JACOBS

Home base: London, Ont.

Style: Surreal mythmaking

Portfolio: His Koyama book, By This You Shall Know Him, is nominated for a 2013 Doug Wright Best Book award. (The winner will be announced during TCAF.)

And BTW… In addition to comics and illustration, Jacobs has done skateboard designs.

VICKI NERINO

Home base: Toronto

Style: Exuberant gross-out humour

Portfolio: Nerino’s mini-comic XXX ABC illustrates the alphabet using creatively placed genitals. Not for children.

And BTW… Nerino won the best English-language comic award at Montreal’s Expozine this past April for her book C.R.U.D. #2.

MATTHEW FORSYTHE

Home base: Los Angeles

Style: Childlike wonder

Portfolio: His wordless 2012 Drawn & Quarterly book, Jinchalo, is rooted in Korean folktales and is a companion to his successful and praised 2008 book, Ojingogo.

And BTW… “Jinchalo” is Korean for “really?”

STEVE WOLFHARD

Home base: Los Angeles

Style: Sad yet cute

Portfolio: Wolfhard’s Koyama comic Cat Rackham is the story of the cutest depressed cat you ever did see.

And BTW… Wolfhard re-located from Toronto to L.A. to work on the Cartoon Network’s amazing, imaginatively trippy show Adventure Time, which has also featured contributions from DeForge, Jacobs, and Forsythe.

MICHAEL DEFORGE

Home base: Toronto

Style: Mind-melting alt-horror

Portfolio: His acclaimed Koyama Press series, Lose, launches its fifth issue at TCAF.

And BTW… An insomniac, he regularly chats with Koyama at 2 a.m. He’s also an unapologetic Gossip Girl enthusiast.

SELENA WONG

Home base: Toronto

Style: Detailed and dreamlike

Portfolio: Wong has contributed to the Koyama-published Wowee Zonk anthology, and in 2012, she won a National Magazine Award for an illustration of a desolate landscape in The Walrus.

And BTW… Wong probably draws her pet Netherland Dwarf rabbit more than any other subject.

LISA HANAWALT

Home base: Brooklyn

Style: Detailed anthropomorphic animals, often wearing funny hats

Portfolio: Hanawalt’s illustrations frequently appear in The Believer, and her new book, My Dirty Dumb Eyes, published by Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly, launches at TCAF this weekend.

And BTW… Hanawalt co-hosts the podcast Baby Geniuses with comedian Emily Heller.

Koyama Press will be at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on May 11 and 12. 789 Yonge St., torontocomics.com.

As voguish restaurants pop up, gourmet food trucks start their engines, and snack stands trumpet comfort nosh as a fine art, Toronto is viewed as a paradise by its resident foodies. And for Martin Parr, famed English photographer, who visited to photograph food for a day?

“It was quite like America,” he says over the phone from his home in Bristol, England. “I know that’s the last thing a Canadian wants to hear…. There’s quite a good ethnic mix in Toronto, but that’s there in New York or London. Apart from that, it’s just like anywhere else. Everyone wants to say, ‘Oh, Toronto’s really special; it’s different’—but it’s not. Food’s a big middle-class activity now, so in Toronto, it will inevitably be part of that whole trend.”

The globe-trotting documentarian has photographed donuts in Mexico, Spam tins in Tokyo, and fried Mars bars in Glasgow. In Toronto, he shot restaurants, markets, food courts, stands, stalls, and big-box stores over one “blur of a day” last October, on commission for the Scotiabank CONTACT photography festival. Parr turned his lenses to everyday food long before it was trendy. Junk food—and the litter surrounding it—were important elements in his controversial and groundbreaking mid-’80s series, The Last Resort, which focused on the run-down resort town New Brighton. His follow-up, The Cost of Living (1989), depicted the affluent English middle classes, often with food and drink in their hands. In both series, he was seen to be critiquing consumption, but in the mid-’90s, when he started shooting close-ups of food, his approach became even more deadpan, his pictures saturated with colour but oblique in their meaning. Many people find humour, for instance, in his photographs of ostensibly imperfect food—for CONTACT’s artistic director, Bonnie Rubenstein, his work “allows us to laugh at ourselves or with each other in many ways.” But Parr, ever the contrarian, maintains that “the food pictures aren’t particularly humorous per se.”

He says his motives are straightforward: “You get what you’re given on the plate, and you photograph it for real. It’s counter-propaganda. [When] you go to the supermarket and look at the picture on a package and you look inside, the two have no relationship whatsoever. It’s part of the lies that we’re constantly told. So all I’m doing is showing food as it really is rather than the sanitized version.”

Parr praises the kind of unglamorous, garishly lit pictures you’ll find in a greasy spoon above the counter. And although he is a self-professed foodie, he sought out “more general” establishments in Toronto. Accordingly, his work will be displayed
here in high-traffic, public places: Metro Hall and Pearson airport. “We wanted to contextualize it within a global network of food,” says Rubenstein.

Just last month, in Tokyo, Parr’s daughter, chef Ellen Parr, prepared a meal at a pop-up restaurant where she recreated several of his food photographs—except that “what looked sweet was savoury, and vice-versa.” For instance, Thai broth was presented as if it were a cup of tea. One could view this as an ironic twist on Parr’s attempt to portray food “for real,” although he is as disinclined to interpret his daughter’s work as his own. He does, however, suggest we’ve missed a trick: “Why aren’t they doing this in Toronto?”

This photo, taken at the Dufferin Grove Farmers’ Market, reflects Parr’s own collection of political ephemera—including Barack Obama sneakers, sandals, and underwear. He’s obsessed with dictators, too: In 2004, he published a book called Saddam Hussein Watches.

Parr photographed festival administrator Elena Potter chowing down near a hotdog stand at College and McCaul. In the very act of photographing what he calls unvarnished “real life,” he can affect it as well. Says Potter, “I tried to put on the ketchup in a straighter line than usual.”

This extreme close-up of Poutini’s poutine makes its fries look like worms, recalling a 1995 photo he took of slimy, uncooked sausages. Parr claims he isn’t aiming to repulse: “We’re trying to get nice, colourful, bright pictures of food.”

Controversy and commissions

Martin Parr doesn’t enjoy speaking about his work: “I’m a photographer, not a talker,” he says. Perhaps he’s been worn down by the controversy he’s faced over the years: The Last Resort was widely condemned for “condescension” toward the English working class, and his election to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s agency, Magnum, was opposed by a number of members on the grounds of “anti-humanism.” When asked about the composition of his images, Parr simply sounds weary: “You’re welcome to write anything you like. I don’t care anymore. People write all kinds of stuff about me. You can slag me off; you can do anything you want. I’m creating entertainment—it’s all I’m doing.”

He views his shots of Toronto food as “just solving a problem” of what to shoot on commission in the span of one day, something he feels he did “adequately.” Bonnie Rubenstein is rather more effusive: “The diversity, for sure, is there, and that’s what we felt was important to reflect—we are a very diverse, multicultural city. I do think that the humour is a strong part of it. Some of his work, you could say, is very critical, at the same time. He’s coming out of a documentary stream where it’s not meant to pass judgment—but framing and focus is a way of passing judgment.” —Mike Doherty

Martin Parr’s installation, Food, will be on display at Metro Hall (200 Wellington St. W., at John) until June 2 and at Pearson International Airport (Terminal 1) until Aug. 30.

It’s been about a year since the Fifty Shades of Grey series, about that mopey millionaire and his insufferable sex slave, became a pop-culture phenomenon. In that time, author E.L. James has received a critical flogging (the London Review of Books said she “deploys every bonkbuster cliché in existence”) and inspired a new sub-genre (“mommy porn”) on her way to selling an astounding 70 million books.

Despite its atrocious prose, Fifty Shades has titillated many people and contributed to a broader cultural acceptance of slave-and-master relationships. Now that mainstream readers have warmed to the idea of sadomasochistic sex, perhaps they’ll be ready to embrace Chloe Hooper’s new novel, The Engagement, a more intelligent, writerly, and provocative take on some of the themes in E.L. James’s series.

Liese Campbell, the heroine of The Engagement, is a thirtysomething architect with bad debts who flees England to work for her uncle’s high-end real estate firm in Melbourne, Australia. She soon starts moonlighting as a call girl for a brooding businessman named Alexander Colquhoun. Every few days, she and Alexander meet up, under the auspices of finding him a new home, to have illicit sex—sometimes involving bondage—in the condos she shows him.

Like slap-happy Christian Grey and the virginal Ana Steele, Liese and Alexander’s affair is predicated on a contract, and the tension in The Engagement derives from each person’s expectations of the role he or she is meant to play. The twist is that prior to meeting Alexander, Liese had never accepted money for sex before; their transactions are the result of a misunderstanding that she never cleared up. Alexander, meanwhile, thinks she’s a full-time sex worker.

The idea of prostitution as a pastime no doubt scandalizes some people, but rather than echoing Ana Steele’s moralistic tone, Hooper challenges the reader to see it through Liese’s eyes: as a game, a turn-on, and, of course, a tidy income. While her motives are hazy, Liese is fully in control of the situation, and she comes to enjoy the part, inventing stories about other clients in order to enrich the role play and keep Alexander’s emotions at bay.

None of the ideas discussed in these novels are new, but because they’re often too pulpy, graphic, or academic for mainstream tastes, books about “transgressive” sex have traditionally been hived off in the darkened corners of bookstores. The same way that Fifty Shades is a populist version of bondage books such as Laura Antoniou’s (much kinkier) Marketplace series, The Engagement explores some of the same ground as U.S. author Michelle Tea, who advocates the notion that intelligent, independent women can be sex workers without compromising their self-worth.

While E.L. James’s series has done a great deal to popularize bondage, its greatest failing is propagating an unfounded stereotype about the lifestyle. One of the central planks of the series is the idea that Ana must save her lover from his “perverse” desires. James ties Christian Grey’s predilection for whips and chains to a childhood trauma, thereby perpetuating an old saw that weird kinks are the product of psychological damage.

If you read the Fifty Shades trilogy, you’ll know that Christian and Ana’s fraught foreplay eventually leads to a very traditional outcome: marriage. I can only speculate whether Hooper was deliberately riffing on James’s deep conservatism, but The Engagement takes this puritanical attitude to task. When Liese tells Alexander she’s moving to Shanghai, he kidnaps her in an all-out bid to save her from her perceived slavery—through forced marriage.

“Presumably Alexander wanted to purify his desire,” Liese muses in the chilling final act. “But the whole point of marriage was to cancel out the erotic. It was essentially a contract between two people so as not to have to sleep together.”

Whatever your thoughts on these prickly issues, you have to admire the chutzpah of a writer who suggests that marriage is the ultimate form of oppression—and that freelance sex may be the most freeing sex there is.

If your friends often tell you how funny you are, chances are you’ve considered trying out your best bits on a stage. With a microphone. In front of people. Let’s say you conquer your stage fright—so, what next?

When it comes to increasing your profile, there are ways to stack the deck in your favour: people you should know, ways of conducting your funny business off the stage, and specific places to perform.

“There are certain shows you just have to be at,” says Jeff Paul, a 31-year-old amateur comedian who works days as a program coordinator for CTV in Scarborough. “Yuk-Yuk’s open mic on Tuesday is definitely one of them, and Spirits on Wednesdays. But my best advice is to go to the vapor lounge and hit the weed-comedy shows.”

He’s referring to the stand-up shows at Toronto’s infamous Vapor Central on Yonge and Charles, where stoners congregate to smoke pot and do what people do while smoking said pot. On Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, that includes watching stand-up comedy.

For Paul, Vapor Central’s audience exhibits a key difference compared to those he sees at regular clubs. You guessed it: “Everyone’s high.” The reason it’s such a good place to start, however, is counterintuitive.

“Stoned people are actually a harder audience,” says Paul.  “You really hone your talent therem-n I find.”

It’s a Wednesday night at Vapor Central and the place looks far from a typical comedy club. It’s too busy, for starters. There are easily 160 bloodshot eyes in the room, most distracted by card games, computers, or good old-fashion conversation and cannabis. Cypress Hill (of course) pounds through the speakers, the fog is beyond intoxicating, and  “FREE MARC EMERY” posters adorn the walls of the long, rectangular room. Two college girls intently fill their dry mouths with chicken McNuggets dipped in sweet-and-sour sauce from next door. “I hear there’s comedy tonight,” one says to the other.

The first stand-up comic on the stage is Mike Rita, a Portuguese-Canadian who asks the audience, “Does anyone have any important shit to do tomorrow?”

One patron puts his hand up. No one else even seems to be listening. The room-wide burnout instantly proves Paul’s theory—laughs are going to have to be earned.

“If you can get a reaction out of the stoners, you’re going to kill it in the clubs where people are drunk,” Paul says. Like playing acoustic before electric, “it’s much easier than making the transition the other way.”

K. Trevor Wilson, a 13-year veteran, couldn’t agree more that the stoners are sticklers when it comes to laughs. “The stoned audience is much more attentive. Alcohol makes people rowdier, which is a little easier,” he says.

The Paul-Bunyan lookalike—who’s known as K-Trev—started doing comedy when he was 19 years old and has made huge strides. A true professional, Wilson is often touted as the next big thing in Canadian comedy.

“And that’s not a fat joke,” Paul says. “But Trevor also did and still does the vapor lounges. It’s not only a place to start, but a place to keep practicing.”

Aside from knowing the right venues, Wilson says the ultimate factor for breaking into Toronto’s stand-up comedy scene is to simply be around it.

“You have to show up to every show you can, whether you’re performing or not,” he says. “Introduce yourself to the comics. Ideally, by the time you do your first set, people almost know who you are.”

People certainly know who Wilson is now. He has landed roles in movies (Score: A Hockey Musical), been featured on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, performed at Just For Laughs 42 in Toronto, toured across the country, and is truly a living testament to how to navigate your way through an intimidating field.

“I’m a persistent guy,” he explains. “When I was starting out, I emailed every single club and just tried to sell myself as best as possible.”

It seems to have worked out, as today, Wilson regularly headlines at Toronto’s top clubs (Absolute Comedy, The Rivoli, Yuk Yuk’s), and hosted Janeane Garofalo’s show last March at the Comedy Bar.

“Last year, I hit both Canadian coasts in three months,” Wilson says. “I was everywhere from Halifax to Vancouver being paid to do what I love to do.”

Meanwhile, Jeff Paul is still a comedy work-in-progress. But the man who often begins his sets by explaining that “90 per cent of his wardrobe comes free in cases of beer” is pressing all the right buttons.

On the night of our conversation, he manages to get stage time at the Avro on Queen East. “I’m the only amateur on the card tonight so it’ll be interesting to see how I hold up against the pros. I think I’ll be fine.”

Almost immediately after the first Sherlock Holmes stories were published, a cult of fandom emerged around the Baker Street detective. This enthusiasm wasn’t contained to England either: New York’s Baker Street Irregulars club brought fans together to share their thoughts, while the Japan Sherlock Holmes Club boasts more members than any other in the world.

But Toronto boasts its Holmes enthusiasts, too. The Toronto Reference Library has a Holmes exhibit running until March 10 and, during March break, Black Creek Pioneer Village is hosting a Sherlock Holmes mystery game in which kids can work on their deductive reasoning (and make cool spy costumes).

For those not familiar with these sorts of Sherlock shenanigans, here are some facts and figures to bring you up to speed on this city’s intimate relationship with the famous detective:

1: Number of Toronto references in Sherlock Holmes stories. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, the boot that is the key to solving the crime is marked “Meyers, Toronto” on the inside. (Sorry if that was a spoiler but, hey, the book was published in 1902.) The reference gives Toronto’s foremost Sherlock Holmes society its name: The Bootmakers of Toronto meet each month, and the group’s president is referred to as “Meyers.”

2: Number of Toronto actors who played Sherlock Holmes on film. Raymond Massey starred as the famous detective in the 1931 silent film The Speckled Band, and everyone’s favorite singing captain, Christopher Plummer, appeared as Holmes in 1977’s Silver Blaze and 1979’s Murder by Decree.

3: Number of visits author Arthur Conan Doyle made to Toronto. On his first visit in 1894, he was asked to help solve the murder of 18-year-old Frank Westwood—a.k.a. the “Parkdale Mystery” that gripped the city. Alas, solving crimes is more difficult in real life, and Doyle said he could not do it.

25-40: The number of people who regularly attend Bootmakers meetings each month. The group started in 1972, and currently has an estimated 220 members. “It’s very social,” says Philip Elliott, its current Meyers. “I have more friends in Bootmakers than anywhere else.”

60: The number of Sherlock Holmes stories Conan Doyle wrote (56 short stories and four novels), with “thousands written by fans,” say Peggy Perdue, the librarian for the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the Toronto Reference Library.

Sherlock fanaticism is hardly a new phenomenon. When Holmes seemingly died in the 1893 story “The Final Problem,” readers refused to accept it and staged public protests to voice their displeasure. “People walked down the streets of London wearing black armbands,” explains David Sanders, a Bootmaker and lifelong Holmes fan. “People were pointing at Conan Doyle in the streets and shouting, ‘murderer!’” Conan Doyle would resurrect the detective for many more stories.

159: Sherlock Holmes’s age, according to his biggest fans. Sherlockians play what they call the “Great Game,” wherein they imagine Holmes as a real person and resolve anomalies between the stories and reality as if they were a mystery. Since Conan Doyle’s writing is still so canonical, and Sherlock Holmes hasn’t died, it follows that he must be alive. “An obituary hasn’t appeared in the Sunday Times,” explains Sanders. “And that’s the paper of record.”

221B: Holmes’s famous Baker Street address is also the name of a Toronto-based Sherlock Tumblr group that arranges screenings, brews Sherlock Holmes-branded tea, and probably discusses which actor portrayed Sherlock Holmes the best. (The answer is Benedict Cumberbatch, obviously.)

400: Number of The Sign of the Four copies in the Reference Library’s collection. Perdue explains that, of all of Conan Doyle’s books, the publication history of this book is particularly interesting. Its October 1890 release was quickly followed by a landmark 1891 international copyright treaty that protected British works in the United States, and American publishers rushed to print copies before the new laws took effect. Some copies were published afterwards, too, but suspiciously omitted a printing date.

4,000: According to Perdue, the number of people who have visited the Reference Library’s special Holmes exhibit since it opened on Jan. 5.

$9,000: Amount that one Bootmaker, Barbara Rusch, paid for Queen Victoria’s 50-inch underwear in 2008.

11,000: Number of books in the Reference Library’s Arthur Conan Doyle collection. Also featured are posters, films, and copies of the Strand Magazine in which many Sherlock stories first appeared. As the Reference Library is still undergoing renovations, the regular collection won’t be available until later this year, but you can see the special exhibit before it closes on March 10.

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.

Quebec-bred, Washington State–based Geneviève Castrée is a comic artist, writer, illustrator, and musician with a backstory that will make your heart ache. In her semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Susceptible, Castrée revisits her ’80s childhood and ’90s adolescence in small-town and suburban Quebec, and describes, through the eyes of her protagonist, Goglu, the burden of having to be the grown-up in a world of unpredictable adults. We asked Castrée, who wrote Susceptible in French and translated it herself, to explain what’s going on in one of the scenes from her book.

Click here for a close-up view of her explanation

Geneviève Castrée launches Susceptible on Feb. 18 at The Beguiling, 601 Markham St., 416-533-9168, beguilingbooksandart.com.

The defining cognitive dissonance of Toronto can be summed up like this: While the city is one of the world’s most diverse, and while more than 200 “ethnic origins” are represented within our municipal borders, and more than 140 languages are spoken, it remains, in many ways, socially and culturally segregated. Ethnic segregation, in particular, has been a red-hot political issue in the city over the past few years, especially with the Africentric-schools debate and the wide-ranging, politically hazardous arguments about how geographical enclaves in Toronto and its suburbs discourage multicultural downtowns, encourage cultural isolation, and foster limited economic opportunity. In Toronto, it seems true that while you’re very likely to share a sidewalk, streetcar, classroom, office, and restaurant with a true multiplicity of people, you’re far less likely to socialize in the same way. And that makes living here a lot different than in other centres of diversity, like New York and London.

There have been some concerted attempts to bring together disparate cultural and artistic scenes in Toronto—like the Wavelength music series, which has sought to broaden the scope of downtown Toronto’s indie-rock consciousness, and has inspired genuine social cohesion through collaborations with local Ethiopian and Eritrean communities. This Saturday (Feb. 16) at the Toronto Centre for the Arts, the Chinese New Year Carnival attempts to do something like that, by bringing the “non-Chinese community” to a “multi-disciplinary” (read: acrobats; dancers; a 42-piece orchestra playing traditional and modern instruments; magic; “breath-taking daredevil feats”) celebration of the Lunar New Year, also known as “Spring Festival,” a.k.a. the most important Chinese holiday. (Chinese New Year lasts for two weeks, and ends with a Lantern Festival.)

Jon Campbell, one of the event’s organizers, lived in Beijing for 10 years, and came to Chinese culture via rock ‘n’ roll. (His book on the subject is called Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll.) He says of Carnival: “The equivalent would be the TSO combined with something like Zero Gravity Circus. It’s really interesting for people to see what China looks like to a lot of Chinese people, and how they experience it”—especially those with no direct access to the traditions and art of the country. The members of the Carnival are visiting from China, and touring seven Canadian cities. Campbell says that the event “is a good window into that community, which is a growing community, a sprawling community.”

The fact that the Chinese New Year Carnival takes place far from downtown will make it harder for curious culture-goers who live, work, and hang out below Bloor to attend. And that’s precisely what is often wrong with ethnically diverse entertainment and events in Toronto: very often, they’re held in parts of the city or in venues that don’t advertise to or take advantage of an interested, invested multiplicity of Torontonians. Considering how many Chinese people live in this city—they comprise 11 per cent of Torontonians, and Chinese is our most popular home language after English and French—it would seem that non-Chinese people would be and should be more aware of what that culture can include. Especially when it sometimes includes fireworks.

The Chinese New Year Carnival happens Feb. 16 (two shows: 2:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.) at the Toronto Centre for the Arts (5040 Yonge St.). For more information, visit legendofchina.net.