For a crazy person, Nikki Payne is incredibly sane. At heart, she's a grounded, affable, salt-of-the-earth east coaster who's easy to talk to, and humble despite her success in one of the hardest gigs going — that of the stand up comic. She could be living in a Toronto condo and rubbing shoulders with the cream of Canadian comedy, but instead chose to live in small town New Brunswick with her Yorkie, Emilio Estevez, punching jokes into her laptop while kicking back in a recliner.
"All I need is an airport and an Internet connection and I can work anywhere," she told Pique in her familiar lisp — the result of being born with a cleft palate. It's just one of the personal things she incorporates into her routine, along with everything else going on in her life — like her decision to move to New Brunswick, her "Crazy Dog Lady" blog or the fact she recently donated one of her kidneys to her father.
While it seems like she's making it up as she goes, a lot of hard work goes into her performances.
"I'm not the fastest writer in the world so I really have to concentrate on that," she said. "I have to sit my butt down every day and write really terrible jokes until I write one that's good and then, yeah, comedy."
If you've ever seen her shows — and her routines have been featured everywhere from the television show Last Comic Standing to stand-up shows on the Comedy Network — she's also fast on her feet and not afraid to venture off the script. And though she makes it look easy, she had to learn that skill as well — aided by a stint with the Second City improv company in Toronto.
In fact, comedy was the last thing she imagined herself doing growing up, although being surrounded by the funny, self-deprecating underdogs from her home in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia is a huge influence.
"It's a town that mostly grew out of convenience because it's close to the city (Halifax), but its roots are as a rural, small town. That's what I like about it, it's a bedroom community but it's never really lost that backwoods hickness."
She's currently writing some short stories based on her life, and many of her tales feature Lower Sackville. One of her favourite stories is about the annual Sackville Winter Carnival, where the town was divided into seven teams, each one named after one of the Snow White's seven dwarves.
"I lived in the Grumpy section, and you competed in all kinds of things like jam jar curling and chuckwagon races, but without the horses — you went to the rink and people pulled the mini chuckwagon around while someone sat on the back and tried not to fall off. There was a beard growing competition where the top lady or gentleman would face off — that kind of thing," she said.
They even had mascots modeled after the dwarves and their pictures graced the town's 'welcome' sign. "Then somebody got the bright idea of writing Disney and telling them all about our wonderful festival and the dwarves," says Payne. "I think they were hoping Disney would send along a prize or something, but what they did send us was a cease and desist letter from their lawyers. If we continued to use the dwarves they'd sue our town! We had to paint over the mascots faces if we didn't want to get dragged into court."
Payne has won several Canadian Comedy Awards and has been nominated for a Gemini award for her work. She's got a long list of television credits, as a guest comedian on Last Comic Standing, a featured guest on various Comedy Network sketch shows, and as a stand-up. She writes a blog about her dog and in her spare time writes and performs in short films. But it's her stand-up routine, raunchy and fearless, that Payne is best known for. She's performed at Kilkenny's Cat Laughs, the Las Vegas Comedy Festival and the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, which is the gold standard for comedy. Twice she's been asked to play the "Talk of the Fest" shows at Just For Laughs, where all the best performers are rewarded with an encore.
And it's not a bad time to be a stand-up these days, as long you're okay with going on tour.
"We've had to do some pretty drastic growing up (in stand-up comedy), and some of it's good and some of it's bad, and I really just think it's finding a new place in the world. So much comedy is on television and the Internet that in a way it takes away from live comedy, but for the more industrious people that are willing to change with the change it's been beneficial. The fact that so many more people see you on the Internet, you can use that to get more people out to your live shows.
"It's a lot of the same stuff the music industry has been facing. There's so much out there for free, so the only way you can make money is when people come to your live shows.
"At one point I was touring like a mother, but I was getting burnt out. But I've got to the place where I can produce my own shows. I still like being invited to play places where I show up and they do all the work, but when I produce my own shows I can do less of them and have more control."
Over the years, Payne has crafted an on-stage personality that is very much her only cranked into overdrive.
"I'm actually pretty quiet," she said. "I'm not that person regularly. I mean I couldn't be! I wouldn't be able to do those day-to-day things. I couldn't go grocery shopping. I'd get kicked out of the malls. Nobody would hire me.... just over time, what ended up coming out of me were all the things I wish I could say or do in real life. You know how we have that part of us, where if someone says something stupid and we don't have a comeback, but when we're walking away we think of all the things we could have said? I think that's where my voice comes from, that part of my brain."
Payne says her only goal in life is for life to be interesting, and if she can make a living at comedy then she considers her time well spent.
"If I can make people laugh and they pay me for it, that's awesome — I feel like that's a fair trade."
