Retirement has been very good for Mark Forward. Four years ago, the standup comic bid a not-so-fond public adieu to his chosen art form in an article in the Toronto Star. Within the year, he became a regular on CBC’s Mr. D and performed standup on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson.

“I suggest it to anyone: retire. It really brings in the work,” he says with a laugh over the phone from Toronto. “I used to say that and comics would get so mad.”

He claims it was all just a joke. He had been threatening retirement on Twitter, complete with hashtag, for a year, not realizing that someone from the Star was following him. He was asked to write about it. Cue moral dilemma.

“I had not had a drop of press in 10 years of comedy,” he says. “The first article I was going to get was about my retirement, so I thought, ‘I can’t not write it! Just for the story alone.’ ”

While he may not have been serious, his frustrations were very real. He was doing one-nighter bar gigs in northern Ontario, in the kind of places that eat up young comics.

“These shows would beat me down,” he says. “And once I dropped the shows I didn’t want to do, and just started doing comedy when I wanted to do it, then my career kind of took off.”

So you see, he was (kinda, sorta) true to his word. It was just more of a specific retirement. “I retired from a certain way of doing comedy. I reinvented what I wanted to be and what I wanted to do,” he says.

These days, he’s using hashtags for good. Last week, Forward started #promoteacanadiancomic and it immediately started trending.

“If we slowly create something here, it’s better than nothing,” he says. “Everybody’s like, ‘What’s the point? What are we going to get, five people?’ Yeah, that’s five people. It’s the stupidest thing I like to say, but every person is a person. You can’t have a hundred people without one.”

It’s a much more generous take than his on-stage persona on the upcoming Joke or Choke, a televised standup competition with a twist. The comedians are given a week to write material on a given topic. They go head-to-head and Forward is the judge, jury, and executioner.

“I was overly vicious and mean because that was just part of the playfulness of the show,” he says. It started as a live show in Toronto before two episodes were filmed for CTV’s Extend channel. (One of the episodes will air on the Comedy Network on December 12.) The vast majority of participants took it in stride, realizing it was all part of the show. The other one percent? “A couple people stormed back on-stage after I kicked them off, screaming at me and crying,” he says, laughing. “Dude, you’re never going to make it in standup! All it is is criticism every night!”

You won’t see evidence of the bully in his standup set at the Comedy MIX this weekend—more stupid-funny, which he also provides on the Mark Forward Comedy Podcast, something he’s been doing for almost two years.

“We’re approaching our 100th episode. We’re about 23 away,” he says. “Then we’re going to retire.”

Yeah, we’ve heard that before.

Mark Forward headlines at the Comedy MIX Thursday through Saturday (November 27 to 29) . He also emcees a showcase at the MIX on Wednesday (November 26).