Ross Dauk loves to talk shop. The 34-year-old standup thinks about comedy day and night. He’s into all aspects of the art, not just the glamorous part of getting up on-stage and making people laugh.

“I love performing comedy but I love the writing and the coming-up of ideas and the prep for the shows,” he says while munching a cookie at a Main Street café.

The Saskatchewan native has been a standup in his mind longer than the eight years he’s been actually doing it. Even while he was working in B.C. forests as a park ranger, his thoughts were with comedy. He wasn’t afraid of bears or cougars, but was too scared to perform.

“Being a park ranger was trying to find meaning without doing comedy, the thing I knew I should do,” he says. “I also care about the environment very much, but it wasn’t for me. I knew I had to do comedy. Even though I had the greatest jobs in the most beautiful places, I was writing jokes and couldn’t help but just be compelled to the city.”

Dauk did a total of one show in Saskatoon and then one in each of the major cities on his way here before embarking on a career in comedy in Vancouver.

“Quite quickly I got a job where I was only working a couple hours a day,” he says. “I didn’t know anyone in the city. I saw comedy as my full-time job but it was leading to five-minute sets.” This convinced the former shy kid to become a fast talker. “I had so much that I wanted to say in too little time.”

Dauk has run the popular weekly show Jokes Please! every Thursday at Little Mountain Gallery for the past five years. This summer, he made his first appearance at the prestigious Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, where he was chosen to compete in the Homegrown competition. He didn’t win, but that was beside the point.

“I don’t love competitions, but I love doing comedy,” he says. “I always want to win, I guess, but that is not the focus. The focus is to have the best set you can.”

The way to achieve that, one would think, is to be funny. But it’s not the only way, says Dauk.

“What I think is funny and what I think is effective aren’t always the same thing, unfortunately,” he says. “I think about this constantly…but I much prefer funny over effective.”

What’s the difference, you ask? Effective is “doing the job professionally, where the audience is entertained and enjoys the show. I can have a set where the audience really enjoys it, but if I didn’t do what I wanted or if I didn’t feel very funny, I’m not that happy about it. And if I have a set where I’m very funny and the audience likes or doesn’t like it, I will much prefer that. What a weird thing that is. I think that’s the craft and art of it, putting it all together.”

It’s a steady learning curve for most standups. But you know Dauk will put in the time.

“The goal is to work on it and do it for life,” he says. “I know how to get better: write, perform, do that on Repeat.”