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I almost feel bad for putting Michael Balazo on blast, but when someone has never been to Vancouver and says they are excited to see, among other things, the steam clock, a cynical Vancouverite has a civic duty to make fun of them. 

Balazo is a comedian from Toronto who has lived in both Calgary and Montreal and has played shows far and wide, including August’s month-long Edinburgh Fringe Festival. But he’s stepping foot in Vancouver for the first time to perform stand-up comedy this week (Wednesday, October 15, at Little Mountain Gallery). He makes the mistake of bringing up the tourist-trappy steam clock rather innocently. 

“There’s a bunch of stuff I want to see; I’m going to be there for 5 days,” he says over the phone. “I’m excited to see the city, look at the steam clock, see the mountains, check out some of the record stores and bookstores around, and see some of my friends there.”

That’s right, Michael Balazo’s Vancouver-based friends, he is less excited to see you than to look at the steam clock emit steam in Gastown. After I call him out, it becomes clear that, to his credit, Balazo can take a joke as well as he can dish them out. 

“Damn, that’s the basic answer, isn’t it?” he asks with a laugh. “I guess if someone was coming to Toronto and was excited to see the CN Tower, I’d say they were a bit slow.”

As for his actual show, Balazo says that he does have some Vancouver-specific material in mind for the evening, which also features Vancouver comedians Graham Clark and Amar Singh as openers. But much of it will be similar to his Edinburgh Fringe Festival show that he performed once a day, every hour, for a full month. 

“A lot of it is long-distance relationship stuff because I’m dating a British comedian who lives in London,” he says. “So the show is all about how difficult but also beautiful our long-distance relationship is.” 

It turns out that people in the U.K. still get jokes about old and obscure Canadian animated shows, so Balazo hasn’t had to change all that much. 

“When I started doing shows in the U.K., I thought I’d have to change a bunch of references,” he says, “but I was surprised when I found out that people there know about the Canadian animated show The Raccoons. That helped.” 

Balazo is no stranger to working on Canadian TV programs himself, having helped write shows like Baroness Von Sketch Show and Schitt’s Creek. He was hired to write on the third season of the latter show, but his experience there is unfortunately tied to a bigger event that was happening at the time. 

“It was in 2016, during the American election, and I was in L.A.,” Balazo recalls. “I went to what was supposed to be a Clinton victory party. Everyone just assumed—it was all decorated with Hillary stuff. As the results started coming in, things got weird in the bar; there were a couple guys wearing MAGA hats. It was very strange, a bad vibe.”

After the Vancouver show, Balazo is slated to do a tour of Canada, though he realizes the timing isn’t exactly opportune. “I hope to hit all the major cities, but I realize that it’ll be in the winter. I’ll acknowledge that seems like a stupid idea. Maybe I’ll be the guy on the news that’s found in the snow with frostbite; who knows?”

Or maybe he’ll fall in love with the steam clock and stay here. 

Michael Balazo performs stand-up comedy at Little Mountain Gallery on October 15. Tickets here.