Ron James admits it was a cheap joke, but it gets the laugh, and that’s what counts on a comedy show.
On Wednesday’s The Ron James Show, in his weekly Ode to the Road segment, James is sitting in a booth at Windsor’s Tunnel Bar-B-Q and is about to tuck into a pulled-pork sandwich.
Looking up, he says to the camera, “After having one of these, you’ll never want to pull the pork again.”
You can imagine restaurant owner Thom Racovitis cringing off-camera. But you can’t buy that kind of publicity.
It’s the kind of sly one-liner audiences have come to expect from James, the Maritimer whose rapier wit has made him a favourite of theatre crowds and nearly half a million viewers of his weekly CBC-TV show.
Now in its fourth season, The Ron James Show is pulling in its best numbers yet since moving off Monday nights to Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m.
The show is an equal mix of the standup comedy of his stage show and the sketch comedy that marked his early career as an actor.
Every week, James also pays tribute to the many stops on his seven-year standup career, and this week it’s Windsor, Ont.
“I’ve been to Windsor many times, but I didn’t know it as well as I thought,” he said this week. “I usually come in and do my show, have a pint afterwards, and leave.”
But last summer, James had a chance to spend a couple of days here and liked what he saw.
“I’ve still got a couple of bottles of Wiser’s Deluxe (from Hiram Walker) sitting here in my closet. Windsor’s is a cool and eclectic history.”
It was a refreshing change, he said, to visit the city in the summer. “I usually show up when it’s the middle of February and all the university co-eds from Michigan are there getting hammered in the peeler bars on the weekend.”
This time he got to stroll the riverfront, including the Sculpture Garden, and that gave rise to another one-liner.
Pointing at the Detroit skyline, he said, “That’s how Detroit was meant to be seen. From a distance.”
“I can’t take credit for that,” James said. “That was from my good buddy, Paul Pogue, who comes from Windsor.”
Pogue is a co-producer and writer on the show.
The success of The Ron James Show is vindication after what he often describes as “the fiasco that was Blackfly.”
The series which started out as a Canadian equivalent of Blackadder, lasted only 26 episodes in 2001 and 2002.
“It was the wrong network (Global TV), the wrong writers, the wrong idea right from the start,” James said.
He went back to the drawing board after that and came up with the current show, which derives its humour from his stage act.
And he’s now planning for a fifth season.
“This is where I wanted to be on television,” he said.
