My friend Andrew Johnston just came out with a new Album this year and it’s great. Mrs. Babers has been playing it in the kitchen a lot and we’ve been loving it.  You can buy the album here for just 5 bucks and it’s totally worth it.

This is Andrew’s new music video for the song: Something You Already Know.  I was fortunate enough to direct this video. Check it out!

Tomorrow night, Thursday April 18th you can catch Andrew Johnston at 9 pm at Jackie & Judy | Rococo Bar Spectacle, 6512, avenue du Parc, Montreal. With Kieran Blake and The Black Bull.

Do you ever wonder how Mike Paterson keeps his fine physical form? Do you ever ask yourself: how does Mike Paterson do it brother?

Well finally, for the first and only time, we are leaking Mike Paterson’s top secret fitness regimen on to the Internet. This is how Mike gets ready for headlining Absolute Comedy in Toronto.

Hello mikamaniacs!

It’s been an exciting winter, locked in my house, avoiding the snow and dabbling in a bit of light occult. Here is my brand new music video about special powers that I have. 

Many thanks to Amir Rizk, the mad scientist lightening expert who put this together! 

Attention Mike P fans of the Internet, the wait is over! You can now see ANGLO, my brand new Rap video in French right here right now!

Here’s the link to Anglo on Itunes!

Hey Internet!

Your favorite funnyman was recently featured on a website known for it’s sense of humor, CNN.com! That’s right Mike P comedy fans, now you can see me kick it on a News website! Things are getting crazy up in here!

What happened was that during the just for laughs festival CNN needed a comedian to show them how to eat that old Montreal drinker’s staple, poutine. Naturally, because of my devilish good looks and obvious poutine gut, I was the clear choice. Check out the resulting hilarity.

We need to change our take on Madmen, Mrs. Babers and I. Sometimes, in conversation, people bring up Madmen, the popular TV program about ad execs from the fifties who indulge in copious amounts of alcohol and adultery.  My girlfriend and I don’t watch that show. We tried it out for three episodes and decided: “meh.” When asked why, I always mention something that my girlfriend pointed out to me shortly after we lost interest in the show. Unfortunately I sound a bit pretentious when I say that it reminds me too much of my own life. I’ll say something like “Oh well, Madmen is just not that interesting to us because my girlfriend and I generally spend our days trying to come up with creative ideas and drinking too much. So watching people do it on TV just stresses us out.” How annoying is that? It will be easier to keep people listening to our rambling stories if we tell them something more relatable; like that we don’t watch Madmen because they smoke too much, and that we started watching it right after we quit. It was hard watching all that sexy smoking, and so we lost interest quickly. It would be much less alienating if we told people that we drink too much all on our own, and that we don’t really need any more incentives.

There are way too many forbidden things on that program: fashion, like awesome hats that would cover my bald spot in such a cool way but that are no longer worn by men; fashion Mrs. Babers loves, but can’t buy at stores even if she had the money for it; furniture that is no longer being manufactured, but still looks hot and functional; and a quantity of smoking and drinking that I just can’t allow myself to take part in anymore. I mean, all they do is drink scotch and smoke cigarettes on that show. These are two things that I no longer do, because when I do, things get broken: fingers, ankles… my heart. If I allowed myself to engage with a tumbler of scotch before the sun went down, the night would not end well. Hell, the afternoon would most likely not end without me getting arrested for drunken bixi bike riding on an active train track. Furthermore, adultery really stresses me out. They make cheating on your spouse look so sexy and easy on the first three episodes of that show, and I have a highly impressionable mind so I do not want to take any chances. But don’t tell that to Mrs. Babers.

The point I am trying to make here is that my girlfriend and I are pricks.

Hello Internet,

Canadian internet in particular, dear .ca, I would like to admit something. I’ve recently been working on a French rap song about being an Anglophone in Quebec called “ANGLO: Parle a moi en Francais” In this song I declare myself to be a fan of Nickelback, the Canadian band that specializes in hard rocking garbage, repetitive, derivative radio bullshit that makes most Canadians want to pull their spinal cords out through their ears, while burning their Canadian passports. I think saying that I dig this band is a wonderful way for me to come across as a dumb Jackass. A real fucking tool. There are few Canadian musicians that are reviled in their own country as much as Nickleback is.  (Think Triumph, Justin Bieber, and my close personal friend Jonas Tomalty of the band Jonas) It is possible to assume that a hatred of Nickelback is the one thing keeping this country together. Whether I’m in the English town of Brockville, Ontario, or the French town of Magog, Quebec, or even the redneck town of Crossfield, Alberta, I can go up to a dude and say “Hey man, Nickelback sucks.” or “Hey, mon gars, Nickelback sucks.” And I will be taken into that man’s great big man arms in friendship and mutual appreciation. I would be offered corn by that man and we would roast cobs and drink beers late into the night.

So you may wonder, Canadian internet.ca, why then have I decided to declare publicly that I am a fan of Nickelback? Particularly as you may have been astute enough to notice, by reading between the lines above, that this may not be true. Well, in the song “Anglo: Parle a moi en Francais” after the chorus, I list a bunch of new stereotypes about Anglophones that I made up: driving Ford Focuses, owning ugly dogs, Bowling; and liking Nickelback. I find that a white rapper rapping about being a fan of Nickelback is absolutely hilarious. Also playing a dummy character may be apropos, since I am rapping about languages, which is an inflammatory subject in Canada, even after so much time has passed since the referendum years. I am taking the incendiary stance that French people should talk to me in French no matter how awful my accent is because I need to practice, and my accent is awful, and I need to practice, and I don’t care if French people also want to practice their English.

The most exciting thing about this whole pretending to like Nickelback situation, is that I think I might start a new fad. Everybody always seems to want to be like me. (“Mike p, Mike P, Men want to be me, Women want to do me.” That’s right, I’ve rapped before, ce n’est pas mon premiere BBQ.) I was thinking that I might be a trailblazer here, that this will be a new thing for Canadians: Ironically pretending to like Nickelback.

Come on Canada, let’s do this together. French and English unite in an ironical love of Nickelback. If you’re in a bar and a Nickelback situation starts happening on the speakers, jump on the bar, take your clothes off, and run around screaming and pumping your fists in the air. Loudly declare, “This song is so awesome it makes me want to head butt my Grandmother in the gums!” Tear your hair and scream, “I can’t take it, this song is so gooood.” Yell, “It’s like punching myself in the balls, in a good way.” And then punch yourself in the balls, because that’s what it might take to pretend to like a Nickelback song, because, and I don’t know if I’ve been clear enough about this, this band sucks. If we get enough people into this, Canada, it’ll be like a new kind of flash mob, except that anybody can join in with it at any point, because there’s no way one could choreograph a dance routine to Nickelback’s monophonic drivel anyway.

So in other news, myspace is still happening. Once in a while I like to visit my old Myspace page, on the days that I’m not too drunk to remember my freaking myspace password. It’s like visiting a ghost town. A creepy reminder of exactly what was going on in my life for those couple of months in 2006 before I discovered facebook. It is just like how when you walk by an abandoned building, there will still be a sign on the door that says “Closed Saturday for renovations” or “Pickles! Now only 35cents a jar!” And you think about that person who put that sign in the window, and you wonder if that same person was just too despondent to pull the sign out of the window again when the place closed down forever. You picture them walking away from their life’s venture, weeping inconsolably, and thinking: “Now pickles will be 35cents forever! Take that world!”

Or something like that… I recently went on a bit of a myspace jaunt myself, mainly because my band The Dan D Lyons does not have a website, but still has the myspace page we created in 2006. I was wandering around on our myspace page, wondering about what might have been, when I found this video. It was shot while my friend Tim and I were running a nightly comedy variety show on Tuesday nights in the basement of Brutopia. We had a blast putting that show on for the year that we did it. We would host as The Dan D Lyons, two friends from Wichita Kansas who had read in Vice magazine that Montreal was the new hub for indie rock music, so we had decided to move there to try to make it big as musicians. In addition to our musical stylings, we would have various guests every Tuesday night, doing anything from comedy routines to circus performances. Neither we, nor our alter egos Tim Lyons and Mike Danderson of the Dan D Lyons, ever did make it big as musicians, but we all had a great time trying.

In 2006 it just so happened that Halloween fell on a Tuesday. I don’t know if you know this, but artist types LOVE Halloween, and we and our fans were no exception. We put on quite the party that year. My girlfriend Monika, our photographer Rashta and our producer Jamie went all out decorating the tiny space. All our friends and fans came out to watch the show, dressed to the teeth. We even had a special guest host, one of my all time favorite professional wrestling superstars from the eighties, Jake “the snake” Roberts!

Ok, I’m going to come clean with you, internet, we did not really have Jake “the snake” Roberts host our musical comedy show in the basement of Brutopia on crescent street in Montreal on Halloween of 2006. I dressed up as Jake “the snake” Roberts. At the time, I did not have the amazing mullet that I sport now, so my good friend Dinah painstakingly added hair extensions to my short do. Monika sewed a felt snake onto a pair of American Apparel tights, and I poured a jar of baby oil onto my hairy chest. Everything was perfect, now all I needed was my brother Nic to play my opponent Randy “the Macho Man” Savage, and Tim to play the referee, and maybe to write a song about how wrestling refs get the short end of the stick sometimes. Done! Now what could possibly be missing to create the perfect tableau of wrestling craziness? Let’s see, Jake the Snake, Jake the Snake… OH! Right, I need to get completely wasted before I do this. Done!

This video captures the descent into madness that was our Halloween super wrestling superstars show. I know it’s long, clocking in at ten minutes, but if you could bear with us, it is worth it. It concludes with a stirring rendition of “Always look after Your Snake” sung by one completely wasted Jake the Snake impersonator (me!) And if that doesn’t make your day, well you must be having a pretty crappy day then, friend.

Halloween At Brutopia

The Dan-D-Lyons | Myspace Video

Hello internet!

More specifically Harry Potter fans of the internet, I know there are quite a lot of you, I was hoping that you might come on over and see me sometime. We have so much in common, Harry Potter fans of the Internet, for we can all be sad together now, it is all over. We had a good run, first waiting for the books to come out, each a delectable treat to be savored over two or three days of uninterrupted reading. Then, the movies, lovingly peopled with incredibly appropriate actors, and lushly realized with all the money that could possibly be thrown at them.  We were riding high, the whole world heard about Harry and his wizarding school. The word wizard even became a verb, fantasy fans rejoice!

We did it folks, fans of Harry Potter on the internet, we read, we saw, we conquered. I would like to send all of you an imaginary high five, a great big well done to all of us, way to love a wizard!

Now that it is all over, we have no more Harry Potter to look forward to, nothing but the hundreds and thousands of spoof videos on youtube. In that spirit, I have one more spoof video for you! I have posted this already, but I’m going to do it again because gosh dern it, I want to. This video is not only for the millions of Harry Potter fans of the internet, but also for the much smaller number of Harry Potter fans who also like ACDC. Where’s my peeps? In any case, this video answers the age old question: what would happen if ACDC sang a song about Harry Potter?

Good Morning Internet!

I’m very excited about today’s post! Something that you may not know about me, I love the Lebanese restaurant Boustan located in Montreal on Crescent street. Countless Montreal Mike P comedy shows have been fueled by Boustan’s delicious veggie creation sandwiches and garlic potatoes. I love Boustan so much that I’ve created a Boustan infomercial. This infomercial truly lives up to its name as it is informative, while it also makes you want some Boustan. I certainly want to eat at Boustan’s after making this infomercial, but then I always want to eat at Boustan. Don’t leave us Boustan! I know you want to retire, and you’ve obviously earned it (when is that guy not there?) But what about me and my need to eat a falafel sandwich whenever I’m working downtown?

Boustan is not in any way involved with this commercial. But I hope he likes it if he sees it.