1. Damn Your Eyes
2. Evil Dead: The Musical
3. Outside Joke Season of Yuks/DND Improv

Local comedian J.D. Renaud proves haters gonna hate with Damn Your Eyes, a theatrical love letter addressed to things he just can’t stand.

“It’s basically about me opening up my angry little weird heart to an audience and hopefully they can relate to it,” the 28-year-old says.

The show premiered this past summer at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival and focuses on stuff he hated in his youth, such as an animated 1980s television series called COPS, which follows futuristic law enforcers “fighting crime in a future time” (AKA the year 2020).

“Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney is another target, a song that actually inspired him to quit his retail job because he couldn’t stand listening to it
on repeat.

“My hatred of that song led me to believe that I deserved a better life, so even though I hated it I have to thank it for giving me the courage to throw up my middle finger and run in the opposite direction,” Renaud says.

Aside from being an autobiographical comedy, it also has a large multimedia component, mostly because Renaud thinks it’s boring when just one person is up there on stage yapping.

Every show he played some music and set up a screen where he showed some videos and original animations he drew himself.

“I feel like you have to give people something a little bit extra and that’s something I really tried to do,” he says.

In the end the show was a smash at the Fringe and received a five star review courtesy of the CBC. Renaud just did an encore final performance at the Park Theatre in December and plans to start focusing more on newer material.

“I feel like I’ve found a format that works with this show and I hope to keep working with it for new stories,” he says.

Part of the series: The Uniter 30

Published in Volume 69, Number 15 of The Uniter (January 7, 2015)