Porn and Pinochet - Great Standup, Solid Story-telling

Porn and Pinochet is a standup comedy and storytelling show written and performed by Andy Canete at Studio 16.

Go see this show. I see a lot of standup comedy and this is well worth your time.

Stand up comedy at the Fringe Festival is a hard gig to pull off. The audiences aren't warmed up and there's no alcohol to encourage laughter so having a good time rests heavily on the shoulders of the performer. With a beautiful combination of self-deprecating humour and tear-jerking stories from his childhood, Canete carries you through his 75-minute show with skillful story telling and brutally tragic, but always funny, personal stories.

Most of the stories focus around his life as a young Canadian immigrant and his time as a teenager in Pinochet-era Chile. Whether or not you're from an immigrant family, Canete's stories are about issues immensely relatable to everyone--relationships with your parents as a child, being the cool (and uncool) kid in school, losing your virginity, moving to a new school (and country run by a tyrant), having no access to pornography and much more.

He makes you laugh, he makes you cry, but he also makes you question your place in the world, something only the best comedians are capable of doing. He drives home a very important point that in Canada, we have it a lot better than the rest of the world and we should be thankful. This runs the risk of being preachy and political, but it fits so well within Canete's life saga living in Canada and Chile, we laugh because we know it's true.

Without the usual amenities of a comedy club, the hour and fifteen minutes can occasionally seem a bit long, but it's still full of a lot of great, edgy material.

There's so much good stuff in this impassioned performance. Canete has complied an excellent set. I encourage everyone to go see this excellently executed story-telling and standup routine while it's still on.