About Me, and My Whimsy

My name is Ian Brodie. I'm not the one who was Stephen Harper's Chief of Staff, nor the Lord of the Rings photographer. I'm the important one.

I am a folklorist, which is a pretty strange thing. I was interested in how the traditional forms of verbal play became the thing we now loosely call stand-up comedy. It is the subject of my book A Vulgar Art. 

This intersection of vernacular understanding and the small-group context led me to my second book, an annotated reprint of Paul “Moose” MacKinnon’s Old Trout Funnies, an underground comic published in Cape Breton in the 1970s.

I am currently working on two projects (with pages to come soon), one on a mid-century Cape Breton radio song contest, and one (with co-author Jodi McDavid) on the depiction of belief in children’s television.

And I continue to write about stand-up comedy, with several articles in the works and some encyclopedia entries under my belt.

This site started as a place to talk about A Vulgar Art but it also serves as a home for all my past and current research, and a blog which (as is the case of all blogs) I haven’t done much with in a long time but will do more. Hopefully.

Socials

I am a reasonably fun follow, with occasional moments of earnestness thrown in for good measure.