Yannis Pappas

Theatre St. Catherine, Montreal QC, July 25

BY Julianna RomanykPublished Jul 26, 2016

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Comedy Central alum Yannis Pappas is known for material about his ethnicity, but his jokes about politics, Canada and his adolescence ended up providing the night's most memorable moments at his hour-long show at Theatre St. Catherine.
 
James Mattern opened up the show with a uniformly humorous set in which he roasted himself. Like a videogame character on a selection screen, he leaned eagerly forward into the crowd and occasionally alternated between his feet as he pointed out his baldness, then quipped that the only girls who find him attractive are ones that have daddy issues.
 
Pappas also delivered some jabs, but his main target of choice was the U.S. Presidential election. With unbelievable accuracy, he hysterically compared Bernie Sanders to a "math teacher of urban youth" and likened Hillary Clinton to America's new stepmom: "We don't like her, but we have to learn to accept her."
 
He segued out of the political jokes by sharply jesting that Laval, QC is so Greek that he could see Syrians swimming in the water when he visited it, and delved further into Canadiana by talking about how he can't get into hockey because he can never see when "that black speck of dust" goes into the goalie's net.
 
In the latter portion of the show, Pappas mined the differences between the childhoods of millennials and his generation for material that was rich, but not as gut-busting as the opening jokes about Bernie and Hillary. Pappas explained that the current generation's tendency to be excessively offended is rooted in the fact that they weren't bullied as mercilessly as his generation was, got big laughs by making fun of the limited attention span of a teenage girl in the front row, and ended his delightful hour by bitterly arguing that motherly love is ruining society because it sets an unrealistic standard for how good life is.

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