Catherine Hernandez wants to help us laugh off the apocalypse in her new sketch comedy podcast

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

When the pandemic hit, writer Catherine Hernandez was more mentally prepared than most. 

"I guess it's that entire thing about being a Scorpio," she laughs. "Knowing that the end is nigh but still having a smile on your face. A lot of people are all of a sudden like, 'Oh my gosh, how long are humans going to be on this Earth?' And they're only thinking about that now. I've been thinking about that for like the last ten years already. I already saw I saw the writing on the wall."

Just before the end started to feel nigher than ever, Hernandez was in conversation with Audible, who had asked her to come up with an idea for podcast.

"I pitched to them an idea of a sketch comedy show that was going to laugh at the absurdity of our times," she says. "But when the pandemic started, I remember they came back to me and said, 'Listen, we need you to re-pitch, and we want you to think about this: would it be the same pitch now that you know there is this pandemic in the world?' I said, 'Actually, you're right. Give me a second.'"

A few days later, the initial concept for Imminent Disaster was born.

"The feeling of the show was really different," she says. "It really was giving people the ability to laugh through the absurdity of our times, whereas before it was just going to be something standing on the on the shoulders of Canada's long legacy of sketch comedy. It was going to be absurd, it was going to be hilarious and it was also going to be very QTBIPOC-focused, from our specific perspective."

Imminent Disaster still definitely became all those things, but as the pandemic wore on, Hernandez shifted her focus to a different question: "How can we make sure that people can laugh through these times?"

"Because this a very strange time," she says. "I remember [seeing a news article online about] the coup attempt was right near, like, a brownie recipe. It was one of those 'five brownie recipes that you need to try today' right beside an article about the insurrection. These are the times that we're living in, right? You can watch the news and you can write it down, and it sounds like a sketch already like that. That's how ridiculous our lives are right now."

The podcast — which is available on Audible.ca now — delves into that ridiculousness through short scenes written by Hernandez that are fuelled by our facing the edge of existence. It features a roster of QTBIPOC comedic voice talent joining Hernandez, including Tita Collective's Alia Rasul and performer Cherish Violet Blood (who can also be seen in the film adaptation of Hernandez's novel Scarborough, which will be released in theatres early next year after winning hearts and awards at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival). 

"Sketch comedy is from painfully white, cisgender, heterosexual perspectives, oftentimes pointing humour at us," Hernandez says. "We become the butt of the joke, people who are racialized or queer, any of the other identities. And so I thought I really wanted this cast to be from the QTBIPOC population."

Hernandez's own experiences as a brown femme queer woman are very present in Imminent Disaster.

"Like the ridiculous meetings that I have to deal with where I'm watching white tears being shed," she says. "Random things in my life where I'm dealing with racism every day. I can't make those scenes up — they're real. A lot of the scenes are based on reality, but then heightened to that sketch comedy level."

"Living as a brown woman in this world and listening to people talk to you the way that they do and belittle you the way that they do — you have to make comedy out of it. It's the only way that I'm surviving, and I'm hoping it's going to help others survive, too."

But is Hernandez hopeful that we are actually... going to survive?

"I think that what we're not understanding is that the choices we're making in interacting with each other [are] actually going to kill us," she says. "I'm laughing this off, but it's a very painful truth. We're not taking it seriously enough. And isn't it funny that I'm using a comedy show to actually make people see things seriously?"

"We have this one scene where you have two parents who are doing the 'parenting Olympics' for Earth Day. Because to them, it's not about saving the earth — it's about being the best parent. And that kind of absurdity is something that I want people to understand. It's a bullshit move because what actually saves the planet is like things such as Indigenous sovereignty, but that's too difficult for people to deal with. They'd rather just go to the public spaces with their garbage bags to show how awesome a parent they are with their children on Earth Day rather than give land back. That's just the reality we live in. So it's all we can do. We can just laugh it off."

You can laugh off our apocalyptic future by listening to Hernandez's Imminent Disaster on Audible.ca now.