From 'running around on the rez being silly' to starring in his own sitcom, Paul Rabliauskas is here

Anishinaabe stand-up comedy veteran Paul Rabliauskas says that a show like Acting Good has been a long time coming. If you ask him, a sitcom with a predominantly Indigenous cast, set in an Indigenous community, should have been on Canadian screens way, way before 2022.

"This is crazy to say, but other than Reservation Dogs that airs in the States, there's no Native sitcoms out there, and it's 2022," he tells CBC Arts. "That seems super ridiculous to me. So it feels really good to be the first one in Canada to do that. But it's also just ridiculous that it's taken so long."

Rabliauskas both co-created and stars in Acting Good. The show's main plot — a young man returns to his remote Northern Manitoba reserve after not-quite-making it in the big city of Winnipeg — is loosely autobiographical. Rabliauskas' home community of Poplar River First Nation doesn't have a high school, so he and his siblings first left as teenagers to go to school in Winnipeg.

But while his brother and sister returned to Poplar River after they graduated, Rabliauskas stayed in Winnipeg to pursue a career in comedy. Or, at least, he tried to.

"There were many times in my life where things just weren't going good for me, and I had to go back home," he says. "And I'd tell my friends, 'I'm going to look after my parents.' But I wasn't — they were looking after me the whole time."

Rabliauskas says that the show's title comes from a phrase people in Poplar River use to describe someone who's gotten a bit of a big head. 

"When you come from an isolated community [where] you don't have access to stuff and there's not too much going on, sometimes you have to be humble," he says. "So when you show off and you go to the reserve — and it could be anything from wearing a new jacket to [having] a new girlfriend — people label you as 'acting good,' and they'll try to find a way to humble you."

"I think we go through that every in every episode: there's somebody that's 'acting good' and they get taken down a peg."

Rabliauskas wants to make it clear that Acting Good is not a dramedy. It is an unapologetic sitcom, and takes a very different tone and approach to Indigenous life than a lot of other media. 

"I can proudly say that we 100 percent lived in the comedy," he says. "I think people are going to think they know what our show is, and I think our comedy is going to take you in a completely different direction. It's so silly and it's so out there."

"We're not talking about the same narratives that you hear with Indigenous content. It's not stuff that's going to make you cry. It's not heavy stuff. It's not going to make you mad. Our show literally is just going to make you smile and laugh."

Having said that, Rabliauskas also acknowledges that the show's Indigenous sense of humour can sometimes come off as dark to non-Indigenous audiences — which makes sense, he says, since it evolved as a survival tactic.

"A lot of people say 'time plus tragedy equals comedy,'" he says. "When you talk about First Nations people, there hasn't been too many people that have suffered as many tragic things as we have. So our comedy comes from a dark place. It literally was a tool that people used to keep each other going through the residential schools, the '60s Scoop and all these bad things that happened."

Rabliauskas says that he thinks the people in Poplar River will love the show, and while he suspects that the community is proud of him, "I don't know how much they're going to show it to me."

"When I do Just for Laughs, I'm gone for 22 days and I come back and they don't care. They're just like, 'Gimme a ride to the store,'" he says. "I kind of need that."

"It's okay — I know they're going to watch it. They're going to love it, but they know who I am. They're not going to like, praise me, because I'm just Paul to them. I'm just old snotty nose Paul, running around on the rez being silly."

Acting Good premieres Oct. 17 at 10:30 p.m. on CTV Comedy Channel.