Why I Used to Be Funny director Ally Pankiw wanted to capture the humour in tragedy
In a Q interview, the Canadian director discusses her debut feature film, starring Rachel Sennott
If you've ever found yourself laughing hysterically in a hospital room or cracking up at something your cousin said at a funeral, you know that comedy and tragedy can sometimes be two sides of the same coin.
That's exactly what the Canadian director Ally Pankiw wanted to capture in her debut feature film, I Used to Be Funny, which follows a stand-up comedian named Sam (Rachel Sennott) who's struggling with PTSD.
"When I sit around with my friends, drinking wine and talking about our lives and the unique nightmare of what it is to be a young woman moving through the world, it's not without some dark humour," Pankiw tells Q's Tom Power.
In I Used to Be Funny, Pankiw takes a more realistic and nuanced approach to her portrayal of female trauma, rather than tying it to a revenge story or a male narrative arc, which is what she says she usually sees on screen.
"That's not realistic and I don't think that's authentic," she says. "It makes things like assault and violence against women seem like these very dramatic, isolated things that happen every once in a while … but also, there's a banality to victimhood that I think isn't explored. I think a lot more people than we want to admit are touched by this kind of trauma, whether that be personally [or] in a sort of secondary way."
The connection between humour and sadness is something that's interested Pankiw since she was a journalism student at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). For her final project, she made a short documentary about the high rates of depression and other mental illnesses among comics, titled The Great Terrifini.
"At that time I just found it so interesting how common mental illness was in the comedy community," Pankiw says. "And the unique attitude that comedians had towards their mental illness and their relationship to their mental illness."
The full interview with Ally Pankiw is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Ally Pankiw produced by Vanessa Greco.
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