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Gay Without the Spin: Elvira Kurt

“Hold on a sec. Let me turn down Sesame Street,” says comedian Elvira (pronounced El-veer-a) Kurt as we begin our interview. She and her partner have an eight-month-old baby, which has been affecting more than just their television viewing habits.

When asked what she’s been up to lately, Kurt answers: “No sleep. And right now we’re having some teething issues. Major life adjustment-that’s what I’m up to these days.”

But she’s also been shooting a new reality series for Logo, First Comes Love. Kurt says it’s based on a Canadian show from last year that Scott Thompson hosted- My Fabulous Gay Wedding -and that the American cable channel tweaked the format as well as the name.

“They thought having a show with gay in the title was redundant for the gay channel,” Kurt deadpans. “It’s shot up here in Canada because, you know, it’s legal,” she adds with a characteristically animated cadence that’s difficult to convey in print.

Though she’s made a career as a comic performer, Kurt studied animation at Toronto’s esteemed Sheridan College. Faced with two job offers after college, one in animation and the other improv, she chose to join the Second City comedy troupe.

Kurt knows Thompson from her ten years living in L.A., which ended recently when she moved back to her hometown of Toronto. The two transplanted Canadians used to commiserate, she recalls: “Even though we speak the same language and you couldn’t tell a Canadian from an American visually, culturally it’s incredible. It’s like, oh my God. They think about things completely differently.”

“Canadians are so self-effacing,” Kurt continues. “We’re so self-deprecating. And Americans are so ‘Look at me. I’m here. I’ll tell you what’s good, I’ll tell you what’s right.”

Kurt acknowledges it’s a reputation that drives many Americans traveling abroad to pose as Canadian. “But you always give yourselves away,” she taunts. “Eventually foreigners will turn to each other and whatever their word for ‘brash’ is will come up, and they’ll say, ‘Not Canadian.’ You’ll push to the front, you’ll tell someone what to do, and then you’ve blown your cover.”

Kurt is best known for her solo stage work. She has appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and specials as well as series on Comedy Central, HBO, Showtime, CBC, CTV and The Comedy Network. Her one-hour TV special, I’m a Big Girl Now, was nominated for a Gemini (Canadian equivalent of an Emmy) and won a Worldfest International Gold Award. She has also received a Canadian Comedy Award.

In 1999 she released a CD, Kitten with a Wit. Last year she produced, hosted, and wrote for the Comedy Network daily show Popcultured with Elvira Kurt.

And now Kurt is one of four comics featured in the film Laughing Matters…More!, which continues to collect awards on the festival circuit.

“You’re never more wanted in Canada until you leave,” says Kurt. In addition to more work, she is now enjoying more acclaim and creative freedom than she did in the States. “I feel like I don’t have to struggle so much for the same amount of job satisfaction,” she says.

“In Canada it’s not an issue to do a show with gay themes, or with no gay themes but to present yourself as an openly gay person,” she says. “Whereas in L.A. they’re always trying to spin it. Are you going to be funky? Outspoken? A comic relief? Or are you going to die in the second episode? It’s always got to be gay and something else.”

But love was Kurt’s main reason for moving back to Canada. Last September she married her partner of five years. “I call her my Doctor Smarty Pants,” Kurt says of Chloe, who is a professor at York University. “She tells me, ‘Now that we’re gay married, you know, there’s no gay divorce, so you can’t divorce me.'”

In addition to the Logo gay marriage series, Kurt is developing a sitcom based on her life. She’s hoping to play her own mother. “I think Freud would roll over many times in his grave,” she says. “I’m going to be playing my mother. As a sitcom character.”

Kurt notes her mother’s “incredible erasing memory” as she breaking into a thickly accented impression: “Well, eef you’re going to make something up…” “Yeah, like I need to make anything up. I go on stage and I tell her stories verbatim!,” Kurt adds, not giving herself due credit for her narrative knack and impeccable delivery.

She complains about her Hungarian heritage, a major source of her material: “We’re scattered, there’s no cohesion. Of all the ethnicities, to have one that so fractured and joyless. Hey, lucky me.”

“I’ve also inherited the Hungarian outlook,” Kurt continues. “It’s not really like the glass is half empty. It’s more like [in thick accent] I think the gless is duhrty.’ And why is it a glass? Why not plastic? Plastic is safer, you could kill yourself…”

Kurt has often joked that her mother tried to kill her when she came out to her in ’89. “My mother is so supportive and sweet and understands there are more of us, and there’s kind of even a cachet about it because not everyone is so it’s special. Yet she has no problem saying things like, ‘I know iz rilly heppy but iz not normal, you know?'” And she doesn’t want any of the family in Hungary to know, claiming “We don’t even have zese tings over dehr.”

“Bailey. Bailey, come here!” This time it’s the family dog rather than Sesame Street competing with us for Kurt’s attention. Apparently the Lab/Newfoundland mix recently discovered the little pan behind the barbecue where all the grease drips, and ever since then she has been going over to lick “the disgusting barbecue drippings” every time she is let out into the yard. “I’m so grossed out by my dog right now,” says Kurt.

Big dogs need plenty of exercise, and Bailey is about to head off to a doggie play group. “It sounds so pretentious. And we do take her for walks,” Kurt says. “But there’s something about her running around the lake with a bunch of other big dogs, playing in the water. I mean, I certainly couldn’t coordinate that.”

Kurt says Bailey looks like a bear, noting that “the baby must think she lives with a gigantic black monster.” Kurt has already started a “therapy journal” for her daughter, and the first entry is about the dog. “Twenty years from now the baby will be grown up, sitting in therapy going, ‘I have images of this big, black shadow lurking over me…'”

Therapy journal? “I’m so sure I’m going to screw up as a parent that I want to have a book on hand. I just want to her to be prepared.”

As if on cue, the baby starts to giggle in the background. “My comedy has gone from how to come up with a really clever way of saying anything…to making funny faces to make the baby laugh,” Kurt says. “She doesn’t care how funny a joke is.”

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