Roman Danylo, corporate stand-up comic and star of the most free-market of all recent Canadian sketch-comedy shows, spent last weekend’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche projected on the three-storey cathedral window facing the headquarters of CIBC Wood Gundy, at the corner of King and Bay. Commerce Court, the three-minute film installation by Winnipeg filmmaker Noam Gonick named for the Financial District building complex it graced, was a perfectly-timed reflection of the psychological states transpiring inside during the week after the Nuit Blanchers roamed home.

Playing the role of the huckster CEO, the script was a manic series of clichés, centered on a pitch for investment in trans-Arctic shipping. “Get in before the big thaw,” Danylo’s character implored. “What are we gonna do when massive flooding and forced migration kicks in? And that’s just in a few short years from now. The Arctic ice was there for a reason, y’know. It’s not just for polar bears, y’know. It’s for the climate — it’s ruined!” etc. etc. etc.

The portrayal then melted down in a state of maniacal exorcist-influenced laughter, with the screen turning blue, only to be seized by the drumming sounds of the Wall Street protest slogan regarding the big bailout: “You Broke It; You Bought It.”

And then it looped to the beginning again, a sequence repeated about 240 times, from dusk ‘til dawn.

Danylo, who has spent the last five years as the hyper-friendly frontman for CTV’s Comedy Inc. — production for its final 13-episode season wrapped as quietly as the show managed to be all along — was approached by filmmaker Gonick for the Commerce Court role after they worked together on bits for a Winnipeg Comedy Festival series aired on CBC.

“Nothing is more flattering than when someone calls out of the blue and just gives something to you,” says Danylo from his birthplace of Calgary, where he spent a Thanksgiving weekend that included a stand-up club appearance. “The fact that I didn’t have to audition — well, I’m not even used to processing that.”

But there was mild trepidation on Danylo’s part — the corporate world has been good for his own comedy business. Concurrent with his Comedy Inc. exposure, the 38-year-old Vancouver resident established himself as an affable entertainer at annual general meetings, association luncheons, and any other events where people in suits ponder their industry over plates of rubber chicken. Bankers, realtors and funeral directors need to laugh too, right?

“I’m there on the outside looking in,” explains Danylo. “The companies all have unique personalities, so maybe they want me to do an impersonation of the VP of HR, or make jokes about their annual report.”

And just as Bay Street was metaphorically burning to the ground in the days after Commerce Court took over the concrete courtyard, Danylo was gleefully providing the entertainment for the Northeast British Columbia Community Coal Forum.

“While everyone was freaking out about the markets,” says Danylo, “they were having a great time in Chetwynd, BC. The price of coal rocketed up last week, so everyone was sitting pretty, all confident that they were the next big boomtown.”

Meanwhile, back in Toronto, discussion of Nuit Blanche tended to point to Gonick’s work as one of the favourites along with other installations in a similar big-box vein —projects that used graying Toronto institutions like Maple Leaf Gardens, City Hall and Union Station to project an irreverent type of hysteria.

The piece addressing the financial meltdown, of course, was the one that had the most in common with where the headlines were headed.

“Karl Marx has been predicting the end of the capitalist system for 160 years,” says Gonick. “I don’t think you needed to be Nostradamus to see that failure was inherent in the system.”

What was originally conceived as a four-screen display ended up being just one, a reduction that suited Gonick and his $5,000 budget, as he spent the first six hours of Nuit Blanche filming reactions for a future gallery presentation of the piece: “There was a cross-section of skateboarders, old people, Filipino families — they all found it was something they could relate to.” 

The commissioned work reflected a genuine statement on Gonick’s part — his father, Cy Gonick, was a one-time provincial politician in Manitoba who also applied his Marxist views to a role as founding editor of the magazine Canadian Dimension. “There was an imparting of certain morals and values, but I wouldn’t call it hereditary,” says Noam. “I’d just call it parenting.”

Commerce Court itself, which 35-year-old Gonick became familiar with while studying film at Ryerson University, was something he related to more through the underground path than its storied four-building exterior. Nonetheless, the North building built in 1930 as headquarters for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was a majestic video-art screen waiting to happen. Last winter, it was one of two Financial District towers that initiated its own process of deconstruction, after a piece of the CIBC sign from the top of Commerce Court West fell on to Bay Street, thankfully injuring no one.

“What is happening to the architecture must be reflecting the reality,” figures Gonick. And he delighted in getting Danylo to infuse the work with personality. “Asking him to do it was a delicate dance because I knew he wouldn’t want to be associated with something that came off like a rabid, wild-eyed Communist statement.”

In turn, Danylo was seen by many thousand passers-by who wouldn’t likely have heeded something like Comedy Inc. Nor is small-screen familiarity a regular occurrence in his life. “Maybe once a week I get recognized somewhere because of the show,” guesses Danylo. “But no one goes after a gig like that because they want their world to change.”

Rather, he’s continued paying the dues along a path he started on at age 16. “I always approached comedy as a business,” says Danylo. “And I knew it helped to be somewhat entrepreneurial about it. You can make it in show business a lot quicker than in many other jobs — and the rewards are usually greater.

“When I realized I had the slightest inclination to get into comedy it seemed like the most important quality was to be loud and annoying. And that was something I was able to do. So, once I had overcome that base shyness, there were opportunities to capitalize on it.”

Danylo spent much of his late 20s pounding the pavement in Hollywood, joining the cast of a fleetingly promising UPN network sketch show, Off Limits. A role in a sitcom was a natural ambition compared to the sci-fi fare filmed around his home base of Vancouver. “It was mostly X-Files-type stuff,” he recalls. “I’d try reading for it and I’d just end up sounding stupid.”

But what initially found Danylo stationed regularly in Toronto was a chance to play sidekick to Jessica Holmes, in CTV’s effort to sell her as the 21st century reincarnation of Dinah Christie. Holmes soon ended up taking her act to the Royal Canadian Air Farce, the de facto starring role went instead to Danylo.

While a show called Comedy Inc., designed primarily to fulfill homegrown content obligations on The Comedy Network and other CTV-owned properties, would suggest the most milquetoast of standards, Danylo wonders if the reign given the writer-performers on the show wasn’t too free. “Sometimes you need a force of resistance to create any tension,” he says. “When you’re raging against the machine it helps to occasionally be pulled back to the other side of the line.”

And while other comic performers were sweating it out online for free, hinging on hopes of being successfully viral, Danylo had the paying gig on network television. The payoff for that exposure was the ability to book a one-man mix of stand-up, improv and sketch comedy into mid-sized theatres across the country throughout the summer, a tour he aspires to reprise next year.

But that’s a world away from his one-night-only avant-garde starring role as a representation of everything that’s proven wrong with capitalism.

“I’m charging up my hustle muscle and going out there working stuff,” says Danylo. “I just read William Shatner’s new autobiography, and I’ve been inspired by his attitude — he just decided at one point to say ‘yes’ to everything.

“I just needed to make sure we weren’t going to piss anyone off. CIBC, that’s my bank. I’ve got a chunk of cash in there. I didn’t want them to get all mad at me.”

Gonick, for his part, was delighted by the number of people working in the financial sector who were excited by seeing one of their totems subverted. The wife of a Wood Gundy vice-president, curious about what exactly the installation entailed, gave Commerce Court her implied approval after learning that watching the work play itself out wouldn’t be too demanding of her time. “She smiled wanly at me,” says Gonick, “and said, ‘Oh, we all have three minutes.’”

The artist then flew home to Winnipeg with one less piece of plastic to his own name.

“You know what happened the day after Nuit Blanche? I lost my bankcard — for the first time in my life. That had to be karmic.”

scroll@eyeweekly.com