by MATTHEW WOODLEY

One day Joe Cobden might find serenity on a park bench commanding a flock of pigeons with a handful of breadcrumbs. Right now he’s sitting on my livingroom couch, taking a haul off a cigarette after a digressive second attempt at explaining what inspired him to do a show about old people, the upcoming Golden Age.

“Aw fuck it,” he says. “The truth is I miss my grandfather. And I don’t know old people. And I’m scared of dying.”

This from a comedian, and a 26-year-old at that. But I’m familiar with his paranoia—we’ve been pals and sometimes co-performers since we were kids. Anyone who’s logged a few audience hours at anglo Montreal performances may also be familiar with the guy. He’s a regular at cabarets, comedy clubs and impromptu band openings. He wowed ’em last fall in the 1.5-hour monologue The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and he was the first anglo actor to win a Masques award for his performance in the Centaur’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

The more big-screen inclined ought to know that he was the comic under the paper bag in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and that’s him asking Leonardo di Caprio to “pass the fucking butter” in The Aviator (not to mention a couple of Canadian film leads).

“I’m scared of being old and dying without dignity and my body breaking down,” he continues. “So my story is about a young guy who is broken and gets old before his time. But it’s snappy.” There we go.

To be performed live to tape for CBC radio, Golden Age is what Cobden calls a throwback to old-time radio drama, a well-rounded evening of words and music that also features locals Eric Amber, Katie Moore, Warren Spicer, Brendan Murphy and Billy Anthony. “I want to sweat on the radio,” Cobden says. “A lot of what I hear is diaries or documentaries. I want to make it more performative, more alive [switches to nasal ringleader tone]—‘And now, ladies and gentlemen…’”

In bringing his off-the-cuff style to radio, Cobden tried to enlist another of his role models, Shelley Berman. “He was my hero as a kid,” Cobden says. “In my grandfather’s time, he was as big as Will Ferrell is now. So I e-mailed him—you can go to shelleyberman.com and write him and he’ll write you back—with this idea to do one of his famous telephone sketches. But I articulated it really badly and he was outraged. He totally told me off, threatened me, it was just nasty. But I’m going to do the show anyway. I still think he’s amazing, though he might not be the nicest guy to work with.”

Trial by fire

Some of the research for Golden Age was done in the Griffith-McConnell retirement home, fuelling Cobden’s fondness for the elderly and eras past. He likes post-war music and sometimes utters the word “Internet” with curmudgeonly disdain. This sensibility comes from two places. “My grandfather for sure,” he says. “He taught me how to gamble. I had my first whiskey with him. He was a storyteller, a lyer in a way.” The second is street performing, which he took up at 11, sometimes drawing huge crowds to watch his juggling and comedy antics. Alongside his patriarchal lineage, weathered, nomadic, fire-eating buskers were his mentors.

“Street performing is the base,” he says. “If you fuck up, then everyone leaves and that doesn’t happen in most other kinds of performing. All my heroes are street performers. One of the guys in this show, Eric Amber, was a king of it—a hero for the weekend all over the world. There are kids all over who will always remember him, even though they’ll talk more about Brad Pitt. It was an intimate, personal encounter they’ll never forget. It’s not cool, it’s entertainment for everyone. And it’s there for half an hour and that’s it.”

Golden Age runs from May 12–14, 8:30 p.m., at Théâtre Ste-Catherine (264 Ste-Catherine E.) and will be taped live for CBC Radio on opening night and broadcast at a later date, $7 with 60- per cent of the proceeds going to the Griffit-Mcconnell Retirement Home in Montreal West