Spokane Comedy Film Festival showcases a different form of comedy

As a young animator, comedy was initially a means to an end for Josiah Carlson. He needed characters and funny voices for the cartoons he created, so he did them himself.

Using Post-It notepads he found around the house, Carlson would create flipbooks and cartoons. He’d then get in trouble for “wasting” the Post-It notes.

But Carlson kept creating, eventually moving from paper to the computer, teaching himself the limited software available at the time as he went.

After high school, Carlson got a job at a company in town, which took a chance on him and his animations. He’s been working as an animator ever since.

During a period of hyperfocus on commercial artist work and working 70 hours a week, Carlson was forced to pause when COVID hit. While at home, he made a parody video of a home repairman that his wife, friends and coworkers found especially funny, and his wife convinced him to give stand up a try.

Though that wasn’t the first time he’d been told he could make a living making people laugh.

“I heard my whole life ‘You should do stand up,’ but it didn’t seem like a real thing,” he said. “I did one of those (career tests) in high school, and it said I should be a clown.”

Carlson decided to go for comedy, not clowning, and gave stand-up a try as things were slowly reopening after the pandemic. His initial sets featured a lot of cartoon, absurd stuff, misdirected focus jokes and characterization.

One bit featured reciting a rage letter he had written about how his gym was being unfair to him, but when the audience heard the details of what he was doing at the gym, they would realize that Carlson was in the wrong.

“It’s fun because it’s an open mic, no one knows who you are,” he said. “You can come up and do three or four minutes as whoever you want to be.”

Over time though, Carlson realized the biggest way to make sure he wasn’t being copied was to be autobiographical, and he began sharing stories from his life.

As he met more comics, Carlson asked if they ever made videos, curious if there was another way to share comedy with audiences than stand up. After hearing that many had created comedic shorts, Carlson had the idea to gather all the videos and launch the Spokane Comedy Film Festival.

Because the comedians and filmmakers had videos ready to go, Carlson said it was easy to organize the first festival, which was hosted at the Garland Theater and showcased 35 videos.

After the success of the festival, a manager at the theater asked Carlson if he’d like to host a monthly stand-up show there. With a theater screen behind him, Carlson was able to incorporate mixed media elements into his stand up. He’s been performing regularly for the last five and a half years and recorded his first special earlier this month.

The second Spokane Comedy Film Festival was a proof of concept, Carlson said, because now everyone had a shared deadline to make something new.

“That’s one of the coolest, coolest, coolest things of this is each year, a larger and larger portion of the stuff that we screen is brand new, doing a world premiere, made specifically for the film fest,” he said.

Now in its fifth year, the Spokane Comedy Film Festival will return to the Garland on Friday, with an encore screening of the films on Saturday.

Attendees will be able to vote for their top three films no matter which screening they attend. Winning creators earn $100,000 in prop money, and their names are added to the Golden Whoopie trophy, which is a whoopie cushion atop a stool.

There are no requirements for the films as far as subject matter, genre or production value. Instead, all the films, 28 this year, 18 of which are brand new, should have good audio and keep comedy at the forefront.

Dramatic or horror pieces that have a laugh every few minutes might look nice, but they aren’t comedies, Carlson said.

Videos should have a narrative, characters and a story arc audience members can follow. In other words, comedians shouldn’t submit clips of their stand up routines.

Carlson tries to curate the festival from an audience standpoint. If a particular video isn’t his cup of tea, but he knows the audience will like it, he adds it to the lineup.

Shorter pieces tend to do better than longer ones, and videos that are overly sexual or graphic have caused audience members to walk out in the past, so while Carlson doesn’t censor the creators, he does want them to keep that in mind.

“We really want the night to be good natured and playful and inclusive …” he said. “That’s honestly probably the most important thing is that it’s bringing people together, not dividing. I want people to be free of concern and have a good time.”

If you’ve got a short you’ve been itching to share, or need an excuse to take an idea and make it real, submissions for the sixth-annual Spokane Comedy Film Festival are being accepted now.