'This Jest In' With Jester Lind

Jester Lind, a local stand-up comedian, writer and citizen journalist, joins the Newsload team to help inform Londoners of important local news stories.

In late February I joined Twisted Mint (Jordan Minter & Dan Twist) at Olive R. Twists to film their annual stand-up comedy contest! It was a fun night of hilarious local comedy and I was super thrilled and privileged to film them all strutting their stuff.

The evening though was not without its hiccups. As I looked for a way to hook my audio recorder up to the P.A. it became clear the P.A. system itself had been left in disarray from a music show the night before. As a proud generalist, I can over come most problems with time, but time was short and this was a serious head ache well beyond my capabilities.

As luck, and serendipity, would have it, one of the comics, known to host Jordan Minter as an astute audio engineer, was on his way. When Jester arrived he managed to sort out the rat's nest of cords, get the P.A. working for the show and figure out how I could get a clean audio recording of the show, all within fifteen minutes. Big sighs of relief followed and the show as back on track.

Through our conversations that night, I realize now that we were both interviewing each other. Me, looking for talented local comics to help do comedic journalism in London, and Jester looking for new opportunities to build his career as a comic.

When we reached out to each other a week of so later, I wanted to see if Jester was interested in helping produce the type of content I really wanted the Newsload to produce more of, so I sent him a link to a local CBC News page and asked him to choose a story, any story, on that page, and come up with a comedic angle we could film together for the Newsload.

A couple weeks later Jester emailed back a script, written around a story having to do with small dogs being allowed on LTC Buses - The script was hilarious - harsh toward small dog lovers for sure, but funny as hell, so we worked toward a shoot date.

Once meeting to film, I suggested we have him improv some content along the edges that would make his news character a bit more sympathetic to audiences. The script was funny but dog lovers would only get a kick out of it, if they first came to like Jester as a correspondent wounded by the loss of his own dog, first. A true natural, Jester did not disappoint, coming up with great content on the fly in-between our scripted shoot.

My intern did his part as well. David Ayigbe, studying film at Fanshawe college, also dreams of becoming an actor, so he was thrilled to step in and help us humanize Jester's character,

This pilot edition of THIS JEST IN is a solid edition to the Newsload content family. I encourage every comedian we work with to bring their own style and focus to their reporting. My role, as I see it, is to amplify that focus, make sure it is balanced, close enough to mainstream and true to its intended audience.

Perfect Newsload content - funny, informative, fast.

Thank you Jester for joining the team and we're very much looking forward to adding more of these segments with you over time. Learn more about Jester here.

Thanks for reading!