From The Dark Side

Back when American stand-up comedian Eddie Ifft was in first grade, he noticed that the gifted kids in his class – some of them his close friends – were being taken off to learn lessons that would place them on the academic fast track. “And I'm seven and I'm already being told 'Nope, it's not you',” he laughs, shaking his head. “I remember feeling incredibly frustrated. And I thought that if I couldn't be first, then I was gonna be last. If I couldn't get good attention, I was gonna get bad attention. And I found it through being funny. Joking and laughing and getting into trouble, all of that was much more rewarding to me than getting an A on a test.”

Many a class clown has gone on to crack wise professionally, and Ifft is no exception. How many of them crack wise as caustically as Ifft, well, that's another story. There's a venomous bite to his material that kind of belies his somewhat pleasant-looking (if slightly devilish) appearance.

“Yeah, I don't hold back,” he smiles. “Career-wise, I sometimes think that could be detrimental. It's not the most marketable or commercial route I could have taken. But I chose this path to go down. In the beginning, I had agents and managers who thought, 'Here's this cute face – he'll be a sitcom star!' And they would sit me down and beat me up about taking the edge off my act. You know, 'don't imply that, don't use that tone'... And one day I just snapped. I told them that I wasn't a puppet, that what they wanted was not comedy to me. I got into comedy because of who I am and what I think is funny. And I just went with that.”

Ifft admits he likes offensive things. “But I like joking about them... That doesn't mean I like them in real life!” he says. I like to think I'm a good person, a nice person, but I do have a dark sense of humour.”

It could be said that an inability to recognise an audience's capability to balance and evaluate two contradictory notions – that something can be upsetting while also being funny – sells that audience short. Ifft feels that “any normal human being” can see both the light and the darkness.

“I once said to my sister, 'I looked up at this plane today and I thought it'd be cool if it crashed right now, and then I thought how horrible it was to even think about that',” he recalls. “She said to me, 'That's what makes you human, that you're instantly able to say it would be horrible. Otherwise you're a sociopath!' The people with a constant happy-go-lucky approach, who treat the world like everything is perfect, they just strike me as fundamentally dishonest. That upsets me. I look at them and just know there's a dark place they sometimes go to.”

Ifft, however, is a bright-side kind of guy. “A lot of my friends would say I'm a negative person but I am actually really positive with a good outlook. I don't get dismal; I always think there's a solution to a problem. But I like to make fun of the negative with my comedy, mainly because negative is way funnier than positive! And in a weird way, taking that negative and making you laugh at it is a positive act.”