James Mullinger can’t wait to get back to Sackville, if only to hit up the Cackling Goose Gluten Free Bakery. “My wife and I always stop in there when we’re passing through,” says the British-born, New Brunswick-based comedian. But this time he’ll be stopping for more than a six-pack of gluten-free cinnamon buns. Mullinger is returning to Sackville on September 20th with a show at Convocation Hall to help launch the Fall Fair.
CHMA spoke with Mullinger to find out more about his tour, his new tv show, and his favourite Sackville spots.
If there’s a theme to James Mullinger’s life so far, it would have to be his propensity to ‘go for it’.
Just five years into a successful editorial career at GQ in London, Mullinger decided to chase his dream, and in 2005 started the grueling work of stand up comedy, all while keeping his day job. Then in 2014, he and his partner Pam decided that raising a family in busy London wasn’t for them, and so made a radical move, all the way to Saint John, New Brunswick, where Pam grew up.
When people in Canada told Mullinger he would have to give up on his comedy career while living in New Brunswick, he very happily went about proving them wrong. With a longstanding goal of playing his own stadium show, Mullinger decided to make that dream come true, and within two years of arriving in the city, took on the challenge of a show at Harbour Station Arena in Saint John. (He ended up selling out the venue, and you can watch the tale of how he made it happen, married with thoughtful conversations about the city of Saint John, in the film City on Fire.)
Since then, Mullinger’s been working on podcasts, tv shows, books, and has toured his act throughout Canada, generally building the career in comedy that folks warned him he couldn’t have.
“People had said there wasn’t a comedy industry here, so don’t go there. And I said, well, that seems weird because you wouldn’t say to a plumber, hey, there’s no plumbers in that town. Don’t go there,” says Mullinger. “If there’s no plumbers, then there’s a lot of toilets that need unblocking. So I see myself as the toilet unblocker of comedy in New Brunswick.”
Image: sackville.com/fallfair
When Mullinger describes New Brunswick, he doesn’t see a place that’s stodgy or stuck. Quite the contrary: “The great thing about the Maritimes is that you can carve out your own path,” says Mullinger. “There isn’t this kind of set way of doing things.”
Mullinger’s comedy is imbued with a love and enthusiasm for the place he now calls home, and it stretches beyond his beloved city of Saint John. Brit Out of Water is a six-episode sitcom set and filmed in Miramichi, streaming on Bell Fibe TV1. “It’s our love letter to New Brunswick,” says Mullinger of the series which he co-wrote with Miramichi mayor Adam Lordon, who also co-stars in it. “It’s a sitcom in the vein of Shitt’s Creek and Corner Gas, where it’s a celebration of small town life in Canada,” says Mullinger. “But crucially, obviously, filmed and based on the East Coast.”
“We wanted to create a sitcom that New Brunswickers can be proud of, but also obviously poking fun at the idiosyncrasies of the place and the things that we do here,” says Mullinger. It’s a style of comedy that Mullinger also brings to his standup act. “I think the only way in which I’m able to do this is that New Brunswickers have an incredible sense of humour, and are also very, very happy to laugh at themselves,” he says.
“I can never take credit for most of my material,” says Mullinger, “because most of it is stuff that people here have said to me or people have sent to me. And so I would like to look at all of my shows as a collaboration between myself and all of the people of New Brunswick, who were kind enough to gift this material.”
You can catch James Mullinger live at Convocation Hall on September 20, presented as part of the Sackville 2023 Fall Fair. Tickets are available on Eventbrite, and are $25 in advance, and $30 at the door. Mount Allison students get a special rate of $10.