There’s a long, proud tradition of great television bitches: Alexis Carrington-Colby, Amanda Woodward, Wilhelmina Slater and Trevor Boris. As a panellist and producer on MuchMusic’s Video on Trial, Boris gleefully attacks big-name celebrities on a daily basis.
The celebrity schtick comes easily, Boris says, because, “I’m dead inside. It makes it easy to judge people when you’re dead inside.”
When he started doing VoT more than four years ago, he says, “I thought I was going to get all kinds of hate mail, but I take as many shots at myself. You learn that it gets old making fun of the same thing: ‘Oh, look at this video ho.’ There’s always a video ho.”
“Sure,” I venture. “Not every music video can be as legendarily ridiculous as Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
Boris laughs at me, “Your references are so old. I thought I felt old.”
He did not go there. The blond, baby-faced bitch deserves the question: how old are you?
“I don’t want to say,” he answers. “It messes up my game, dating teenagers.”
Boris says dating more and younger in the last year has influenced his standup act.
“I’ve definitely gotten a lot edgier lately, more sexual,” he says.
He jokes about a recent hookup, saying, “We had sex in his parents’ bed — we had to because we couldn’t both fit in his racing car.”
Laughing at his own line — an oddly endearing quality he has — Boris says, “I have jokes that are good gauges of the crowd’s mood. You dip your toe in a little.”
For instance, he says, one good test is a bit about horrifying his hot gay gym trainer by asking him if he’d ever had sex with his identical twin brother. “But it’s another you!” squeals Boris. “It’s really more masturbation than sex, right? I just know that if I had an identical gay twin, I’d… well… I can do better than me.”
Though Boris has a following of gay men, he says his biggest fans are college and university students and, perhaps oddly, teenaged girls.
“I’m the Hannah Montana of Canada,” he says. “I’m the fourth Jonas brother. It’s definitely very bizarre to have 15-year-old girls as a big part of your fan base. I do all-ages shows sometimes, and they’re a hard crowd because they don’t get a lot of what I’m saying. You can’t make jokes about dating 19-year-olds to 19-year-olds — there’s no distance.”
But that said, he goes out of his way to please them — riffing on Miley Cyrus and Harry Potter.
“I’m going to personally phone everyone who buys my DVD,” he says. “Fifteen-year-old girls love that kind of stuff. I figure we’ll talk about boys, or I can help them with their homework.”
It’s hard to feel sorry for a guy who looks half his age, calls his own shots and commands a loyal army of teenaged girls. His first full-length DVD, Trevor Boris: Over Easy, goes on sale at the end of April, and he’s booked for his Just For Laughs Gala debut.
“I’ve always been lucky,” Boris says. “Because I’m not threatening. I’ve never had a backlash, even a heckler.”
Best of all, he gets to be a role model.
“I get emails from kids who watch VoT who say they’ve come out because they watch me on TV, which is really nice,” Boris says. “And then I say, ‘Where do you live? Are you 19?’”
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