Review of I Used to Be Funny, directed by Ally Pankiw

Although this blog post is going to come out in 2025, due to the sheer amount of backlog and blog posts I have to get through, one of my goals I established in the second half of 2024 is that I wanted to diversify the kinds of content I was consuming. As someone who has been working on this blog for almost three years now, reflecting on what I read and watch creates a lot of soul searching.

It’s made me realize that I want to diversify the kinds of content I want to consume. I have a focus on pan-Asian cinema and literature, and I want to go deeper. I want to see joy and suffering from all around the world, not just one region. Kudos to those who specialize, but I get bored with doing just one thing.

This has led me to open up Netflix and be open to watching anything that catches my eye. My blog lately has been full of movies and shows that I pretty much watched because of a spontaneous urge to press play.

It was when I opened Netflix on a random Monday that I saw I Used to Be Funny had been added to the platform, and when I read the synopsis, I was very much interested in what it had to say. So I pressed play and watched the entire movie in one sitting.

Let’s get into the review—I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction!

A comedian grapples with trauma after she takes on a new babysitting client.

I Used To Be Funny follows Sam Cowell, who is a young comedian living and working in Toronto. Because comedy doesn’t pay enough to cover the bills though, she has to find other works while telling jokes in the evening. The story of this movie is told in a nonlinear format, so we see her at a stage where she can’t even tell jokes due to depression and PTSD.

We start moving through the past to understand how she got here. She works as a nanny in order to pay the bills, and the agency she works for assigns her to a twelve year old named Brooke. Brooke’s father Cameron is dealing with the fact that his wife is terminally ill and in the hospital, and Brooke is clearly struggling.

Brooke doesn’t want a nanny and tries to resist Sam’s efforts to befriend her, but eventually the two become very close. But in the present day, Brooke has gone missing and Sam obviously is grappling with this. We learn how as Sam grew more into the family, Cameron, who didn’t think Sam was funny, starts thinking otherwise.

He even shows his buddies the clips of her performances that are online, which is a bit weird at first because we see how the clips he’s showing them are about sex and her dating life. Sam has a boyfriend, as we see in the past and the present day, but the dynamics shift when Brooke’s mother passes away from her illness.

Cameron begins drinking more, and Brooke withdraws. One day, after watching Brooke, Sam is gathering her belongings to leave on a date with her boyfriend when Cameron comes up to her. He’s drunk and says that through her comedy performances, he thinks she likes rough sex because of some of her jokes.

Sam tells him to back off basically, but he doesn’t listen and becomes even more aggressive in his approach. He then corners her and rapes her in his own home. When he gets off of her, she goes to Brooke and tells her that the carbon monoxide alarm went off. She takes the girl and drives off with her, but then pulls over and calls the cops.

She reports the rape, and Cameron is convicted and put in jail for five years. However, Brooke blames Sam for this and thinks her father did nothing, and she even throws a rock through her window when she comes to talk to her. After that, she goes missing, leading us into the present day.

With her spare key, Sam returns to the family home and goes through Brooke’s belongings. She finds a journal with the name Nathan on it, and there’s a phone number. She calls it, pretends to be a friend of Brooke’s, then gets the location in Niagara Falls.

She goes to find Brooke, who is with Nathan and doing drugs. Sam forcibly brings Brooke to her motel, and while Brooke doesn’t react too kindly to Sam’s presence, the two make up after she admits she thought Sam left her. Sam drives them home, and the two go to Niagara Falls before stopping. After that, Sam goes back onto the stage, returning to her comedy career.

Overall Thoughts

This was a really unique movie to me. Not only does the focus on how Sam lost her creative spark after this trauma prove to be an interesting plot point (as some might find it as motivation to keep telling stories and jokes, but I see why this happened—her jokes led to Cameron thinking she was “easy”), but it’s also very much about the two girls’ relationship.

I like to study creativity and how it manifests in people, and this is a movie that does just that. Sam lost her creative spark because of what happened to her, but was also because she no longer had Brooke in her life. These sudden losses led her to start grieving and have PTSD, which is difficult to overcome.

That said, I thought this was a really solid movie. Every time I watch a Canadian movie recently I’ve been impressed. I hope more Canadian movies come across the border onto American streaming platforms.

Give this one a chance if you’re thinking about it. I think it’s worth it!

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