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Kevin McPherson Eckhoff is "thrizzled" to invite the Okanagan College community to preview his latest creative work: a comedy album.

McPherson Eckhoff is an English professor at OC and poet, who has published several volumes of visual poetry including Rhapsodomancy, Easy Peasy and Forge. Their biography: an organism of relationships was a book "about" the author, but via collaboratively collaged word-portraits from friends, family, coworkers, strangers, robots and even adversaries. The Globe and Mail called the 2015 collection "wide-ranging" and "incredibly playful."

After dabbling in acting and stand-up comedy for several years, McPherson Eckhoff decided to amp up the playfulness with his first comedy album, entitled JokeKiller.

"There's a funny thing about poetry: it's rarely allowed to be funny. You can write funny poems, but if that's all you write, then you're not a serious poet. Or worse, eventually folks don't believe you and start to take your poetry too seriously," he explained. "Comedy, on the other foot, is simply allowed to be itself. The audience comes to it with a different set of expectations: to be amused, rather than moved or enlightened. I think poetry can and should be funny, and that both forms can use humour to talk about life and social issues in meaningful and surprising ways, as well as scrutinize and subvert dominant ideas and systems of power."

For his debut album, McPherson Eckhoff incorporated guest voices like Andy Kindler, Jay Jurden, Amy Edgar and Maria Bamford. Kevin McDonald even provides an (unsuspecting) outro.

"I wish I could tell you that I’ve performed on every renowned Canadian comedy showcase, like The Debatables, Northern Lights Out, and Chunky Bill’s Late-Nite Minute, but I just made all those up. Truth is, I’ve only really comedied around small-town nowheresville for years," he says. 

"Warning: this is not a real album. This lo-fi humour experiment is the damp squib child of too much pandemic lockdown and too little self-respect."

Including 13 tracks and running 48 minutes, Joke Killer is available on Spotify, iTunes and Bandcamp.