Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

They came, they saw, they danced.

Over a hundred dancers went underground on Satuday afternoon to cha-cha, two-step, and dougie while riding the TTC as part of the sixth edition of Improv in Toronto’s Subway Dance Party. The event’s participants, who got on at Museum station, started to boogie to music from their iPod headphones almost immediately, as others joined in over the course of the ride.

By the time they hit Queen, it was a full-on party. They danced their way Eglinton, where they got off, crossed the platform and repeated the process.

Onlookers had a variety of responses, ranging from laughter to confusion to pointed ignorance. A few people even joined in the dance, which, according to co-organizer Kyle Friedberg, is the best possible scenario.

“I got people to come on the train and instantly start dancing,” he said. “They were very pretty girls, so that was great for me…It’s always really good dancers [who join in.] You’ll have someone come on the train and just throw down, and they’re better than you are.”

Co-organizer Ashkaan Mohtashami says that the only goal for the day was to make their fellow Torontonians smile. That’s also the mission statement of Improv in Toronto as a whole.

“We’re basically an organization dedicated to making our fellow Torontonians smile,” he said. “With Subway Dance Party, the people participating are having fun, but then the other people are having fun, too. It’s funny to watch.”

He says that this year’s event went remarkably smoothly, compared to previous years.

“We don’t really have expectations for events,” said Mohtashami. “We just organize it, run it, and see what happens.”

“It went fairly well,” added Friedberg. “There wasn’t anyone kicked off.”

Some of those rowdier years led to the creation of some of the Dance Party’s rules.

“Two years ago, we got kicked off a train, but that was because people were dancing really roughly and it was rocking the train,” he said. “After that we started imposing the no-dancing-on-the-seats rule.”

Most important of all is the “No grinding on old ladies” directive, although its origins are somewhat murky.

“I’m not completely sure [where it came from],” said Mohtashami. “There may have been something the first year, or it may have started as a joke, and now there’s a weird myth behind it so we just say it…But if anyone had some weird ideas, that would put them at bay.”

Improv in Toronto also runs the annual No Pants Subway Ride. According to Friedberg, Improv opts to run so many events on the subway because it’s central in the minds of Torontonians.

“When you’re downtown, the subway is really central,” he said, “Our three biggest spots for [gathering] are Nathan Phillips Square, Yonge-Dundas Square, and the subway.”

“You impact a lot of people,” added Mohtashami. “You’re not just hitting one location, you’re hitting a whole area, so more people are bound to see that.”

Photos by Chris Dart/Torontoist.