Brent Butt is so good at what he does that we run the risk of not even noticing.

His Leo Falloon character in the new feature No Clue (now playing) is a classic creation; a lowly salesman (foam fingers and other “specialty crap”) turned fake private eye who’s actually less bumbling than he thinks.

Cue 90-minutes of low impact smart-assery from the local stand-up king and Corner Gas star. The screens lights up whenever he appears, which is pretty much most of the time (although a cameo by Butt’s creative and real life partner Nancy Robertson might trump everything, but there you go.)

Veteran actor David Cubitt whittles Butt’s appeal down to two things.

“Well, he’s undeniably cute,” he tells the Straight, complete with a deep, rumbling laugh, in a call from his Vancouver home. And, he continues, “I don’t want to use a platitude like ‘safe’, because there’s nothing safe about comedy—it’s very risky at the best of times—but with Brent it’s inclusive somehow. You feel like you’re safe with him.”

Cubitt goes on to report that conditions on the comic’s first ever big screen project were equally cosy.

“He’s wonderful,” says the actor, who plays one of Falloon’s suspects in a Vancouver-set spoof built around a missing computer game designer. “He’s very smart, and very collaborative. He had quite a lot at stake, because it was his project, but there was no sense of despotism whatsoever.”

With an extensive resume closing in on 30 years of film and network TV work (E.N.G., Traders, Medium), including long stints in L.A. and the odd development deal with CBS, Cubitt’s in a position to know that “the business is rife with imitation despots.” Score another one for portly Canadian nice guys and the humble successes they continue to achieve.

Same goes for director Carl Bessai, the indefatigable (but not portly) one-man film industry who stepped out of his usual indie pocket to put Butt’s script on screen. After years in the mainstream, Cubitt says he loved Bessai’s unconventional methods.

“He’s a real filmmaker,” he says. “He’s free of a lot of the constraints that I think directors develop when they do stuff that has a lot of money and a lot of producers behind them.”

For Cubitt’s biggest scene in the film, involving a convention centre-sized room filled with extras, Bessai shot the entire thing himself as a ‘oner’ instead of breaking it into individual scenes. “It was really like nothing I’ve ever experienced, and it worked the acting process beautifully,” Cubitt says.

“That’s the other thing. He really loves the actors, which you don’t find very much as you move up in the business. The higher you go, the less valued you are, until you reach a certain echelon. But I never got to that point.”

Butt clearly benefited from Bessai’s sensitivity to performance, and we should probably stop to consider just how skilled of an actor he really is. The man makes everything look so easy.

“He’s absolutely effortless,” remarks Cubitt. “He’s effortless. He doesn’t try for anything, which I love. I think it’s partly also his intelligence. Thinking about his character bumbling his way through; you never get the sense that he’s reaching, or trying to grasp humour. He’s just doing what he’s doing.”

It flows out of Butt like natural spring water from a hot rock. Of comedy.

“Pretend I said that,” demands Cubitt

Okay, he said that.