The Alternative Show is one of those “sure things” of the festival, and with its midnight start time typically ends up capping off my week in Montreal. All the comics have gotten to know each other and are slightly loopy from the lack of sleep, and the paying audience usually only fills the main level, leaving the balcony for us laminate-clad folks who just didn’t get enough of host Andy Kindler at the State of the Industry address.
It became clear off the top that Kindler has a following in Montreal, something certainly not lost on him.
“This is a very vocal crowd and I don’t enjoy that,” he said.
Reggie Watts & Jon Dore double up at Saturday night's Alternative Show
Jon Dore kicked things off alongside surprise guest Reggie Watts. They each did their own standup set simultaneously, ignoring the existence of each other. It went on just long enough to start being enough, and then they came back out for an encore. Hilarious.
“Maybe I’m old school, but I found that very distracting,” Kindler said.
If slapstick is included in the Alternative Show does that mean it’s cool now? I sure hope so. Josh Fadem fell down, got tangled in the mic cord, split his pants, got stuck while taking his sweater off, fell down some more… and did manage to get some jokes out in the process. Hooray for physical comedy, and a secondary hooray for having a special mic brought out for him to screw around with instead of causing problems with the normal one (is it wrong of me to notice these things?)
Aubrey Plaza, who is new at all this from having to learn standup for her role in Funny People, had some good stuff about old people on the internet, and New York City being “the only city where I’m afraid of having trash blown into my mouth.” During the week many were hailing her fast progress, but as should be expected there’s some work to do on the presentation side. Her awkward/blase/depressed tone works, but we could do without all the “umms” and then breaking that character by giving us a relatively chipper thanks/goodbye at the end.
Matt Besser brought out his Jason Yellow character (the no-armed deaf and blind comic) from North America’s Best Comic, one of my favourites from that show the night before. It was weird enough to work well, although Besser seemed to have forgotten about one of his characters traits. His “braille” setlist was taped to his leg so he could read it with his bare foot, but he kept looking down at it instead. But I think everyone was laughing too hard to care, so let’s move on.
Nick Kroll’s initial “what’s uuuuup Montreal!” gangsta schtick was hilarious unto itself even before he promised his set was “goona be a lot more Goldblum-y than that.” I can’t wait to see his newly pitched show about a bilingual hat called Fedora the Explorer.
And while I’m at it, allow me to burn one of Matt Braunger’s best lines: “Wild boys! Wild boys! Sorry, I have Duran Tourettes”. Runner up: “Since you guys have 15 sex shops for every 1 sex shop in this town…”
Marc Maron began the final set of the night with a tale about himself, Kindler, and Eugene Mirman getting lost while driving to a Target in the outskirts of Cincinatti — wherin we learn that he does a fantastic Kindler impression.
Maron moved onto a chunk very close to my heart, about his experience in Winnipeg a few months ago. “What the fuck is this? how many times can someone show me the windiest corner in North America?… I fought the urge to go up to people and say ‘you can just GO. Get on a bus or a plane or a train and just GO someplace where there’s coffee shops and black people…’” (I’m a former Winnipegger and did finally realize a few years ago that I could indeed just GO.)
He closed with a story about what must be the craziest woman he’s ever met on the road (I hope), who wanted him to help deliver a letter to the Governor at 1:30am because he’d saved her from Mormons. Or something like that. The crowd loved Marc, cementing my suspicion that everyone who loves Andy also loves him. A great way to bookend the evening.
Metropolis is the venue set aside for only the most rockin’ of Just For Laughs shows (my first experience there was in ‘04 for Rob Smigel’s 3-hour Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Live so I became quickly initiated how insane things can get there).
The lineup was, as expected, wrapped around the building upon my arrival. Tip: it pays to make friends with someone with one of those $25 JFL membership cards that gets you to the front of the line. When the doors opened, it was like the Winnipeg Folk Festival tarp run as people fought each other for a position as close to the stage as possible.
A francophone-accented voice came over the PA system to make seemingly standard announcements, revealing otherwise upon promoting Cher’s upcoming run of shows at the same venue, and that flash photography would be permitted only every 14 minutes and in increments of 14 minutes. The tone dropped and the voice was revealed to belong to Louis himself, of course. We didn’t have a chance to cheer appropriately before he introduced his opener, Jimmy Carr. Yep, you know you’re at a good show when Jimmy Carr is the opener.
Louis opened by telling stories about coming up to Montreal from Boston with friends when he was 17 to “get drunk in the park and bother Canadians.” He also marveled about the plethora of punk kids in Montreal who drive around listening to French rap.
The arc of his material through the show seems to go from observational, to social commentary, to personal relationships and kids.
He started with a bit he did in Toronto a week ago, about the inability to have fun in Buffalo no matter how much money you have. From there, a piece that has me laughing harder than I ever laugh: the impatience and drama of getting off a plane once it lands.
“There’s only room for 20% of people to stand in the aisle, and the other 80% of the people are standing sloped.”
He did a truncated version in Toronto last week, and this lengthier one gives me even more joy.
The social commentary in a few of his bits is heavy-duty stuff, even on paper, but somehow doesn’t feel weighty in the moment. One of my favourite newish bits is about how his friend’s cousin from out of town and saw a bum on the streets of New York. She offered to help him, which Louis and his friend immediately corrected her on.
“Oh no, he needs you desperately, but we don’t do that here… Just a little cultural nuance that we ignore suffering constantly.”
Further on that theme, there’s the “there are people staving, and I drive an Infinity” bit. He could trade his car in for a Ford Focus, make $20,000 and feed thousands of people, but “every day I don’t do it and I choose to let them die with my car. I’m a piece of shit.”
He can say something like “I think about killing myself sometimes, but it’s completely narcissistic. I just picture people crying and shit,” and get a huge laugh off it. I can’t even begin to analyze that.
20somethings dominate his fanbase – at least the group that came out to last night’s show – and it’s incredible how relatable his large chunk of material about being a middle-aged divorced guy with kids is. These people haven’t lived through half of what he’s lived through. Is knowing they would be equally frustrated with that lifestyle that makes it connect? Is it the relief of hearing him say things about parenting that parents never have the balls to say?
The cool thing about watching a guy like Louis do shows a week apart is that you can note the differences in wording and inflection in jokes. It struck me last night that he isn’t married to any particular precise wording in a lot of cases. Example: in Toronto, he said milk cartons had been “invented by some Dutch faggot in 1740″. Last night, he said “that some Dutch fucking loser invented in 1783″.
It doesn’t have to be 1783. It doesn’t have to be 1740. It doesn’t have to be “loser” or be “faggot”. And if he wanted, it probably doesn’t even have to be “Dutch”. So many comics make definitive choices down to that level of detail, and program their autopilot to whichever seems funniest. But Louis doesn’t memorize down to that level of detail, and it’s primarily the ideas themselves that do the heavy lifting. When you think about it, doesn’t that sound like… I dunno… the correct way to do this? No wonder other comedians love him so much.
He returned to the stage for a lengthy encore, treating fans to his already-classic “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy” bit.
“I’ve been looking forward to this show for a long time,” he said in the end. Same here, Louis.
Friday night at Toronto’s Massey Hall, Sarah Silverman summed up every audience member’s thoughts in six words:
“Can you believe this lineup? Seriously.”
Just For Laughs Toronto indeed blew its alt-comedy load in twin 90-minute shows with Silverman as host, and featuring John Mulaney, Arj Barker, Todd Glass, David Cross, and Louis CK. It’s the kind of freakish cosmic event that you imagine only happens once a century.
Silverman kicked things off with straight standup, opening with the requisite reference to the local municipal workers’ strike:
“They’re making us feel so at home here. They feed us, put us up in a nice hotel, put all this garbage in the street to make it feel like New York…”
In true Sarah style, she recounted a story about her pubescent niece, and mused bout the power of the word “pussy”. At the midway point we were treated to a few songs (3 in the early show, just 2 in the late show due to some red light disobedience in the first half).
Mulaney, in his first visit to Toronto, mused on crime investigations before the days of DNA, why drag queens’ perception of what a woman looks like is based on a housewife from a Far Side cartoon, and provided the night’s best throwaway line:
“In my spare time, when I’m not trying to figure out who Tyler Perry is…”
Barker started off his 12 minutes with a meta bit about a hack airplane joke, leading to a Star Wars themed variation on it to prove “my shit’s fresh and original!” Barker’s Toronto reference du jour: contemplating the amount of pot he’d have to smoke in order to enjoy the Bata Shoe Museum.
Introduced by Silverman as her favorite comic, Glass opened both sets by toying with his relative lack of name recognition. For the early show, he had the band play him on at great length as he “modestly” acknowledged the long-ago petered-out ovation. Late show, he simply asked “where are all the people I drew here tonight?” His fantastic rant about how making rape jokes doesn’t mean a person endorses rape only made it into the first set. A shame, considering how many rape-related jokes were indeed scattered throughout all the comic’s sets. It couldn’t have been more relevant.
Cross displayed his Toronto research while recounting his search for poutine earlier in the day, which he figured he’d find by walking up Yonge “’til it peters out.” During the early show, he mocked the festival’s hour-long rehearsal that afternoon, noting how useful it was to confirm his ability to shake hands with Sarah, and to prevent him from going to the side of the stage and taking a nap in the middle of his set. My favourite Cross bit of the night centred on how Coors Light treats their customers like retards, making cans with a bigger mouth and making the mountains on the can turn blue when it’s cold (“Thanks, I was using some of my other senses.”)
And then the man himself, Louis CK, closed out the show to the loudest ovation of the night. As I wrote about after he last played Toronto in December, these are some damn dedicated fans, and rightfully so. It’s been 6 months, so of course he unloaded material I hadn’t heard before. When he’s back in Toronto in October, he’ll likely have a whole new hour (presale password for those tix is “cklive”). Hell, when I see him in Montreal next week, he’ll probably have a new hour. An hour from now he’ll have a new hour. Dude writes a lot, is what I’m sayin’.
As in December, I’m at a bit of a loss for what to say about Louis because nothing I can write will do him justice. I’ll try to work on that before next week’s show. In the meantime, a tiny morsel from him: describing having to help kids open their milk cartons because the design was “invented by some Dutch faggot in 1740″.
The only negative moment of the evening? The genius in the balcony during the late show who yelled out “Jimmy Kimmel!” to Silverman. In what state of mind does this seem like a good idea? She handled the shout-out to her ex-boyfriend well, responding with “thank you for breaking my heart on stage….You must be an awesome friend.”
It should be said: Toronto galas are far more enjoyable than Montreal or even Winnipeg Comedy Festival galas, purely because they aren’t televised. At taped galas, the house lights are kept half-up to capture audience reactions. Slightly, counterproductive as people laugh harder in the dark. Massey Hall is a great venue for comedy, even though the venue staff seem to live on a whole other logic plane. But that’s a story for another day.
All photos above by yours truly. Full set of 42 shots available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sharilynj/sets/72157621644293902/
Variety’s annual list of 10 Comics to Watch was revealed last night.
I imagine anyone reading this blog is already familiar with all 10 names. Many aren’t exactly bold choices, as it doesn’t take an industry genius to predict a career upswing for someone recently cast in a major network sitcom.
The list, linking to their Variety profiles:
Wyatt Cenac, photo by Sharilyn Johnson
Kumail Nanjiani
(Really, do we need to be told at this point that Kristin Schaal’s future looks bright?)
One nice surprise is seeing Canadian Jon Dore’s name on this list. He’s fun to watch on stage, just as fun to watch on the quirky Jon Dore Television Program (airing on the Comedy Network up north), and I’ve never heard anyone say a bad thing about the guy. Should he choose to head southward, good things will happen for him.
The majority of these folks are expected to appear at Just For Laughs in Montreal next week at the Comedy Conference, and they’ll no doubt be last-minute additions at some of the club shows and galas.
I moved away from my hometown of Winnipeg in late 2007 to be closer to comedy. Mission accomplished. But if I were still stuck back in the ‘Peg, I wouldn’t be complaining about comedic starvation today: Louis CK will be crossing Canada (or part of it) this fall.
Immediately my thoughts turned to this epic rant Louis made on the alt.comedy.standup newsgroup in 2001, in a thread entitled “Your Worst Gig”. Behold…
If a show is performed at Just For Laughs and no industry people are there to see it, does it really take place?
…Read more of Just For Laughs: Magical Box of Scheduling, cont’d
What the below photo illustrates – other than a dire need to upgrade my cellphone – is that Toronto has officially been hit with a Just For Laughs marketing blitz. Banners like these line the busiest downtown thoroughfares, bright green posters adorn the bus shelters, and it seems there’s no excuse for anyone not to realize that in just 3 weeks, Toronto will host the 3rd annual offshoot of the Montreal fest.
…Read more of Calendar Cleanup: Just For Laughs & Del Close Marathon
After six seasons, how does the place with “not a lot goin’ on” make its departure memorable?
Tonight marked the end of Corner Gas, one of the most successful comedies in Canada’s history. And if you needed a reminder as to why it defies the odds of sitcom success in our country, the final script provided it in spades.
Even history’s “great” comedians rarely make news after they’ve passed. Bill Hicks has been gone for 15 years, and besides a few books published about the man, nothing has been as newsworthy to Hicks fans as this.
The long-running rumor that John Mayer would host a new variety show were confirmed by CBS last week, and immediately, venom spewed throughout the internet. He’s a sell-out, he’s a douchebag, he needs to stick to music, and so on. In short: “that’s enough, John Mayer”.
I disagree. Walk with me…
