I’ve just come back from the Montreal Just for Laughs festival. Saw 17 comics in four days. If we knew more about the way things worked, we could have fit in even more. They hold it every July and I’d recommend it. Prepare to stand in long lines to get in early for general seating. But the theaters also all surround a perpetual street fair with a million things nightly. Hope that it’s not 90 and there’s no tornado, both of which happened earlier in July.
Some big names were disappointments. Sarah Silverman phoned it in so blatantly she may get an Android endorsement. Jimmy Carr is somebody I like a lot, but his material was much weaker than usual. Tig Notaro was trying to find a new post-cancer path and needs more time. You’ll probably see them all on Comedy Central, because it was taped for them.
My top three were all 30 or younger, so watch for them in the future, even though they’re hardly unknown today. All have huge upsides.
John Mulaney - SNL writer who does old-fashioned smart stand-up, part jokes and part stories. If you like John Oliver, then he’s a great alternative. He’s trying to launch a career separate from writing so you’ll probably see a lot of him in various settings and I wouldn’t be surprised if people saw him as an Oliver/Stewart successor. He’s clean cut! He’s a former cocaine abuser! He wears a suit! He’s got street cred!
Bo Burham - Made his splash at 20 so he has greatest hits already at 22. He does funny songs interspersed with jokes all set to a back-up tape timed to the millisecond that makes his act a meta version of meta. It’s all so perfect as to be slightly spooky. Broadway shows are sloppier. Every joke refers back on itself and every interaction with the audience is preplanned. Has fanatic fans that know every word, like rock groupies. He’s brilliant but has the drawback that he doesn’t project an actual personality. I don’t know where he goes from here. He probably has the next ten years already planned out.
Trevor Noah - I hate to push him because he’s going back to South Africa after spending two years touring the U.S. He’s the anti-Burnam, a quiet gentleman who is all personality and connects with the audience throughout an act that is otherwise just as precisely honed. (His best local line was that Montreal calls itself bilingual, but is really French with English subtitles. Perfect.) The whole hour is essentially one long story about his boyhood under apartheid and how he came to the U.S. so that he would have an identity: as black. The show’s called “Born a Crime” because he has a black mother and white father and interracial babies had no legal identity. And he does it all from a perspective of how happy his childhood was. The audience, more racially-diverse than at any other show, loved him, rightfully so. If the suits ever figure out what to do with him, he will be a gigantic global star, Will Smith before everybody started hating him.
All the big names speak in English, mostly because they’re nearly all American or British. If you speak French, then a zillion more shows open up. If you want certain types of comics, there was a dirty show, an ethnic show, a Britcom show, a nasty show, a Bar Mitzvah show, a new faces show. There were comic short films, an Off-JFL for smaller names, a Zoofest for weird performance art, and galas with big names introducing a squadron of slightly-less famous names. Prices aren’t outrageous, but costs will build up before you realize it the more you try to see. The website is - sorry - hahaha.com.