Today is the third day of a three-week tour across Canada with Just For Laughs. This is a blast, and very different from my usual corporate gigs. The Just For Laugh Comedy Festival is the world’s oldest and most prestigious comedy event, held every July in Montreal. It attracts major comedy talent from around the world and has grown into be a two-week global showcase of the best and rising-star comedians, very much like the Cannes film festival.
Just for Laughs now takes a show across Canada. This year the featured comics are Jeremy Hotz, Gina Yashere, Robert Kelly, Ryan Hamilton, host Frank Spadone, and me, Bob Arno. The beautiful theaters we play hold 1000 seats to several thousand. For me this is a first, and hanging with bright, talented comedians is as much fun as interacting with pickpockets in Europe, or hanging with undercover security agents in the USA. The pendulum swings from one extreme to another.
We have just concluded filming in Europe for our documentary, done a corporate event in Toronto, attended the annual convention for professional mentalists (MINDvention) in Las Vegas, and now this comedy tour. How more varied can our work be?
The first night the show got an instant standing ovation. Huge applause for each comic. Very different from performing for a corporate event, where the management and event planners are often sticklers for squeaky clean content. The extent of the censoring can be extreme, including a preview of the performer’s spoken lines to make certain that nothing may offend any sub-group among the attendees.
But a comedy tour is a very different animal altogether. Here the audience buys tickets and expects raw and cutting-edge comedy, which by nature will nearly always offend someone. The bigger the appeal or the stronger the ticket demand is, the more controversial the material may be. This tour has a sponsor — Capital One Bank — and therefore even our cast got a briefing of sorts to not embarrass our client. Otherwise we have practically free reign.
During the next couple of days we will chat with our fellow comedy team members and share what they have to say about touring, the comedy scene today in North America, where their careers are, and how to expand and climb the ladder. We will go inside the minds of some of the very best new and successful comedians out there today.
Brilliant! If we ever see you guys live, we definitely don’t want the watered-down censored version. Nice article. Bra gjort!