Sophie Buddle

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After speaking with Rick Mercer the week before the Just for Laughs festival hit Montreal, I had high hopes for the show he was hosting. Comedy Night in Canada was unfortunately a disappointing mishmash of ethnic clichés and other safe topics that left me starving for the edginess that so beautifully defined the other shows I’d seen at Just for Laughs this year.

The roster of Comedy Night in Canada consisted of Mercer, Salma Hindy, Sophie Buddle, Ivan Decker, Dave Merheje, and Eman El-Husseini, whom I remember back when she was waitressing at the now defunct (due to a fire) Comedyworks club in Downtown Montreal. I must applaud the producers of this show for sticking with Canadian comedians, while not shying away from ethnic diversity, making the show reflective of the Canadian Mosaic. That said, I desperately wanted to love this show and I couldn’t.

The material most of the comedians stuck with was brutally safe, and often repetitive. Dave Merheje, whom I’ve interviewed in the past, stuck with family anecdotes and jokes about his own ethnicity, as did Salma Hindy. Ivan Decker and Eman El-Husseini’s stuff was about relationships and mundane activities. Sophie Buddle mainly rehashed the jokes she’d used in The Nasty Show.

Only Mercer and El-Husseini were about to add some edge to their comedy. El-Husseini’s joke about having a boy means having a child “that will masturbate all over your house” was funny, but it came too little too late in her set. Mercer’s material on conversion therapy, naming public property, and the dullness of space were by far the edgiest and funniest the show got.

It must be said that the quality of the comedy cannot be blamed entirely on the cast of Comedy Night in Montreal. As me and my plus one settled in our seats, we saw a sea of Baby Boomer and elderly mainly white faces.

When I saw the cost of the tickets, I understood that the audience was indicative of the generational and racial wealth gaps. The comedians who performed that night were clearly pandering to this audience, and the quality of the jokes suffered for it.

If Comedy Night in Canada comes back, I want the roster to unleash their inner beasts and come out with material that’s actually funny and not just comfortable for white Boomers who love ethnic clichés and bashing young people. I’ve seen these comedians do better and I want them to.

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There’s something about a perfectly-delivered one-liner that just makes life worth living, don’t you find? Lucky for us, the world-class comedians performing at this year’s edition of Just For Laughs have provided plenty. And lucky for you, we just so happened to write down a few of our favorites.

So, in honor of the final weekend of JFL, here’s a smattering of some of the Best of the Fest thus far.

“There’s a new trend of coming up on stage and physically attacking comics. I’ll beat yo ass. I just get bigger as you get closer. Don’t try that shit.”
– Alonzo Boden @ Just For The Culture

“You’ve turned on me. I make a joke and now you’re looking at me like I own a business and the French isn’t in big enough letters.”
– John Mulaney @ From Scratch

“Men will watch a superhero movie and identify with the hero. Every single man thinks he’s Batman. Crazy! No, you’re not Batman – you’re the mother f***er over there, asking for help!”
– Yamaneika Saunders @ The Nasty Show

“I went to fat camp as a kid. It was fun. We all went on our own bus.”
– Jessica Kirson @ Just For The Culture

“Invisalign? You’re ‘vis’. We all see it. When you talk, it sounds like you’ve had a stroke.”
– Dan Levy @ From Scratch

“’Morbidly obese’ is the ‘n word’ for fat people.”
– Robert Kelly @ The Nasty Show

“Doesn’t matter what country I’m in – EVERY SINGLE AUDIENCE joins in for the ‘ba ba ba’!”
– Randy Feltface on Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”

“We have two dogs. The first is like a cross between a mop and a panic attack.”
– Tommy Tiernan @ Tomfoolery

“Learning to masturbate with a vibrator is like learning to butter toast with a chainsaw. It’s overkill. It’s not necessary.”
– Sophie Buddle @ The Nasty Show

“How many more times are we going to have to read an article about how they found a new cure for cancer that only works on rats? Can we all agree that does not belong in the human newspaper? Naw man – that’s rat news. That’s great for the rat community. Let them know. You can leave us out of that conversation.”
– Sheng Wang @ Just For The Culture

“Hockey is the only sport where it’s completely legal to assault a guy. You could break a guy’s jaw and they’re like ‘alright, go sit in that box and think about what you did for a few minutes.’ I know what I did. It was premeditated assault. I should be in prison for 5 to 7 years. Maybe 12 if I don’t speak French.”
– Yannis Pappas @ Just For The Culture

Just for Laughs runs until Sunday, July 31. For tickets and showtimes, please visit hahaha.com

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It’s an understatement to say that JFL’s The Nasty Show is a big deal. The gala is synonymous with the festival (I’d venture that perhaps only New Faces is more widely known). And it is what it says it is: nasty.

Nasty words, nasty concepts, vividly nasty imagery…it is designed to offend in the most uproarious way. Just For Laughs itself bills the show as “hands down the filthiest of the entire festival”. The prim and proper need not attend.

While I did wear my media hat to the event (old school fedora, card that says PRESS), I’m a comedy fan first and foremost. I don’t dissect jokes in search of reasons to be offended; nay, I understand that saying the most inappropriate or unexpected thing is part of the art.

If you can see it coming, it’s not funny. If the jokes were as basic as the puns you keep in your back pocket for emergencies, no one would pay to see it on stage. Laughing is a reflex: I laugh at things I find funny, won’t at things I don’t. Additionally, I laugh like no one’s watching, ‘cuz I don’t actually care about your opinion, so when I tell you I came for the comedy, believe me.

I’m saying all this because it felt like a lot of people came to cover an event they didn’t choose, or got stuck at a table with a co-worker, leaving both too afraid to laugh. Maybe there were just too many scouts and “industry” people, who I assume never laugh authentically.

Just about every comic mentioned the tension in the room, with host Big Jay Oakerson going out of his way to assure the audience that these are jokes, and funnies are different than realsies. (I spoke to him last week, and you should totes read it.)

Josh Adam Myers was a good way to start. He came out with energy, and songs (I was hoping he’d sing!). Don’t get it twisted: he told jokes, and they were funny.

While I was glad to see him live, I expected no less from him. A New Face at JFL 2013, he’s done tons of festivals, loads of touring, and a lot of music. He created and hosts The Goddamn Comedy Jam, a touring show wherein comedians do a set, tell a story, and sing a song of their choice — with a live band. It’s at JFL this year, as a free outdoor show this Wednesday, July 27.

Sophie Buddle was a name I didn’t know at all, so I was stoked for our Canadian content. The Ottawa native received a smattering of boos when she announced that she’d recently moved south of the border, but that’s reasonable. Her set was fun, and I hope to see more of her soon.

Yamaneika Saunders is a Roast Battling Queen, and I was stoked to see her. She’s not only on Jeff Ross’ new Netflix Historical Roasts series, she writes for it too. She’s known for pulling no punches and having no fear, so even though the crowd still seemed reluctant to enjoy themselves, she charged in with steel cervix energy to shake up the room. My face hurt from laughing, plus she had some genius bits that made me look at things from a fresh new angle, and feel like I got a pep talk from a cool chick. Actually factually cannot ask for more out of comedy.

Next up was Liza Trayger. While I recognized her from Your Mom’s House (the popular NSFW podcast hosted by Christina Paszsitzky and her husband Tom Segura), mainstream media consuming folks might recognize her from David Spade’s Lights Out, or Judd Apatow’s King of Staten Island. Again, I knew what to expect (shameless, funny, well thought out jokes), and was glad to get it. I have a hunch we’ll see more of her in the future.

Robert Kelly closed out the show, because well, it couldn’t be any other way. A mainstay of the NYC comedy scene for almost 25 years, host of the You Know What Dude! pod for more than 10, he’s a pro all day. He did cutting crowd work with one hand, and deft self depreciation with the other. His skills were both on point, and full display.

All this to say, the comedy was chef’s kiss, and the comedians deserved far better than the crowd delivered. I’ve never seen such big names with such a tepid crowd.

At one point I caught myself wondering if I was laughing too much, and had to remember that I was at a comedy show…at an internationally renowned comedy festival…laughing at funny things. Frankly, anyone who wasn’t enjoying themselves was doing it wrong.

I felt bad for the comics that we didn’t show them enough love. I feel bad for you now, ‘cuz I can’t repeat any of the jokes or crowd work, and I wish I could, ‘cuz you would laugh too. So go to The Nasty Show while you can; just be sure to leave your clutching pearls at home.

The Nasty Show runs until July 28th. Tickets available through hahaha.com

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Sophie Buddle isn’t a huge fan of the Zoom comedy show, the go-to performance option for many standups during the pandemic.

“Yes, I was doing Zoom shows,” she said in a phone interview, “but I will say that doing Zoom shows is almost worse than doing no shows at all for me because, number one, I have very bad WIFI, but as a standup, if you boil down what we do, we create a vibe in a room and in order to do that, you have to be in the same room with everyone you’re creating said vibe with.”

Buddle feels that with Zoom, you miss the smaller laughs which allow the comic to really connect with their audience.

“In my set, I have more fun with the little laughs in between the big punchline laughs,” Buddle observed, “that’s really where I think all the personality is. It’s the little in-betweenies. In Zoom shows, the big pops still come in, but all the little ones that really bring the flow along don’t get anything.”

This Sunday, she will once again be performing in front of a live, in-person audience at Just for Laughs. Of course, this is a hybrid version of the festival, meaning, among other things, that capacity will be limited and social distancing and health measures will be in effect.

Buddle knows that it will be different. She has been performing socially distanced shows in Vancouver, a comedy scene she loves, for about a month now, since venues re-opened, and sees the advantage to this new type of performance.

“Comedy audiences are as desperate for standup as the comedians are to do it,” she said, “it’s kind of good that everyone who is there is really keen to be there. There’s no filler audience members anymore.”

This year, she won’t just be performing for the audience in the room, Buddle will be recording her first comedy special for Crave and the CTV Comedy Channel. She is thankful for this opportunity and sees it as her career regaining momentum.

“I was waiting in line to board the plane to go to the Junos (she won Best Comedy Album for 2019’s Lil bit of Buddle) and I got a text that the Junos were going to be cancelled,” Buddle remembered, “I’m sure for every industry, you work your entire career to get some momentum, and I felt like winning the Juno was definitely the biggest thing and finally things were starting to roll for me and then that happened and I just had to sit in my apartment all year and I felt like I’m not going to get anything big like that again…and now that things are opening back up again and I’m getting a special on Crave, it’s just such a relief. The momentum is starting up again!”

Buddle plans to spend a few days in Montreal after the festival, as this was where she was born and spent a few years of her childhood and she still holds a fondness for this city. In the fall, though, she plans to move down to the US, California most likely, and look for comedy writing work.

Her previous TV writing gig was for This Hour Has 22 Minutes, but was cut short due to the pandemic. In particular because it was remote work, the show operates on Halifax time and Buddle lives in BC and keeps “stand-up comedian hours”, aka she’s not an early riser.

And you can catch her during standup hours twice this Sunday.

Sophie Buddle and Chris Robinson will be recording CTV Comedy and Crave Stand-Up Specials Sunday, August 1 at 7 and 10 pm at L’Astral, 305 Ste-Catherine Ouest. Tickets available through HaHaHa.com

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I’ve been to a few comedy TV tapings in my time including one episode of The Daily Show and a few Just for Laughs galas. JFL All Access was different.

It had a real comedy club feel, meaning we, as an audience, were part of the show. In particular a kid who was there with his parents and some dude with a beer towel on his head.

The young man was a go-to for most of the comics, but the guy with the towel was just a favourite of host Moshe Kasher. The host explained that he looked like a fellow American, so a bond was formed.

Experienced being on TV and now hosting his own talk show, Kasher took to his JFL hosting duties like the pro that he is. He also delivered some real killer standup.

His material touched on catcalling, Jewish stereotypes and the difference between the kind of social media comments he and his wife (Natasha Leggero, also a comedian, hosting All Access tonight) get. The most interesting part for me, though, was when he told a joke as a test to see just how far a progressive Montreal audience would follow him.

But, of course, the show wasn’t just about the host. There were seven really talented comedians also performing.

Joe Lycett

The standout for me was British comedian Joe Lycett. His retelling of an email exchange he had with his rental company was that stuff that fits of laughter are made of.

Fellow Brit Seann Walsh also delivered the funny with a really relateable bit on memories of Limewire and dial up. I felt I should have predicted his final punchline but was glad that I didn’t as it really worked comedically and made sense.

Proving that even the comics in Vancouver are chill and talk about weed was Sophie Buddle. Her set was low key but just as funny as her more bombastic compatriots. A nice change of tone.

Fellow Canadian (from Toronto) Eddie Della Siepe won the award for most awkward personal story told for laughs. It involves vibrators and his deaf mother.

Fellow Torontonian now living in LA Julia Hladkowicz got real about an encounter with a kid in a park. It’s all about perspective.

Props to American comic Guy Branum for bringing our national dish into the conversation. He also had some interesting views on Canada’s history.

Eugene Mirman of the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival and Bob’s Burgers spent most of his time telling of a rather unique way he got revenge for a parking ticket. However, it was his story of the signs he posted in various places that really got me laughing.

While that completed the TV lineup, the audience was also treated to a surprise off-camera performance by Jimmy Carr, whom we already reviewed in our report on The Nasty Show. There was also Aaron Burr, a stellar comic in his own right, serving tonight as the warm-up guy before the cameras started rolling. Burr’s set was great, but there’s something extra cool about getting instructions on how to get drinks from the bar during the show from a world-class comedian.

I recommend checking out an All Access taping and watching this show when it shows up on The Comedy Network.

All Access Live runs with different hosts until July 29th, tickets available through hahaha.com