Just For Laughs Comedy Tour

At the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Saturday, November 14

Just for Laughs has been producing comedy galas for 25 years, creating slick shows that always give the audience what it wants. Of course, to please the masses, you can’t offer up cutting-edge comics. But what viewers get are solid professionals who know how to generate laughs.

This year’s Comedy Tour was no exception. Further ingratiating themselves with the great unwashed—and the bottom line—and distancing themselves from comedy fans who also possess musical taste, the powers that be have substituted a DJ for the JFL band. Okay, whatever. He’s there basically to bring people to their seats. But this year, the producers decided to employ a warm-up comic. Wrap your head around that. Montreal’s Mike Patterson was paid to get the crowd ready to laugh at the emcee, a comedian whose job it is to, yes, warm up the audience. It was made all the more ridiculous by the fact that the host was the already capable Sugar Sammy, and the warmer-upper was, on this night, hopelessly incapable. We don’t need to practise laughing and applauding on command. Say something funny and that’ll do the trick.

The meat of the night was made up of Sugar Sammy, Pete Correale, the uni-named Godfrey, Gabriel Iglesias, and Danny Bhoy, all enjoyable to varying degrees. Sammy was an amiable host, keeping the show running smoothly and trotting out his greatest hits about his Indian heritage and dating. To his credit, he’s not afraid of offending. But why should he be? He’s charming enough to utter the most sexist comments and pull it off.

Traditionally in comedy, the best is saved for last. With these all-star events, it’s a little different. Scotland’s Danny Bhoy (seriously—and it’s not a stage name) closed the show and felt like the headliner because he was the only comic to eschew the handheld mike in favour of the lavalier microphone. But for my money, the best of the night was Correale, an impressive joke writer with a great New Yawk accent and a pissed-off/resigned attitude. As the lone married guy among his friends, he’s often left shaking his head at their ignorance of his situation. When they talk about how hot Jessica Simpson is and suggest that his wife would let him sleep with her if he got the chance, he shakes his head: “My wife doesn’t let me have ice cream after 9 o’clock. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say no.”

Correale was the least animated of them all, but he had no reason to get excited. His persona demanded a more stationary beaten-down delivery, and the strength of his material allowed it. No theatrics needed.

The African-American Godfrey seemed to enjoy himself a little too much, laughing at his own jokes throughout, seemingly kick-starting the crowd. He, too, was an engaging performer, but his material was lacking. He resorted to hard-luck stories his dad would tell about growing up in Nigeria—how he had to walk 100 miles to school and, when he arrived, how there was no school so they had to build it. Shades of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, only not nearly as funny. And when you end on a Cosby impression, that’s never a good sign.

The larger-than-life (literally) Gabriel Iglesias is a plus-size Mexican-American who prefers the descriptive fluffy over fat. His great weapon is his voice. If he doesn’t do cartoon voice-over work, he should. Then again, half the fun is seeing the manic little girl’s voice coming out of his face.

Bhoy is the one everyone raves about. If he used a hand mike, though, would they? I don’t think so. Everything he says seems so much more profound as he paces the stage like a speaker at a convention. But, really, “Do you think Chinese people get English tattoos?” ain’t gonna cut it at most open-mike nights. He has a nice way with words, but they often just rephrase tired bits. Why do they turn the lights up in nightclubs at the end of the night, he wonders? “It illuminates the full horror of your situation.” Well said, but the explosion of laughter he got was for the unoriginal observation rather than the phrasing. Still, he was a humorous storyteller, even with his studied asides.

It won’t make a list of best shows of the year, but for the casual comedy consumer there was little to complain about. The skillful jokesters gave ’em what they wanted from start to finish. Mission accomplished.