At the Orpheum on Friday, November 24

The annual Just for Laughs Comedy Tour is such a franchise now, they’ve stopped trying. It used to be a lineup of the top comedic talent in the world, complete with a house band to play the comics on and off the stage. The 2006 tour, which rolled through town on Friday, featured names not widely known by even the most devoted comedy fans, with the exception of host Greg Proops, but even then you have to follow his name with, “You know, the smart-ass with the glasses on Whose Line Is It Anyway? ” As for the band, it was replaced by a DJ whose sound system wasn’t even hooked up to the theatre’s speakers.

You just have to trust the organizers of the world’s largest comedy festival to know what they’re doing. And they do. It’s rare to be 100 percent satisfied with every comedian on the bill of a comedy show, and Friday’s was no exception. But one of the joys of watching unknowns is that the element of surprise and discovery is heightened. The real find for me this night was John Caparulo. The American has a really likable dumb quality to his act, which is rife with solid jokes. With his white T-shirt and ball cap, and a Joe Sixpack persona to match, he appeals not only to the irony-challenged good ol’ boys of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour set, but also to the hep, sarcastic slackers. The fast food–loving, TV-watching, book-hating Ohioan revelled infectiously in his lack of sophistication with a sort of resigned self-deprecation. When asked by his friends how he could have missed George W. Bush’s speech, he shrugs. “I dunno. I guess I got more channels than you.”

Proops proved to be an excellent MC, pacing the stage with surety, giving voice to the tour’s slogan, “Leaving no city unfunny”. He skewered our little whistle stop, saying in reference to our murky tap water, “It’s great to be here in Upper Mexico.” But the fun wasn’t all directed at us; he took aim at his own country’s political excursions with a facile flair for the language. On the war in Iraq, he asked, “How did our oil get underneath their sand? What a tantalizing ecological conundrum.”

Canada’s contribution to the show also fared well. Vancouver’s Tim Nutt, who looks like a young Meat Loaf, won me over with a story about buying a plunger. It had the potential to be all poo-poo humour, but he managed to make it engrossing without being gross.

Montreal’s Joey Elias, slimmed down and angrier, won the crowd with his rant about Air Canada.

The two comics I didn’t care for did tired, predictable humour. Jim David’s act was full of stereotypes, from gays (he himself is homosexual, making this somewhat more palatable) to Japanese trying to speak English, and from Wal-Mart greeters to Condoleezza Rice speaking “ghetto”. But the biggest disappointment was the featured act, Tommy Tiernan. Roaming and dancing around the stage with a headset mike, the Irishman offered nothing new on standard topics like women being different from men and the Tyrannosaurus rex having tiny arms. He just dressed up the lame material with histrionics; it was as if he had it in for the spotlight operator.

Still, four out of six ain’t bad at all.