Putting together successful Just For Laughs festival is a juggling act

MONTREAL – Putting on what’s billed as the biggest comedy festival in the world is nothing short of a juggling act, suggests the president of Just For Laughs.

“Every year we’re actually amazed that it flies given the amount of hurdles,” says Andy Nulman, reeling off the behind-the-scenes details that glue things together at the bilingual event before the first joke is cracked.

“We know the difficulties of convincing talent, of selling television shows, of selling sponsorships, of getting grants, of selling tickets, of people doing things you wouldn’t want to know about (before) they have to be on stage.”

Things even got as strange as bailing a comedian out of jail and fending off RCMP officers who once came to the event looking for a performer named Chuck Wood. They insisted he hadn’t cleared immigration.The officers were informed Wood was a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“We are building a house of cards,” Nulman said. “What you do in the previous year has no relevance. It’s like a spin of a roulette wheel.”

The 31st annual edition of the festival runs until Sunday. Over the years it has sprawled out from a one-night theatre show to include offshoots such as Zoofest and Off-JFL as well as events in cities including Toronto and Chicago.

Among other activities, it also has a TV production arm which pumps out “Just For Laughs Gags,” a prank show which Nulman says gets five million hits per day on the Internet alone.

This year’s big success is a series of sold-out festival shows by comic Dave Chappelle. The event had barely tweeted it on social media before people started snatching up tickets. More shows had to be added with the final number settling at 10 performances.

“There’s not a comedian here that’s sold this many tickets at festival time, in any language,” said Nulman, suggesting that Chappelle’s quirky reclusiveness probably helped spur sales among a devoted fan base.

“People are saying it was X amount of years before he last played so we better take advantage of this,” Nulman said. “He’s a genius the way he’s created demand. We didn’t have to sell it.”

Just For Laughs wasn’t always a big deal. Nulman says a lot of people thought he and founder Gilbert Rozon were kidding when they tried to sign them up for the event.

“Back then, our wildest dreams were to convince people it’s legit, that we weren’t two fly-by-night freaks coming to their office.”

At the time, standup comedy was something seen on late-night chat shows and in smoky clubs. Funny people didn’t have the status they do now, like Canadian Just For Laughs alumni Russell Peters, who was listed recently by Forbes magazine as the third highest-earning comedian in the world. He pulled in $21 million in the past year.

Nulman says the festival started to get big in the late 1980s when agents began showing up looking for new talent and Canadian funnyman John Candy hosted a live special for HBO from the event.

“In 1990, when Tim Allen went from our stage to ‘Home Improvement,’ it was like a gold rush,” Nulman said. “The industry realized this was the place to discover talent.”

A who’s who of comedy, such as Bill Cosby, Jon Stewart, the Muppets, members of the fabled Monty Python troupe, British comic Russell Brand and Zack Galifianakis, who gained fame in the “Hangover” movies, have appeared.

One of the major players now working with the festival is The Comedy Network, which draws its “Just For Laughs: All Access” TV series from it.

The network actually launched at Just For Laughs in 1997, noted Sarah Fowlie, the director of independent production, comedy, for Bell Media.

She said the festival shines an invaluable spotlight on Canadian talent and is one of the reasons a comedy TV network is viable in Canada. Fowlie even credited it with influencing the revival of television sitcoms in the country by adding to the experience of performers and writers.

“It really is world class,” she said of the event. “This is where you come to be discovered, this is where you come when you’re on top of your career, this is where you come if you’re on your way up, this is where you come to do a comeback.”