Comedy, Eh?

FURTHER TO THIS little news below, Jim Slotek in The Toronto Sun is an always-interesting writer with a great sense of comic context. He's puzzled by the "Canadians are so funny" thing almost as much as I am, and he's turned in an interesting antidote of a read:

To some extent, reality TV is a prime culprit for the decline of our influence in the comedy world. With sitcoms nearly dead, many comics I knew who took part in the annual "pilot season" auditions have given up and gone back onstage for good (with the result that live comedy has never seen bigger business).

The Comedy Network, which recently marked its 10th anniversary, was also not the boon it promised to be, hamstrung with tight budgets even when it tried to be ambitious (as with Open Mike with Mike Bullard -- whatever you thought of Mike, a big problem with the show was that it had a writing staff of only a couple of people). No wonder that at its 10th anniversary celebration, the Comedy Network ran a promo reel that was dominated by Daily Show and Colbert Report clips.

(Speaking of the Daily Show, it, at least, values its Canadians -- with Samantha Bee and her husband Jason Jones holding key staff roles.)

For a while, I thought the problem was us. Maybe we had stopped being funny. Maybe it was like that Clive Owen movie Children of Men, where, for reasons unexplained, the last Canadian with a sense of irony was born decades ago, and we've just been drifting along in a state of cowlike unquestioning consumerism ever since, watching Adam Sandler punch people.

But in the last year, I've actually gone out to see twentysomething comics -- as a judge for the Tim Sims Encouragement Fund and at Yuk Yuk's $25,000 Laugh Off (where for the third year in a row, a Canadian standup comic won the grand prize over competition from around the world). Many of them are actually funny, and weird, and worth hearing. And you can hear them at open mikes at places like the Eton House and Spirits and the Rivoli.

From the lemons-to-lemonade department -- maybe the fact that the Americans aren't knocking so hard that also means that some enterprising producer could actually build a Canadian show around somebody funny here, before they were whisked off to the USA. That would be a feat.

It would also require some people getting off their asses and out to see some shows. I have, in the back of my mind, at least five comics I'm going to tap if I get a show greenlit in the next couple of years. No, I'm not telling you who they are. But yes, like good Canadian writers, they're out there.

Imagine the sea change that could be if Canadians bothered to find them first.