Bellying Up to a Comics Convention

It was going on 2:30 a.m. at the Delta Hotel, and Jackie Martling was in a fine mood.

“What’ya wanna know? You wanna know who he’s [sleeping with]? I have no idea.” He was talking about his boss, the recently separated Howard Stern. Martling, who is nicknamed “The Joke Man” on Stern’s monolithic radio show because of his propensity for telling filthy jokes in his club act, was among the royalty here, at the 18th annual Just for Laughs comedy festival, held each July in Montreal.

Stand-up comics will never have a Cannes or a Sundance or any kind of dance. True, there is the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, held in Aspen, Colo., each February, but that event, with its private jets and fancy hotels, is so awash in luxury wealth that it’s a strange place for what is, at bottom, an outsider’s sport. There is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, held in August in Scotland, but its edgy mix of international performers doesn’t conform to the mandates of the North American comedy machine.

No, you have to come to Montreal, in July, to experience the U.S. comedy scene in all its limping glory. And you have to show up at the Delta Hotel bar, roughly between the hours of 2 and 5 a.m., to get a glimpse of the industry’s still-functioning underbelly--the performers, the managers, the club bookers, the promoters. Here, in a smoke-filled bar that has the generic look of an airport lounge and a pleasing undertone of camaraderie mixed with scuzziness, the comedy business breathes in and breathes out: Managers try to poach clients and cronies trade war stories, while the bar fills to bursting as all of the midnight shows let out.

“Look at that,” said Rick Messina, pointing into the bar late Thursday night. “Where else are you going to get John Caponera sitting with Dom Irrera making fun of Howard Lapides?” Caponera and Irrera are warhorse comics, and Lapides is a manager. Messina is a manager too, a former New York club booker who, along with partner Richard Baker, today handles Drew Carey and Tim Allen, among others. Two nights later, Messina was sitting around with Martling, who’d emceed one of the festival’s late-night “nasty shows” (“Two flies land on a piece of [expletive]” is how one setup began.) Soon, comedian Maryellen Hooper came over to say hi. Martling pulled her down onto his lap, as Lenny Schultz, a comic synonymous with the 1970s, tried to sidle into the conversation. He was quickly dressed down and dismissed.

Nearby, Pauly Shore was lurking with his makeshift entourage. Shore had come to Montreal, said his agent, Rich Super, not only to do stand-up and get the word out about his new film, a documentary called “The Untitled Pauly Shore Project,” but also to reintroduce himself to a business that seemed to lose track of him somewhere between the films “Bio-Dome” and “Jury Duty.” Indeed, included in the press materials Shore’s team was distributing was a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined: “Reconsidering Pauly Shore, the Anti-Sandler.” Hmmm.

English and French Stand-Up Separated

There is, it should be said, a festival running concurrently with the Delta bar scene, though it’s hard to match the Delta for spectacle and pathos. The first week of what Montreal natives call “Le Festival Juste Pour Rire” is mainly given over to French-speaking acts; it’s during week two that the American stand-up business shows up, and the hardened North American pros trot out their best. In contrast to jaded American audiences, Montreal seems to love stand-up; the clubs are packed, and the English-language newspaper, the Gazette, devotes lots of ink, keeping score of the best jokes.

Each night, gala shows at the St. Denis Theatre with big-name acts (Kevin James, Eric Idle, Tim Allen and Louie Anderson were this year’s headliners) kick things off, while all around Montreal smaller venues host shows with prepackaged titles (“The Relationship Show,” “Queer Comics,” “Best of the Uptown Comics”).

As an attendee, the festival is a crapshoot, but the better acts appear as revelations: Harry Hill, a British comic whose non-sequitur jokes (“Bad enough to jilt someone at the altar, but worse still to send someone who looks a bit like you”) mix seamlessly with the rest of his sublimely silly act, which includes a slide show history of the Bee Gees. Hill performed his show as part of the festival’s fringe series, which also featured the four talented members of the Upright Citizens Brigade, the sketch-comedy troupe hoping now to land at a broadcast network after leaving Comedy Central.

As it happens, the Montreal festival falls during TV development season, offering scouts from networks and studios a one-stop shopping environment. (It is worth noting that the better-heeled industry types don’t stay at the Delta, where they would have to mix with the rabble; they’re over at the Loews Hotel Vogue or the Ritz.)

The industry focuses largely on the shows called “New Faces of Comedy,” though a few of the faces aren’t new, and many of the acts could be wearing cardboard signs around their necks reading, “Will work for sitcom deal.” But in Montreal, with enough rival casting and development people in the same room, it is easier to manufacture a sense of possibility.

This year’s festival-goers were still talking about something called “the Chicken deal,” which happened last year, when a comic named Michael Roof, a.k.a. the Chicken, scored a pilot commitment from Warner Bros. Television and the WB network, apparently based on a single performance at a small club called the Comedyworks. (Roof will next be seen as part of the ensemble cast in the WB’s sketch-comedy series “Hype.”)

This year, two comics were swept into the TV development vortex--Corey Holcomb, an African American comic who inked a deal with 20th Century Fox Television, and Mike Young, who signed a holding deal with the WB.

The smell of something about to happen trailed after Orny Adams and Tony Rock, though the Gersh Agency’s Rick Greenstein was dubious about simply tossing any client to the highest bidder.

“That’s just putting a lot of competition in the same room and letting capitalism work,” he said.

The Buzz Over a New Face

There was some buzz, too, for a truly new face--Sarah Kendall, a 23-year-old from Australia with a long mane of red hair and a face reminiscent of Nicole Kidman’s. In her act, she displayed an intelligence beyond her years, talking about everything from spiders to Mike Tyson. Kendall was one of two Australian comics at the festival--the other being Carl Barron, 36, a gifted physical comic and monologuist who, unlike most stand-up comedians, can claim to be the son of a sheep shearer.

Barron did well all week, but his laconic delivery failed to cross the divide between the stage and the appraising industry types in the back of the tiny room at Comedyworks, where he performed most of the week. Kendall, meanwhile, was drawing heavier interest in several “new faces” shows, and by midweek her manager, Andrew Taylor, was sensing interest. He was hearing “fresh, clever, beautiful,” he said. Scripts were supposedly being expressed by mail. Dave Becky of 3 Arts Entertainment, who manages the Upright Citizens Brigade and Chicken, was offering to bring her to New York.

Kendall, who now lives in London, spent the week alternating between being gracious to the people who approached her and skeptical of their motives. Mostly, she wanted to go back to London, she said, and build her sets to a solid hour.

“It is a meat market here,” she said during one afternoon. “It is an absolute meat market. And you are a commodity to these people. I don’t think they care about your creativity.”

The festival already had been an out-of-body experience; performing as part of an all-female lineup one evening at Eve’s Tavern, she found herself in a prayer circle, led by Mo’nique, star of UPN’s “The Parkers.” Together, the comedians held hands, saying in unison: “Lord Jesus Christ, let the funniness come out of the bottom of our souls and our mouths.”