Juste pour rire was founded by Canadian businessman Gilbert Rozon as a two-day event in Montreal, with four French comedy shows, forty-one years ago. In 1985, promoter Andy Nulman came on board, and the two turned the July festival into a longer bilingual production, which became known in English as Just for Laughs. That year, the event attracted 40,000 attendees and showcased fifty-five comedians, including Yves Lecoq and Michel Forget for the French sets and Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno for the English shows. American talent scouts and Hollywood agents began to understand that’s where they needed to be. In 1989, about 250 of them attended the summer event, which at that point boasted performers from twelve countries. For decades, JFL launched star careers.
“What [the festival] did was pretty amazing,” says Andrew Clark, humorist and director of the comedy program at Humber College in Toronto. “It became the one-stop shop for the comedy business.” Industry professionals could spot promising comics, who, in turn, “could walk away with a three quarters of a million dollars development deal.” Clark is also one of Canada’s first comedy critics and author of Stand and Deliver: Inside Canadian Comedy, a deep dive into the industry’s history. “It used to be ‘JFL is touring Canada,’ and you’re on the JFL bill. People were going because they recognized JFL,” he says. “It was a very exciting thing.”
Over the years, the festival featured famous performers, including Joan Rivers, Tina Fey, and Trevor Noah, along with up-and-coming comics. It put Roseanne Barr and Tim Allen on the map. In 1995, Jimmy Fallon did an opening set for Penn & Teller, where he was a standout act. Mike Birbiglia made his debut on JFL’s New Faces of Comedy in 2001; in 2007, the emerging-talent series showcased Amy Schumer. Jo Koy has told Variety: “Immediately after I walked off the stage, the booker from The Tonight Show said, ‘Save that set, we want it on the show.’ I was still a shoe salesman at that point, so it felt like a scene from a movie.”
By 2012, Just for Laughs grew to roughly 250 shows produced in multiple venues around downtown Montreal. In 2016, the festival began bringing in an audience of nearly 2.5 million. It expanded to Toronto, Vancouver, London, UK, and Sydney, Australia. Its flagship event stimulated Quebec’s economy. The festival was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2022 for its influence as “the most important player in the global comedy industry.” And then it crashed.
In early March of this year, Groupe Juste pour rire Inc., the company that runs JFL, announced it was cancelling this summer’s edition; it owed $22.5 million and was seeking creditor protection to avoid insolvency. (In June, entertainment company ComediHa! bought some JFL assets and announced its own summer festival.) PR company National Public Relations says the organization is not taking interview requests at the moment, and so the closest there is to an answer can be found in a Groupe Juste pour rire Inc. press release. The pandemic, inflation, a changing media landscape, and difficult times for festivals in general are listed as reasons. The intention, according to Groupe Juste pour rire Inc., is to return next year.
But with JFL’s enduring public issues—disturbing reports of sexual assault and overall bad management, to name just two—maybe it’s actually okay that the old festival is dying a slow death. In 1998, Rozon pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a nineteen-year-old at a party but was spared jail time by a judge who believed his business contributions to Montreal outweighed the need for punishment. Rozon continued running JFL until 2017, when he stepped down after several women accused him of sexual abuse, including one who claimed he assaulted her when she was fourteen, in 1990. In total, fourteen women filed complaints against him, leading to a single prosecution, in which Rozon was charged in 2018. In 2020, in a separate trial, he was acquitted of charges of rape and indecent assault. He, however, continues to face charges from nine women, who filed civil lawsuits in 2021 and 2022, with total claims exceeding $13 million.
Following Rozon’s resignation, the festival was sold to a group of buyers that included the talent agency ICM Partners, the media giant Bell Media, and Howie Mandel (Mandel is no longer affiliated with the ownership consortium). Andy Nulman, who occupied the role of president, CMO, and CEO at different times and left in 2015, says he believes “different management philosophies” were in large part responsible for the festival’s downfall. Of the company’s previous owners, he says, “You’re talking about three companies who I don’t want to say are at odds but they have differing objectives and priorities. And so, while all this squabbling was going on internally—who’s taking what management fee and who’s doing this and who’s doing that—the world of comedy is being completely upended by technology.”
JFL’s decline is in part a matter of obsolescence—nowadays, up-and-coming talent gets discovered on TikTok, not necessarily on stage. But it also points to what’s really broken in Canada’s comedy scene: the festival often prioritized American comics over Canadian talent, reinforcing the idea that, to make it big here, you have to go south. With JFL on hiatus this summer, it’s an opportunity to rediscover who’s actually making us laugh.
Wassim El-Mounzer, who was featured in JFL’s New Faces of Comedy in 2022, wasn’t devastated by the festival’s cancellation. “Personally, I’m much closer to ‘meh,’” he says. “It’s more of a loss for the city of Montreal because it’s such an iconic event.” Seeing some of the greats on stage when he was growing up had helped him envision what a career in comedy could look like. It made the concept, the dream, accessible.
And finally getting on was exciting. “It was an honour, but it was kind of a shadow of what it once was,” he says. He heard from several industry representatives who were there that he had the set of the night. He felt he had the set of his life. “But still, it was a bit anticlimactic; it just felt like any other show in the end. Twenty years ago, it probably would have opened many more doors for me.”
With more comics posting their material on social media, attending and watching all the shows is no longer imperative. “It’s not like it used to be where all the agents are there. Like ‘Oh my god, you killed it, kid! Come to New York and we’ll do this and that,’” says El-Mounzer.
While performing at JFL, El-Mounzer felt, like many other Canadian comics did, that he was undervalued. “You have a budget to bring in Kevin Hart for God knows how much money, and then we do a guest spot for free or a gala for $50.” And though Hart’s performance fee likely reflects his star power, one can argue that Canadian institutions, especially those that receive taxpayer money, have an obligation to boost domestic artists.
Natasha Lyn Myles, a stand-up comedian who began her career in Edmonton and was featured in New Faces of Comedy in 2023, sees things in much the same way. “If you’re an American comic, you’re probably thinking, ‘That’s money I depended on.’ But Canadian comics are like, ‘Sure, maybe I’m just not going to be in Montreal in July.’”
Some hope that the void JFL has left will be filled by local initiatives that might feature more of the country’s talent. But to level up in their careers, both El-Mounzer and Myles believe they’ll still have to move to the US. “It’s just such a tough move for Canadians,” El-Mounzer says. “If I could just go down to the States and try to do the club circuit there, then I could [continue to] live in Montreal,” he says. “I just got kittens. My family is here. I’d love to stay.”
Canadian comedians who want to perform or tour in the US are required to obtain an O-1 visa, or the visa for “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement,” before entering. This visa process can be both time consuming and expensive, typically costing between $5,000 and $10,000 (US), usually handled through a US-based agency or lawyer. Besides the financial burden, applicants must demonstrate “extraordinary ability or extraordinary achievement” in the arts or significant accomplishments in the motion-picture or television industries. In contrast, American comedians coming to Canada to perform face minimal requirements. Most do not need to pay fees and need only to show proof that they have been booked by a Canadian festival or comedy venue. “What the Canadian government could do is make it easier for Canadians to work in the US, if they really want to help comedians,” says Clark. “It’s never been reciprocal.”
Stand-up comic, actor, and activist Sandra Battaglini has been fighting for legislative change for about eight years. “The idea that there are opportunities missed because [JFL] isn’t there is true on one hand,” she says, “but on the other hand, they were terrible the way they treated Canadian comedians.” A two-time Canadian Comedy Award winner, she spearheaded the creation of a non-profit organization—now called the Canadian Association of Stand-up, Sketch and Improv Comedians—that advocates for comedy to be recognized as an art form and fights for comedians’ rights, including labour mobility between Canada and the US. In 2023, JFL received $1.45 million in federal and provincial support; the year before that, it received nearly $8.5 million as part of government efforts to shore up events that had been hit hard by the pandemic. “It’s been getting this kind of funding for decades,” she says. “Our lobbying efforts are to get money to go directly into Canadian comedians’ hands.”
She feels that, in many ways, comics are held hostage in Canada. If you want to stay, you must make a sacrifice. If you decide to go, you make a sacrifice. But she believes the solution is obvious and likens it to the successful revision of the Copyright Act in the ’70s, pushed for by musicians. “They were being played on the radio and not being paid [copyright royalties]. So they started lobbying, and now most of the money goes to them. And it’s no coincidence that we’re churning out superstars from Drake to the Weeknd to Bieber to Shawn Mendes to Jessie Reyez. Comedians don’t want to complain for fear of not getting jobs, but it’s incumbent on us as workers to stand up for our rights.”
Moving to New York was a business decision for Nathan Macintosh, who’s from Halifax. He’s performed several times on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS and on TBS’s Conan. “When I first started, I’m not even kidding, the first two sets I ever did, in Halifax, at Ginger’s Tavern, people came up to me after both of them and went, ‘Start saving money for a green card.’” He internalized two things that evening: that he’d done well, and that, to keep advancing, he’d have to leave.
Macintosh, however, acknowledges that JFL has business decisions to make too. “If the people who went to JFL wanted to see Canadians, JFL would put Canadians on. This is a bigger deal than just JFL.” (He later clarified that he was referring to Canadians’ attitude toward local talent: “If Lil Wayne didn’t find Drake, Drake would be rapping on Dundas Square.”) But while JFL didn’t create the problem, it didn’t do much to rectify it.
While he predicts JFL’s current struggles will hurt Canadian comics—one less stage to perform on, one less outlet to network, and one less avenue where credits can be accumulated in order to potentially move to the US—he thinks the sector is due for an update anyway. “There’s no reason it can’t be more in line with what is happening now in terms of social media and people building their own brands.”
Traditionally, says Myles, comedy was “run by a few people in a room. And since COVID, there has been a ‘I don’t need these gatekeepers. I’m going to do it my way [attitude],’” she says. “We had to think of so many different ways in which to be noticed.”
JFL’s demise seems to be directing attention back onto the talent. “I always say, if there’s a Canadian comic that you enjoyed, follow them [on social media]. If you want to hire them, message them,” Myles says. And the pandemic catalyzed a shift toward all things virtual that had been brewing for some time: like in other sectors, social media is where you’ll find many of today’s entrepreneurial Canadian comics. “A lot of people are also releasing YouTube specials,” says El-Mounzer. “You can have good production quality, put it out for free, and get your name out there. I’ve had friends who were shunned by JFL for whatever reason—which is fine, not everybody is entitled to a spot—but that wasn’t a career breaker.” Or, as Nulman puts it: the death of Just for Laughs isn’t great—but it certainly isn’t as bad as the death of your internet connection.
