You’ve heard of Just for Laughs Montreal: it’s one of the world’s biggest comedy festivals. But Just for Laughs London? That’s a new initiative, which unfolded this weekend at the O2 with corporate partners galore, and promised “to shine the international spotlight on the incredible UK scene, while bringing global comedy stars [together in] one epic comedy celebration”.
Great stuff: who wouldn’t want more and bigger opportunities for comics to do their thing? But what gap, I wonder, does Just for Laughs think it’s filling? This is a city, after all, with a richer provision of live comedy than practically anywhere else. To our heaving smorgasbord of funny entertainment, what can JfL add?
Maybe it’s the pure pleasure of spending more time on the site of the Millennium Dome? Just kidding: it’s the worst place in the world. To me, “festival” and “O2” are about as convincing a pairing as “compassionate” and “Conservatism”. By the time you’ve arrived on the Greenwich peninsula, navigated the deathly privately owned public space and the aggressive advertising and soulless chain cafes, paid £10 (£10! – unless you’re a VIP) for the cloakroom service and joined the queues, the festive feeling starts to chill.
Maybe it’s a more diverse audience? Just kidding again. The comic behind Saturday afternoon’s likable FOC It Up mixed-bill (it stands for Femmes of Colour), Kemah Bob, had to ask its largely white audience if they’d mind spreading the word to their less white friends. At James Acaster and Nish Kumar’s event the same day, Kumar bonded with an audience member who identified herself as the only other brown person in the room. Whatever Just for Laughs achieved on its maiden London visit, diversifying the capital’s comedy audience wasn’t part of it.
But these things take time, and JfL is reportedly in for the long haul. Were we to judge by Acaster and Kumar’s running joke about low ticket sales for Saturday’s flagship event, a Q&A with the Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds, the 2023 edition has been only a qualified success. But there’s still plenty to celebrate. There arguably is a space in London’s comedy world for what JfL provides – that is, a concentrated hit of what’s going on anyway, but with added megastars from beyond the current standup crop (this year: Graham Norton, Richard Curtis, Miranda Hart), and wider public conversations that come at comedy from different angles.
If nothing else, this kind of beanfeast is catnip for the comedy industry. Many of them crowded into the Spiegeltent for the event teasing Acaster’s new project, a fake true-crime podcast about his undercover cop alias, Pat Springleaf. “Are there movers and shakers present?”, as he asked Kumar in mock-surprise. “I wouldn’t have burped into my microphone if I’d known that.” This hour was pure bliss for Acaster fans, among whom I count myself. With Kumar playing cackling straight man, it found the Kettering comic ad-libbing one wayward flight of fancy after another (about the real Slim Shady, about Dido, about McDonald’s mascot the Hamburglar), all in wafer-thin, ultra-meta character as his crap policeman alter ego. I can’t wait for the podcast.
The Ryan Reynolds Q&A was fun, too – and perfectly well attended. But it was a tenuous fit at a comedy festival. Yes, the Deadpool star chatted about his comedy inspirations (Bill Murray; Eddie Murphy; Planes, Trains and Automobiles), and engaged in entertaining banter with host Rob Delaney about vasectomies, favourite roles, and the failure of his Green Lantern movie. But it’s hard to think of anything less in the dissident spirit of comedy than the long section trumpeting Reynolds’ marketing work, in which we had to stomach free advertising for his various products and much burbling about “jumping into cultural conversations as a brand”. Yeeuch. Just for Laughs might bring wonderful things to UK comedy in the years to come, but please may it include as little as possible of corporate guff like this.
