Just for Laughs Toronto: Report #1: the Kimmel fallout

Comedy is all about timing, and the timing of the return of the Just for Laughs Toronto Festival couldn’t be better.

It opened Thursday, a day after Disney/ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show from the airwaves after Kimmel delivered a funny, perfectly accurate and lawful monologue about how MAGA had tried to spin Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

There’s suddenly a chill on freedom of speech, and as On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder pointed out in his recent Substack video post, comics are often the first to feel it:

“This is why comedians are very important. The truth that we have to speak to power is sometimes surprising, it’s sometimes eccentric, it’s sometimes personal. Comedians are unpredictable, they’re sometimes eccentric, sometimes personal. But it’s that laughter which let’s us know there’s been a harmony between experience and facts. Comedians matter. You can make the point historically, too. In Germany in the 30s or in Russia in the 2000s, when the comedians went, that was a sign that freedom for everyone else was going as well.”

I had already booked a ticket to see the first of James Adomian’s three late-night Alternative Show (Rating: ✭✭✭✭✭) spots because I’m a big Adomian fan and I wanted to see how he would handle a gig that’s been hosted by the great Andy Kindler in the past.

But no one expected the Kimmel news, not the least Adomian, who’s been appearing regularly on Jimmy Kimmel Live! — as his Minnesotan MyPillow guy Mike Lindell, Elon Musk and others — as well as himself for several years now.

After saying he was looking for Canadian sponsors — he already had one of the Kids in the Hall, he joked — he told us he had left his mobile phone at home in LA and had come with a burner phone.

That detail opened up a riff on Bernie Sanders, being a queer James Bond and Amazon buying. Acknowledging the fact that Kindler had hosted the night for years, he launched into a very affectionate impression of the man, and then explained how he — a gay, middle-aged white man whose career, he said, had plateaued and gone over to the other side — would make a great alt right figure, which introduced a hilarious bit about hosting an Alpha Bro Podcast.

When Chris Sandiford joined him to sort of co-host the night, the two launched into a double act that felt almost too frighteningly real, Sandiford doing a gruff, grizzle-voiced RFK and Adomian launching his note-perfect Elon Musk impression.

Other standout moments included Jon Blair’s impossibly funny impression of a guy getting dumped at the club from the movie Blade, and the inimitable Eric Andrews imagining the magnificent, standing ovation, crowd-surfing reception he would get — before he even began his set.

Adomian and Sandiford ended the show with a one-sided “conversation” between Sandiford and (wearing a pasted-on grey beard) Slavoj Žižek. Riffing as the Slovenian philosopher, Adomian dropped references to the cultural importance of such figures as Robert Ford and the two Trudeaus before ending with a karaoke number (in Slovenian?).

The legendary night completely lived up to its “alternative” billing.

Adomian hosts one more Alternative Show tonight (Saturday, September 20, at 11 pm). See details here.

Stand-up and writer Jay Jurden (Rating: ✭✭✭✭✭) made Variety’s prestigious 10 Comics to Watch list in 2022, and his profile will no doubt get a massive, and much-deserved boost when his first special is released this November.

The Southern-born, New York City-based queer comic opened his set with a couple of references to the current troubles, saying he came “with a bigger suitcase this time“ and wondering if the Underground Railroad counted if it was Delta. Perfect opening jokes.

Jurden has it all: an electric, exciting stage presence, absolutely razor-sharp joke writing skills and complete control over his beautifully-structured material.

A couple of early jokes dealt with people wanting to move to America, and what made them so funny was Jurden’s ability to use vivid imagery. “Have you ever kissed someone in a club... and then seen them under fluorescents?" And: “It’s like going to a friend’s home when you know they have a dog that bites... and the dog is the president.”

His material is always grounded in authentic, often personal details. Riffing on RFK’s attitudes towards autism, he takes us to an aquarium for a very funny visual bit; discussing anti-trans attitudes, he presents a snappy visit to the animal kingdom, where he has real affection for giraffes; and when talking about how right wing extremists complain about the effect of gay media on the young, he takes us back to his own formative years — growing up without gay media but with WWE.

He saves his boldest material until the end, when he introduces his list of “the Blackest of the whites,” a joke that speaks volumes about society’s shifting attitudes towards privilege and power.

And I hope Jurden includes his joke about the first gay guy who left Africa — the birthplace of modern humans — in his special. If so, I expect I’ll watch it several times, just to see how it’s constructed.

It sums up his unique POV in one brilliant joke. And it signals a major comedy career.

Jay Jurden has one more headlining set tonight (Saturday, September 20 at 7 pm) at Comedy Bar. See details here.

Back in 2022, I included Scottish-Canadian comic John Mostyn’s album on my list of the Top 10 Canadian comedy albums of the year.

Back then I’d never heard of him, and had never seen him perform live. So I jumped at the opportunity to see his one-night-only comedy special set (Rating: ✭✭✭✭) at JFL.

He’s just as funny in person. His range of subjects might be narrow: moving from Glasgow to Toronto 15 years ago, encountering women who are turned on by accents, being cast as pedophiles and creeps in TV and film, dating in his mid-40s.

His funniest joke finds him describing what it’s like as an undesirable, middle-aged man on the dating site Hinge, and what he does with his weekly digital rose, which he gets to present to a single woman as if it’s "a pathetic episode of The Bachelor."

A lot of his material covers being sober and trying to figure out ways to have fun without substances. That leads to a solid section about mental health and therapy. One of his best jokes compares therapy to other professions, like car mechanics.

He’s not afraid of going to some dark places, which gives his material a thrilling, dangerous edge. While his finale could use tweaking — the set simply ends — there’s more than enough material to get a good sense of who he is, what he’s about. Namely, one of the funniest comics in the city.

JFL Toronto continues until September 27. See full lineup here.