Too much personal tragedy in the past three months and too much travel and gigging in the past two weeks adds up to near-debilitating exhaustion and an intense desire to coop out here at SHECKYmagazine HQ rather than make the hump eight hours north to Montreal for this year’s Festival Just For Laughs. The thought of taking off within the next twelve hours to commence with 96 hours of fest coverage is enough to make us weep.

We did it for nine straight years. We are taking a much-deserved break in 2008. Will we return next year? We seem to have misplaced our crystal ball.

On top of all that, we’ve been monitoring the JFL site and we’ve been reading some of the press releases and, perhaps it’s our keen powers of observation or perhaps it’s a perception tinted by mild depression, but we’re sensing that there’s a sameness, a lack of surprises and a certain regimentation in this year’s lineup. Perhaps all the past nine years are blending together, but we sense that the same comedians are returning year after year, with little that’s fresh to attract us northward.

Of course, we’ve always had a blast because we didn’t so much pay exclusive attention to the shows and the talent as much as we paid attention to the other people– the accompaneurs, the agents, the suits, the managers, the other media folks– all of whom contributed to the general circus that was the world’s largest festival devoted to comedy.

And we don’t particularly like the new hotel! (Our first eight fests were spent in the Delta. The Hyatt Regency is no Delta.) And the US dollar isn’t particularly strong right now, so the $1,000 dollars we would spend on our annual trek north would actually be… a thousand dollars!

If it sounds like we’re talking ourselves into staying home, you may be partially right. To an extent, we are already regretting our decision. But we’re going to give it a rest for a year.

We know that many of our readers will be sorely disappointed. Many is the time that we’ve been told that our coverage was eagerly anticipated and that reading our dispatches was “just like being at the fest.” (Indeed, some of the comedians who have appeared at JFL over the years told us that they went into the archives and read every year of our prior coverage to fully prepare themselves for the pressure cooker that is Just For Laughs.) So, we feel bad about letting our readers down. Covering the fest in Montreal has been a big part of what made us SHECKYmagazine. Our coverage was one of the elements that “put us on the map,” early in the magazine’s history (along with interviews with Shelley Berman, Mitch Hedberg, Triumph and Dick Cavett).

When we applied for our first credentials, we had maybe two monthly issues (back when we published monthly!) up on the WWW and not much in the way of a track record. We hit Montreal in 1999 with a scanner, an instant Polaroid camera and absolutely no idea what we would do when we got there. (Check out the result here, complete with typos and hinky layout!) Since then, we acquired a digital camera or two, burned through two or three laptops, switched from dialup to hi-speed, made quite a few friends and made a handful of enemies.

We hope everyone has a good time in Montreal in 2008. And, just as we always have at the end of each year’s fest coverage, we thank the folks at JFL who saw fit to grant us access to their annual celebration of standup comedy. Maybe we’ll see all of you next year.