SHECKY! A magazine about standup... treks to Montreal for the second straight year to bring you daily slices of the world's largest comedy festival!

\SHECKY! Alum on NBC!

\Homegrown Competition!

\Try To Remain Dot Com!

L to R: RICH MILLER, TODD GLASS, COLLEEN McGARR, PATRICK McGARR and DUNCAN STRAUSS submit to a lineup at the Delta.

Homegrown competitors (Clockwise from left): DEAN KANJI, JASON HARPER, FRASER YOUNG, ADAM GROWE, RON JOSOL, JOHN BEUHLER, AL RAE and HOWIE MILLER.

Innocent bystander RICH MINERVINI stands by innocently as MARYELLEN HOOPER besmirches the SHECKY! logo by picking the nose of her espoused (played here by MARK HERVAT).

Hey, hey, we're framed badly! MICKEY DOLENZ gives comedy tips to Globecom comic SARAH KENDALL of Australia.

MONTREAL-We were lounging in the lobby of the Delta, combing through the mounds of paper that this Festival generates. Shuttle after shuttle disgorged standup comedy industry soldiers near the Delta entrance on Ave. du President Kennedy. The stacks of HOLLYWOOD REPORTER SPECIAL COMEDY ISSUEs finally were put out. They take a regular weekly HR, slap a special cover on it and pack the last 40 pages with features and advertisements related to standup comedy. One item that caught our eye on page 8 (under the heading of "Briefs") was about SHECKY! Alum Paul F. Tompkins and how he had "snagged the last open spot on 'DAG,' a new NBC comedy series starring David Alan Grier" Congratulations, Paul F.! He'll play the President's "power-hungry chief of staff, who "gets into frequent skirmishes" with first lady Delta Burke.

The back page of the HRSCI was purchased by Laugh.com. Half of the lobby is dominated by comedyworld.com's "cybercast" corral and banners hang overhead touting thefunniest.com and pop.com. The folks at humorvision.com (a division of fastband.com) purchased a quarter-pager and playboy.com has dispatched a representative or two. And, of course, SHECKY! (sheckymagazine.com) is present in the form of editors Brian McKim and Traci Skene. There is an explosion of dot-commers here at the festival this year. Much moreso than last year. And there are many more business cards with email addresses.

What does all this mean? We overheard one comedian, when the plethora of dot-commers was brought to her attention, say that there were "too many dot-coms" here at the Festival. What the hell does that mean? There can never be too many movie production companies around. There can never be too many talent agents milling about. There can never be too many network executives present. How ever can there be too many dot-coms? The internet represents opportunity for comics. Can we all agree that there can never be too many opportunities? Although SHECKY! might be a dot-com, we are proud of our sub-motto: "We're not making any money, but we're not losing any, either!" (Apparently that's something that many of the dot-comsters cannot claim!)

We kicked off the evening by wading through the tension in the green room that housed the competitors for the Craven A Just For Laughs Homegrown Comic Competition National Championship (Let's break that down: "Craven A" is a cigarette company and a major Festival sponsor. "Just For Laughs" is the name of the Festival. "Homegrown" refers to the fact that these comics are Canadians. The rest is self-explanatory.)

In Festivals past, the competition was held over two nights with a rather screwy and arcane set of rules. This year, it was streamlined and held on one night. And the boys and girls of Montreal were excluded from the running because, as it was explained to us, they had ample opportunity for exposure via The Montreal Show.

Anyway, the competition was fierce (cliche alert!), the crowd was rabid and Al Rae of Winnipeg confidently whipped them into an Alberta Clipper of nationalistic fervor (clumsy metaphor alert!). The runner-up was John Beuhler of Vancouver and we're all out of cliches and mangled metaphors and stilted similes.

Hosting duties were aptly handled by Sean Cullen whom you may remember as 33-1/3 per cent of Corky & The Juice Pigs. Cullen will be in the new Ellen DeGeneres sitcom. The judges for the competition were Bob Huber of Fox, Terry Danuser of Comedyworld.com, Matt Harawitz of The Late, Late Show with Craig Kilborn, Ann Maney of 20th Century Fox, Ed Robinson of The Comedy Network and Anita Simand of Telescene.

The Delta bar finally reached its potential on Tuesday night. Excitement rippled through the crowd when former Monkee Mickey Dolenz strolled through. He patiently posed for a SHECKY! photo which was spoiled due to battery failure. After a fresh set of double-A's was inserted (into the camera, of course), we snapped a candid of Dolenz as he rapped with Aussie comic Sarah Kendall.

Schmooze Tip of the Day: When approaching the schmooze corral, make sure that your handshaking hand is empty. It eliminates that awkward moment when the extended hand, hanging in midair, waits while the offending object is shifted to a neutral, non-handshaking hand! This has been your Schmooze Tip of the Day, carry on!

RAW DATA: Laugh-Rodisiacs: The Relationship Show continued on, as did Britcom, Globecom and Bubbling With Laughter (with, from what we hear, had a rather subdued crowd throughout the show. Just what a comic wants: A crowd of nearly 500 that tends toward nodding in agreement rather than laughing hysterically.) Christopher Titus, star of his eponymous Fox series, began his one-man show, Norman Rockwell Is Bleeding last night as well.