4:00 P.M., July 23, 2000
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SHECKYmagazine.com treks to Montreal for the second straight year to bring you daily slices of the world's largest comedy festival!

\Hooping For Laughs!

\Barbecued Up!

\Saluting Whom?!

\Pop.com!

Standup comic FREDDY CHARLES and comic/writer ALLAN MURRAY (Blair Bitch Project) discuss Charles' stylish balloon headdress at the Pop.com blast.

SHECKY! editor TRACI SKENE and Howard Stern jokeman JACKIE MARTLING at the Pop.com gathering.

Comedy Central's ZOE FRIEDMAN and 3Arts' DAVE BECKY stalked by the SHECKY! papparazzi.

L to R: Comics New Face-r SAM TRIPOLI and KEN JEONG, IAG's SCOTT and New Face-r JAKE IANNARINO at the pop.com disco.

Standup comics WALI COLLINS and JOHN CAPONERA in the shadows at the pop.com shindig.

MONTREAL--There was a decision by Festival organizers to de-emphasize seminars and the like at the 2000 version of this industry summer camp. In the place of dry, boring seminars would be things like a roast and a basketball game. The First Annual Just For Laughs Basketball Tournament sponsored by Reebok took place at the gymnasium on the campus of McGill University. Not a bad idea, really: Field a team made up of talent and a team made up of industry and provide wiseguy commentary. One problem with the execution, though: They scheduled it for Saturday morning at noon and they pretty much kept it a secret. The result: more players than crowd and Industry won. Note to JFL planners: Schedule it for 2 in the afternoon and publicize it better. After getting back to our base and attempting to dash off a Festival update it was 5:30 in the morning. The prospect of playing basketball just six short hours later was not appealing (especially after a wrong number ripped a hole in our REM sleep at 9:30)!

The CBC weather guy predicted that the tandem low pressure areas that parked themselves over much of Quebec and Ontario would mean copious amounts of rain starting Friday and continuing into Saturday night. How about that? Canadian meteorologists are wrong just as often as U.S. meteorologists! Good news for the folks who showed up for the Comedy Network barbecue. It was held on the Delta's outside terrace, just like last year. But, unlike last year, no one named after a farm animal fell into the fountain.

SHECKY! editors were too stinking tired to make it to the barbecue. A full week of gathering information, packaging it, dispensing it, partying, networking, partying and performing left us mere husks, unable to do anything but sleep for most of Saturday. Fatigue and dehydration are two very important factors here at this vast festival. The amount of activity, the schedule and general logistics make it very difficult to get in quality sleep. SHECKY! editors were well aware of this after last year's fest, but performing at a few charity shows while here in Montreal this week made us that much more tired. We sympathize with the performers who are actually in the Festival. Some of them are called upon to perform three and sometimes four times in one night! One comic we spoke to on a Friday shuttle ride to the Theatre St. Denis told us that not only was he scheduled for three shows that night but he was also summoned at nine that morning for a (rather pointless) "walk through" of that night's event. Comics Joey Elias and David Pryde, for example, had this schedule last night: The 7, 9:30 and midnight Montreal Show at the Club Soda venue, then they were also on the bill for the 11:15 Comedy Night In Canada show at the Comedy Nest. This may be similar to a typical weekend night for a Manhattan comic, but the added intensity and pressure of the Festival experience makes all this scurrying around a lot more tiring. Heap on some publicity work and radio interviews and, of course, the all-hours partying (which is, admittedly, optional) and it all adds up to bone-tired comics. Hey, Festival organizers: Swing a deal with some bottled water people! How about water coolers at every corner?

Saturday night is definitely NOT the loneliest night of the week! A significant chunk of the festival rolls, slides, floats or glides away on Sunday morning. So many take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the major bashes thrown on this evening.

The CBC attempted to throw a major bash at the tent complex just outside the Theatre St. Denis. We say "attempted" because they made the grievous error of actually requiring attendees to produce an invitation. Normally, the "invitations," whether they are printed on a card or photocopied (or, in the case of Comedy Central, wrapped around a pillow!), are merely announcements and are NEVER a prerequisite for admission. One source we spoke to (who actually was able to produce the paper) said she looked around the tent at one point and realized she didn't know anybody in attendance. In other words, the usual band of industry merrymakers that was populating most of the week's festivities had been shut out. And, to top it all off, they called this particular party "A Salute to Canadian Comics," but it coincided with The Montreal Show and Comedy Night In Canada Show, effectively preventing nearly two dozen of the salutees from attending! Some salute! More like a raised middle finger (Do they do that here in Canada? Of course--it's universal!)

Fortunately there was several thousand square feet of party rolled out at the Delta! This year it was pop.com who inflated the balloons and spun the throbbing music. That makes two major soirees/bashes/shindigs (We're running out of synonyms!) that were thrown by dot.coms. The dot.com thing has become quite a force here. There's always speculation at JFL about deals being signed for x amount of dollars. This year, however, the only sentences that had those three words in them also contained the words "dot" and "com" somewhere in them. Pop.com went so far as to hand out a plaque to a comic, David J. Nash, and unofficially (Non-JFL-approved!) saddled him with the rather ungainly title of "Most Outstanding New Face." They briefly stopped the music and brought out (much to everyone's horror) an Austin Powers impersonator to present the award. Then they turned the music back up, turned on the strobes and it was back to ignoring the cauliflower! The food was atrocious at all but one party (comedyworld.com/Thursday night You can't go wrong with smoked meat!). Does anyone really eat cauliflower? Sushi is risky. When you refuse to eat free food, you know something is horribly askew!

We promised that we'd address the subject of hype in today's upload, but, we're afraid you'll have to wait until tomorrow.