Last month, we posted about Variety’s Brian Lowry and his insipid theory as to why there are no more sitcoms starring comedians (“It’s a big pile of dumb!”), best summed up by this sentence:

Ultimately, the lure of TV proved too intoxicating, and the talent pool wasn’t equal to the demand.

Huh? Whatever.

The Toronto Sun’s Jim Slotek has a different, slightly more optimistic take on the current epoch in his article in this past Sunday’s paper with the rather ungainly title, “Anybody who thinks that Canadian comedy has run out of gas should check out the brilliant standups at the local yuk-fests.” In it, Slotek recounts the glory years when Canadian comics populated the airwaves of North America (particularly late-night U.S. airwaves) and sacks of cash were thrown around the Delta every July.

Then he fast-forwards to today when things have… slowed down a bit.

But all is not gloom and doom. He cites Russell Peters and Seth Rogen as two comics who could become, or who currently are, major forces in Hollywood. The skeptical among you might say that two comics does not a trend or industry turnaround make. Ah, but you must realize that all it takes is one success and the herd mentality of Hollywood takes control. One hit sitcom starring Peters accidentally makes it onto the primetime schedule and (despite the inept meddling of the boys in marketing or the bloated ego of a programming guru or two), BLAMMO– the stampede to sign up and pilotize comedians begins. Before long, Time and Newsweek run cover stories with titles like “New generation of laugh-getters are bringing the funny to the tube!” and “Yukmeisters slay the reality dragon!”

Slotek turns the corner to optimism:

For a while, I thought the problem was us. Maybe we had stopped being funny. Maybe it was like that Clive Owen movie Children of Men, where, for reasons unexplained, the last Canadian with a sense of irony was born decades ago, and we’ve just been drifting along in a state of cowlike unquestioning consumerism ever since, watching Adam Sandler punch people.

But in the last year, I’ve actually gone out to see twentysomething comics — as a judge for the Tim Sims Encouragement Fund and at Yuk Yuk’s $25,000 Laugh Off (where for the third year in a row, a Canadian standup comic won the grand prize over competition from around the world). Many of them are actually funny, and weird, and worth hearing. And you can hear them at open mikes at places like the Eton House and Spirits and the Rivoli.

Maybe we’re still effin’ funny after all– even without a U.S. development deal and a laughtrack.

Names? Not this time around. Perhaps next Sunday. And, we suspect there are a lot of thirtysomething and perhaps fortysomething comics in Canada who are “actually funny, and weird, and worth hearing,” but Mr. Slotek has become– dare we say it?– jaded. (Hey, if it can happen to an entire generation of network executives, it can happen to entertainment reporters. Perhaps we’ll take it up with him in Montreal in July!)

As a companion piece to Slotek’s column, we refer readers to an article from Reuters which is burning up the RSS feeds. It’s all about the recent ratings week and, although the information is hard to extract, the folks at Reuters have headlined it, “Fox wins week as viewers abandon talent shows.” Viewers are abandoning talent shows? Who could have predicted that?

Well… we could have. In fact, we have done so on more than one occasion. Scroll up. We just did it again!