Just for Laughs sale is bad news for Quebec Culture
If you care about Quebec culture, you shouldn’t be laughing about the news that our comedy festival has been sold to a U.S. company. This is not good.
Wednesday’s news release heralding the sale of the Just for Laughs Group/Groupe Juste pour rire made a point of underlining that the consortium acquiring the fest includes Howie Mandel — “a native Canadian,” it says, using language that is oh so wrong. But make no mistake: that’s just a way of trying to camouflage that a U.S. company, the powerful talent agency ICM Partners, is buying Just for Laughs/Juste pour rire.
So another one’s gone. Another Quebec cultural giant is sold off to foreign interests, following the sale of Cirque du Soleil to U.S. private equity firm TPG Capital in 2015. In other words, two of the greatest success stories in the province’s vibrant cultural milieu from the past couple of decades have been snapped up by American companies. Sure, the head offices are staying in Montreal in both cases, but the people who own companies are the ones who make the final decisions, and those people are no longer here in Montreal. They’re not even in Canada. These are two strikes against Quebec culture.
There are more dark tidings here. My take on this is that the net result will be that the real francophone comedy festival in Montreal will now become Le Grand Montréal comédie fest, the entity created by many of Quebec’s top franco comics who wanted nothing to do with a festival owned by Gilbert Rozon.
They set up the fest after allegations were made public last year that Just for Laughs founder Rozon had harassed and assaulted a number of women. (The allegations have yet to be proved in court.) Those allegations led to Rozon being forced to sell his company.
This week, Québecor-owned Vidéotron announced it was becoming a “founding partner” of the newly created Frenchlanguage comedy festival. The announcement made it clear that Québecor has ambitious plans for the fest. This came just days after Québecor said it was not exercising its option to buy Just for Laughs/Juste pour rire.
I can tell you right now that Québecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau is going to make every effort to ensure the new event becomes the dominant Frenchlanguage comedy fest ici, and that it crushes the competition.
If you haven’t noticed, Péladeau takes that competition thing seriously. Just look at how ferocious his battle with RadioCanada and La Presse has been.
So here’s how I see this going down:
ICM clearly bought the fest as an English comedy property first and foremost. ICM represents some of the top comics in the U.S., many of whom have played Just for Laughs. Its roster includes Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, David Spade, Ellen DeGeneres and Mandel. This company is not in the non-English comedy biz. Sure, they’d be happy to see the franco part of the business do well, but it’s not the top priority.
At the same time, Le Grand Montréal comédie fest is backed by a slew of top Quebec stars, including Martin Petit, Mike Ward, Louis-José Houde, Maxim Martin and many others. So the vedettes will all be at the Québecor festival. Sadly, this means there will be two festivals, one mostly English and one French, and will I believe eventually lead to the end of the brave, exciting bilingual/ bicultural experiment that was Just for Laughs/Juste pour rire. My prediction is that it will be mostly just an English fest in a few years.
And don’t forget that Rozon — who pleaded guilty to sexual assault in 1998 — will now be able to slink off into the sunset with whatever undisclosed sum ICM paid for Just for Laughs.
ICM reportedly paid tens of millions for the festival, although no official figure was released Wednesday. It has been reported that Just for Laughs/Juste pour rire received more than $40 million in government grants over the years, so you will be happy to know (sarcasm alert!) that Rozon’s generous retirement plan has been subsidized in no small way by you and me and our tax dollars. It also underlines the point that a cultural enterprise created in large part by public money is now owned by Americans. They reap the benefits of all that government largesse and presumably will continue to benefit from those public bucks — though you do wonder if they should still be receiving all these grants, given that it is no longer a Canadian company.
Short version?
It’s no laughing matter.