There was a time when Mike Bullard was the King of comedy in Canada. His death from a heart attack Saturday at age 67 brings to an end a complicated legacy, one I had a window seat on for many years.
Bullard, who grew up in Mississauga, Ont., had a day job at Bell Canada as a corporate investigator when he started dabbling in stand-up comedy. He paid his dues at clubs such as Yuk Yuk’s and soon worked his way up to hosting duties at Just for Laughs in Montreal. Mike had a very spontaneous style, never relying on a set list of jokes and material, always sticking with crowd work with the audience. He could be self depricating, describing himself as a guy with a potato face who made it big.
He was one of the few survivors from CBC’s variety show misfire Friday Night with Ralph Benmurgui, parlaying his winning stand-up guest shots there into a chance to do the impossible in Canada — host a daily late night talk show.
His series, Open Mike with Mike Bullard (1997-2003), had a humble, very Canadian, beginning. Premiering on The Comedy Channel, then a brand new specialty offering, it found a temporary production home in the back room of Wayne Gretzky’s bar in downtown Toronto. In the beginning, in order to scare up a studio audience, bar patrons were chased off stools and ushered into the back room bleachers.
The first guest was Greg Thomey from This Hour has 22 Minutes who, confounding the rookie host, stuck to his sketch impulses and refusing to just be himself on the show.
Other guests followed and were more themselves, including Canadian comedians such as Gerry Dee, Harland Williams, Dave Foley, Tom Green, Brent Butt, Jeremy Hotz and Colin Mochrie. Occasionally there would be an international star such as Jamie Oliver, Joan Rivers, director Kevin Smith, Bob Odenkirk, Phyliss Diller or Donny Osmond. One of Mike’s favourite politicians, Prime Minister Jean Chretien, make an appearance. Musicians such as the Barenaked Ladies, Loverboy and Tom Cochrane performed. In 1998, Mitch Hedberg did a very funny set.
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Eventually Open Mike moved to a classier place with a much larger set built in the Masonic Temple on Yonge Street. The series also began airing on the main CTV network. Bullard prevailed for six seasons there, racking up close to a thousand shows in late night. The series won two Gemini awards as Canada’s best late night talk show series, beating out… well, I’d have to look that one up. There was Ed the Sock and that infomercial from the sauce and juice guy.
Still, for a number of years, Canada finally had a place where Canadian personalities could appear and be themselves on a home-grown, star-making machine. Bullard wrote a bestseller and for a while, despite a far lower budget, enjoyed ratings in Canada which topped those of such imported late night giants as Jay Leno and David Letterman. I know he got plenty of coverage from me in the entertainment pages of The Toronto Sun.
The story takes a dramatic downturn from there. Bullard, from my peripheral perspective, was overtaken by his own success. He became a little harder to root for, among viewers and especially at CTV. He was summoned to a lunch with the head of the network, who told him directly that the show would be canceled at the end of the sixth season.
Rival Global Television, however, offered a happy landing — Bullard’s own nightly talk show on their network. Bullard brought his band, led by Orin Isaacs, with him to Global, as well as head writer Lawrence Morgenstern. He would need a lot more help.
In the weeks prior to launch, I met Mike for lunch in the St. Lawrence Market area and he introduced me to his new producer with this all too prophetic (albeit dated) joke: “I call him Enron because he hasn’t produced anything yet either.”
This led to a very strange meeting. These were troubling times for Mike, at home and at work. He had split with his wife and was living, along with a stray German Shepherd he had recently befriended, in a small apartment he had just moved into in Port Credit. A week or so before the premiere, he called me and two other journalists who had covered him for years to a summit at his place.
What we found was a man in crisis. On the positive side, he had five pizzas ready. Everything else, however, was bizarre and very negative. It was like confronting Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now. He seemed beyond counsel, so eventually we thanked him for the pizzas and shuffled into an elevator, swearing an oath not to ever disclose a word of what Mike had said.
Unfortunately, Mike kept talking to other reporters. He spoke with one at The Toronto Star, and a front page story emerged. It profiled a bitter man who, a day or two before his new series launched, could not have appeared less sympathetic to the average Star reader. Mike shot himself in both feet.
CTV, meanwhile, was taking no chances. They imported The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, promoted the hell out of it and put it on five minutes before Global’s The Mike Bullard Show. The overnight ratings told the story. Bullard’s series was dead on arrival.
Just to drive the final nail in the coffin, Conan O’Brien brought his popular NBC talk show north of the border for a week of shows in January of 2004. In one week, O’Brien welcomed to the Elgin Theatre stage all of the Canadian talk show guests Bullard could only dream of getting, people such as Jim Carrey, Mike Myers and Michael J. Fox. Bullard tried to counter with Don Cherry as a guest on his Global show but not even Grapes could help. Less than a month later Bullard’s series was cancelled.
In America, Bullard would have done pennance and returned a year or two later as host of a game show or something. He dearly wanted to mount a Canadian version of Dean Martin’s celebrity roasts, a series we both grew up watching in the ’70s, and he pitched that idea everywhere. Mike remained radioactive, however, and nothing ever came of it. In Canadian television, you rarely get a second chance.
I ran into Bullard a few years ago and asked if he wanted to be in late night in Canada today. His answer: “Sure, great — I get to go head-to-head with 12 American shows instead of three.”
He did rebound somewhat on the radio, hosting shows on SiriusXM and from 2010 to 2016 a lunchhour series on Newstalk 1010. He went overboard on being provocative there, and whenever I listened, he seemed to be daring his employer — 1010 is a Bell Media station — to fire him. Eventually they did.
Sealing his fate on radio were legal issues and charges of harrassment. Bullard pled guilty to one charge and later claimed he got bad legal advice. Other charges were dismissed. I had lost contact with Mike at this point and never discussed any of this with him, but, especially in the #metoo era, Mike’s social media pushback did not win him any new fans.
Mike Bullard was a complicated, often troubled, guy. Born two days apart, the two of us shared the same comedy heroes and references and he really loved that world. His brother Pat Bullard was a successful television producer in the States, writing and producing shows such as Grace Under Fire and Last Man Standing. Mike was proud of him, sibling rivalries aside.
Mike also had fond memories of his family and was devastated when his dad passed away. Just two weeks ago he did a stand-up comedy show in a club in Sudbury, Ontario. “My dad was born in Sudbury,” he said on a video shout out on Instagram, “and I always love coming back.”
The last couple of years saw Mike take a dramatic step towards personal redemption. He went to Ukraine in 2022, during the Russian invasion, and for several months there devoted himself to humanitarian work. He wrote movingly about that experience and some of the horrors he witnessed. Over the years, he also volunteered and raised money for several charities, including the United Way, Sick Kids Hospital and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.
Condolences to his brother Pat, other family members and friends.
