I was lucky enough to spend a few nights in Bangkok this May with the cast and crew of The Amazing Race Canada. The series — which topped the ratings across Canada the week of July 31 – Aug. 6 with 1,830,000 viewers — resumes tonight at 8 p.m. on CTV. Me and my ex-Toronto
MONTREAL — There’s an expression here at Just for Laughs: “Jump-the-liners.” These are folks who — in the minds of many stand-up comedians who have put in their dues in comedy clubs from Saskatchewan to Van Nuys — have had their big comedy break handed to them on a silver platter. One veteran comic I
MONTREAL — People come to the Just for Laughs comedy festival for the laughter and stay for the wisdom. Take Friday night’s all-star awards show, please. The event is held at a hotel built into the side of as mall, which seems about right as presenter Jimmy Carr pointed out. Several of today’s top comics
MONTREAL — “I truly am in an existential crisis. I don’t believe in the character I’m selling. I don’t believe I’m a person anymore.” That statement had a packed, Place des Arts audience leaning forward Thursday night towards the end of an extraordinary, 90-minute show panel at Just for Laughs. The speaker was Jim Carrey, barely
MONTREAL — Things got real Wednesday night at the 35th annual Just for Laughs Comedy Festival with a return engagement 20 years in the making — by Jerry Seinfeld. The stand-up specialist teamed with Gad Elmaleh, a Moroccan-born funnyman who has lived in both Montreal and Paris and brought a french flavour to the duo’s two-hour set. The
Hokey smokes! June Foray almost made it to 100. The Queen of Cartoons died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was just a few months shy of her 100th birthday, which would have been September 26th. Foray was not the Mel Blanc of female voices, as famed Warner Bros. animation legend Chuck Jones once declared; Blanc was
On Tuesday night, CTV viewers watched as teams from The Amazing Race Canada arrived at the Great Wall of China. So much goes into making something like that happen; just getting all the cameras and sound equipment through customs at the Beijing airport is a major operation. The nature of the race, however, means that
For the past ten years, my life has gone like this: be a freelance TV beat writer; see the world. The most spectacular trip so far may have been to China in May with the teams participating in The Amazing Race Canada. Thanks to Jim Quan and the folks at CTV PR, I was invited