by MATTHEW WOODLEY

The beer sponsorship deal has been struck, the acts booked, the fire department called in to emergency-test the venue, and it’s now safe to call this city’s newest festival as of press time, the Montreal Sketch Comedy Festival, official.

“There wasn’t a festival in May,” explains producer Eric Amber, conveniently ignoring Asia, electric art, Jewish films, musique actuelle, gay partying, first peoples, bikes, electronic music and beer, “so we thought the timing was good.”

More like it’s about time. “Montreal has had a solid sketch comedy scene for 20 years,” says Amber. Of late he’s been a big part of it, drawing dozens of regular students to his weekly improv class at Théâtre Ste-Catherine. There he passes on the teachings of Keith Johnstone, theatre sports guru and padre of the Calgary school of comedy. Seems the style from the city that gave us Steve Harper figures prominently in sketch.

“It got big with Second City,” explains Amber, “and now there are so many people doing it everywhere, and that’s neat because it’s definitely different from the Toronto style. Calgary’s is more focused on storytelling. It’s all about how characters affect other characters so that their emotions change. Toronto is similar to Chicago-style. It’s all about talking heads and finding the game. These days they’re going in a direction of total weirdness and absurdity. At first you might not even get the jokes, but you slowly get to know the characters and start to understand. Yeah, basically it’s just weird-ass.”

This inaugural sketch fest sees popular Toronto weird asses The Distractions drop in along with city mates Morbio and Bob Wiseman. Much of the Calgary component will be represented through Amber’s influence on the many participating students, including festival organizer Sandra MacMillan’s Divorce Separation Strategy. Other highlights include Montrealers MANboy, recent producers of the TSC hit Shit Job, Never Surrender, the Broad Squad and an afternoon of short films.

As for Amber: “I’m going to host. I plan to say things like, ‘Thanks for coming. The next show is in half an hour and it’s going to be great. I’m not going to ask you to leave but you can’t stay.’ But first I have to fix the hole the fire department put in the curtain. Man, they just come in, wreck stuff and say, ‘Okay. C’est beau.’”

The Montreal Sketch Comedy Festival runs from May 18–21 at
Théâtre Ste-Catherine (264 Ste-Catherine E.), all shows $12, except the free short films screening, which takes place
Saturday, May 20 at noon. www.montrealsketchfest.com for the full schedule