Day: July 18, 2008

Many comedians come to Montreal and joke about the preponderance of strip clubs in the city. But it’s infinitely more amusing to watch off-duty strippers (call them exotic dancers if you like) ordering cheeseburgers at McDonald’s at 4 a.m., in both French and English (insert your own joke here about that’s what she said, oh now they’re bi, so they go both ways, that’s how they like their meat, etc., etc.,...

Thoughts and quotes from the first day of the Just Comedy confab at Montreal’s Just For Laughs fest… On "Finding the Comedy Audience," Comedy Central’s Lou Wallach set the tone early by cracking, "If anyone can find the comedy audience, please let us know." So we’re going to learn a lot here in Montreal, eh? Perhaps. Megan O’Neill from Atom.com, formerly known as Atom Films, said MTV Networks (and Comedy Central) bought the site to replace Motherload as its online broadband partner because Atom could prove it had both the Web traffic and the viewing demographic (young men aged 18-34) that Comedy Central wanted. O’Neill said she’d been with the company since 1999. "We’re survivors," she said. Of 31-32 other online competitors, 29 went belly up and crashed when the stock market bubble burst in 2000. "Because we survived, advertisers kept coming," O’Neill said. Atom Films had its biggest hit last year in "This Land" from the folks at JibJab — which you may recall got a big boost from having the guys appear on The Tonight Show. But how did JibJab end up on Atom? Good old-fashioned networking and relationship building. O’Neill knew the guys, would buy them pizza in Williamsburg (Brooklyn edition, not Colonial Virginia edition) and waited for them to produce a video that could appeal to the biggest audience. And when they did, the guys...