Sacre Bleu! Just For Laughs Files For Bankruptcy. Now What For Big Comedy?

By Sean L. McCarthy @thecomicscomic
Published March 5, 2024, 3:40 p.m. ET

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Stand-Up Comedy

While Netflix gears up for its second major comedy festival in Los Angeles come May, its biggest rival in North America has just closed up shop in a major bankruptcy restructuring.

Casual comedy fans might not know that JFL stands for Just For Laughs or even what those words mean outside of possibly hidden-camera prank videos, but since 1983, the Montreal-based company has staged one of the largest annual comedy festivals in the world, attracting industry from Hollywood, New York and worldwide each July, and for the past several summers, showcasing young comedians as “New Faces” who’d get recruited for Saturday Night Live that same fall.

Back in the 1990s, JFL was a massive pipeline for relatively unknown comics to score six-figure development deals with the networks for their own primetime sitcoms.

But today, Groupe Juste Pour Rire inc. (“JPR” for the French-speaking Canadians of Quebec) announced it had filed a notice of intent seeking protection from creditors under Canada’s Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. The immediate restructuring included laying off 75 employees (about 70 percent of it workforce) and cancelling the 2024 Montreal festival. That followed a previous round of layoffs in December.

JFL had just concluded a comedy festival in Vancouver last month with Bill Burr, Ted Lasso‘s Brett Goldstein, Ronny Chieng, and Wanda Sykes among the headliners; is staging its second JFL London next weekend, albeit with only two shows listed for March 15-16; and has put its name on the annual Moontower festival in Austin in April, where Andrew Schulz, Shane Gillis, Tim Robinson, and Chieng are the top-billed headliners. It also has staged festivals in years past in both Toronto and Sydney, as well as a smaller event this February on Bermuda.

American viewers have seen a few of the annual Galas that Just For Laughs puts on each year on The CW, fronted by a big-name celebrity and showcasing stand-ups and sketches, while Canadian viewers have enjoyed multiple JFL Galas every year for decades on the CBC and other networks.

So what happened? The official press release effectively blames the pandemic for upending the organizational finances.

To wit, they claimed:

  • “The media industry and the free festival industry are facing difficult times, and JPR operates in both of those sectors.
  • The global pandemic forced us to effectively cease operations for two years, with significantly reduced revenue, while carrying nearly all of the associated overhead costs.
  • The pandemic was followed by the inflationary times we continue to experience, meaning our cost structure increased appreciably, exerting unprecedented financial strains on the organization.
  • In parallel, the media industry landscape has radically changed over the past few years. Consolidation and reduced budgets at the networks and streaming platforms have made television production more challenging.“

JFL had previously all but cancelled the 2020 festival due to COVID-19 restrictions, reducing it to a handful of virtual events, and for similar reasons in 2021, temporarily relocated the “New Faces” showcases to Los Angeles, before bringing the festival back to Montreal in 2022.

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ROBBIE PRAW in black and white in front of a bright orange background

Netflix’s First-Ever Comedy Festival Is No Joke. Just Ask Robbie Praw, Netflix’s VP Of Stand-Up

But much has changed since 2016, when JFL’s top programmer Robbie Praw left Montreal for Los Angeles and Netflix to head up Netflix’s massive investment in stand-up comedy, which eventually led to Netflix starting up its own Netflix Is A Joke: The Fest, which debuted in L.A. in 2022 and returns this May for a second edition.

In the meantime, JFL’s founder Gilbert Rozon resigned in 2017 to face legal accusations of sexual misconduct. The Canadian courts would eventually clear Rozon, but not before he sold the festival to Hollywood power agency ICM and comedian/actor Howie Mandel (along with Canadian firms Bell Media and Groupe CH) in 2018.

Mandel hasn’t commented publicly yet. He was busy last night instead promoting the return of Deal Or No Deal to NBC.

I attended every Just For Laughs festival in Montreal from 2007 through 2018, reviewing each year’s crop of “New Faces” and covering other live showcases and panels. Personally, I noticed fewer and fewer outlets or buzz over the years, and hardly anyone covered New Faces at all after I stopped going. For whatever that’s worth.

Here’s what some comedians had to say about the bankruptcy news today:

Former Conan writer Laurie Kilmartin, out with a new special this year herself (Cis Woke Grief Slut), chimed in with a GIF response:

Another JFL booker, Jeff Singer, resigned in 2021 following multiple varied complaints about his conduct. Singer had been prominently featured in the Prime Video docuseries, Inside Jokes, which folllowed the “New Faces” from auditions to Montreal in 2018. Some comedians found time to fit in a crack about that today, too.

A former colleague of mine from Canada who now works in the tech sector wondered today:

But Netflix doesn’t need Montreal. It already has Praw and a thriving comedy festival of its own, right in the heart of Hollywood where almost all of the industry already lives.

Decider has reached out to representatives at Just For Laughs for comment, but has not heard back at press time.