The financial setbacks of the Just for Laughs Group (JPR) caused a shock wave, mainly because all the industry players on whom the group’s proliferation relies learned from the media that they were losing their jobs, contracts and shows. For them, it’s a bomb, and even if there were signs announcing the sinking, the news was striking. JPR protects itself from its creditors, lays off 70% of its workforce, cancels its festival planned for this summer and in the process, drops the shows of which it was to produce. The columns of the temple of humor crash, creating a crash that is not funny at all. But is the JPR Group really representative of the very real challenges facing all festivals in Quebec?
Professor François Colbert, an eminent person who has been thinking for decades about issues linking taxation and culture, wrote a powerful text last week in which he asks relevant questions. These deserve legitimate attention. How on earth can a non-profit festival backed by a multinational go bankrupt? he asks first. And how is it that a multi-billion dollar for-profit company can own a non-profit company? he then asks himself. The financial structure of the JPR Group allowed its NPO component to be a requester and provider of subsidies, while its lucrative portion remained a beneficiary of activities guaranteeing income. Since 2018, JPR has been 49% owned by the American Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and 51% by Bell Media and the CH Group. Other festivals, such as the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the Francos and Osheaga, present a rather similar model.
Is this dual structure, endorsed by governments, partly responsible for the disappointment we are witnessing? In any case, thanks to this spectacular rout, this business model undoubtedly deserves to be reassessed, because it remains difficult to understand the extreme vulnerability of a group to opulent owners.
But JPR remains an anomaly on the landscape for other reasons, starting perhaps with the extremely bad decision once made by fallen comedy mogul Gilbert Rozon to grant an archivist a lifetime contract , the terms of which were broken in 2019 when he was fired. The man, who the court ruled in favor of when he challenged his unfair dismissal, was concerned last February about not promptly receiving the $850,000 that JPR owed him. He therefore took out a legal mortgage on the building housing the JPR head office, which was seized on February 27. We would like to invent this scenario worthy of a bad joke but we couldn’t.
JPR invoked the shocks caused in quick succession by the pandemic and the inflationary surge to explain its fall. This is a contrary trend facing all festivals and, more broadly, the performing arts industry in Quebec. But not all of them had to deal with the descent into hell of their founding leader, like Gilbert Rozon, whose allegations of sexual misconduct – not confirmed by the courts – precipitated the fall. We do not easily recover from such a debacle, which undoubtedly leaves traces in the conduct of business.
The JPR affair may well be unique in its kind for multiple structural and circumstantial reasons, but the fact remains that festivals suffer from a financial vulnerability which is not fictitious. This contrasts painfully with the enviable reputation that certain cities have forged precisely because of the vitality and cultural quality that these festivals bring in their wake. The Grouping of Major International Events is right to continue to campaign to maintain public support worthy of the population’s attachment to festivals. Likewise, to keep the free aspects of certain festivals alive, it might be time to consider other methods of financing, by involving real estate developers and merchants taking advantage of the windfall associated with the brand and traffic. .
Will Just for Laughs be reborn from the ashes? Already, a bonze of the humor industry, the Swiss Grégoire Furrer, is offering to save a portion of the festival this summer by extending and moving his Exclam event, so as not to “let a summer go by without a comedy event.” humor in Montreal. It is true that rebuilding a festival from scratch is no easy task. But let us still be reassured about the tone of the humor industry, which perhaps owes a lot to the past efforts of JPR and his creative genius, but which now succeeds beautifully in deploying itself in an autonomous manner completely outside within the Group. The columns of the temple of humor are collapsed, but the laughter industry, which occupies the forefront of the world of cultural performances in Quebec, stands proudly upright.