you’re gonna laugh 2 couldn’t live up to its title better: with his new show, Sugar Sammy picks up exactly where he left off, no less, no more.
Sugar Sammy warns us upfront: there will be 90% of the material from his second show that we will love and 10% that will hurt. But this 10%, he specifies, will not be the same for everyone. Understand: the comedian will also tease everyone, without sparing anyone.
Absent from the Quebec stages since 2016, the Montrealer has meanwhile exiled himself to Paris. Why did he leave his native land when he was, as he claims, “at the top of his game”? Because any Quebec comedian who succeeds in everything is faced with two choices, answers Sugar Sammy to himself: start from scratch in France or make grocery ads. For fans of Martin Matte, this valve will be placed in the 10% that hurts.
But Sugar Sammy doesn’t care to alienate anyone, he claims. you’re gonna laugh 2which he presented on Friday evening at the Salle Pierre-Mercure, picks up in this sense exactly where he left off with his previous tour, with the difference that this time around he is offering a bilingual evening throughout Quebec, and not only in the 514.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
Sugar Sammy
The beginning of the show, in which he casts his acid gaze on the insularity of local showbiz and confides his confusion in the face of certain monuments of Quebec culture, which he did not know at all, traces the contours of where Sugar Sammy shines. most. It is when he talks about an experience that could only have happened to himself, and to no one else, that the forty-something stands out with the most singularity.
His segment on the reluctance of some of his comic colleagues, who would restrain their causticity in order not to lose the chance of one day animating The goose that lays golden eggsis one of his rare moments of real audacity, insofar as the fear of alienating someone influential seems to guide the choices of many of the artisans of the marvelous cultural milieu.
Unstoppable repartee
Like all comedians who drink in socio-cultural stereotypes, to exaggerate or deconstruct them, Sugar Sammy is always a bit on the outskirts of the cliché, a territory that his art of the murderous formula often allows him to circumvent. His most shocking jokes – of women who would put their desire for equality aside when paying the bill, at the restaurant – are so less by what they say than by their blatant weariness. One day we will also have to be told about the obsession that so many cisgender men seem to have for the penis that trans people may or may not have.
While he may have a good lead when he evokes the two-speed feminism of certain white women, too little solidarity with the fight of racialized women, Sugar Sammy abandons it too soon for anything to emerge. Where a Bill Burr is always ready to show all that his heart and his soul conceal of ugliness, in order to better highlight the hypocrisy of his contemporaries, the Quebecer rarely overflows with the tone of a well-cooked animator.
Agile improviser, with an unstoppable repartee, Sugar Sammy once again shines in his moments of interaction with the crowd, which bring out what is most endearing to him.
There is a perfect balance between warmth and sarcasm in this Sugar Sammy, that of plural Montreal, who knows how to adequately tease all the members of his audience, because he knows enough about all the cultures that weave the Quebec quilt.
Each of the moments when he touches on the subject of his family or his personal life seems much richer than his lines on Donald Trump or Marie-Pier Morin, just as delectably well shot as they are.
Despite his many detractors, Sugar Sammy enjoys great love from Quebecers, who awarded him the Olivier of the Year in 2013 and 2014, and this relationship deserves to be deepened.
The Great Leveler of Humor
Even if many Quebec comedians now claim to be inspired by stand up in the American way, most of them remain first and foremost storytellers, dependent on the art of storytelling. In this sense, Sugar Sammy has the undeniable advantage of really being part of this American tradition of cock and donkey, of which our comic ecosystem has few pure representatives. Even if it means offering a show without a real common thread, except for its conception of humor as a great leveler, which would bring men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, Anglophones and Francophones, back to their common humanity.
Sugar Sammy doesn’t seem to be quite sure if he wants to be a political comedian or if he’s satisfied with being a very good comedian in the end. comedy clubs American style. One thing is certain: his critics see more politics in his work than there really is.
Like many successful movie sequels, you’re gonna laugh 2 is therefore the occasion for a pleasant moment in the company of a character whom it is good to find again, but about whom we will not have learned more.
you’re gonna laugh 2
On tour everywhere in Quebec