A Couple of Laughs

Two of the finest comedic voices in the world are coming to town.

Louis CK's new show, Word, is coming to Montreal Thursday night, a production of Just For Laughs.

Montreal audiences have had the opportunity to enjoy Louis CK most recently at last year's Just For Laughs Festival, when he played to packed houses. In fact, he'd been performing in Montreal pretty steadily almost for the duration of his career, including a memorable gig at Montreal's Comedy Works during the great Ice Storm of 1998.

Louis CK is an award-winning writer, with credits for both Late Night with Conan Obrien and The Late Show with David Letterman. He's been on both the big and small screen, most recently starring in his own HBO sit-com, Lucky Louie, which he also wrote. But he is first and foremost a comedian, considered by many to be the best American stand-up artist of his generation. He is as profane as they come, tickling audiences with tales of how his daughter sucks at Hide and Seek, or how he was insulted by an angry motorist. In this oft-viewed clip from Late Night with Conan Obrien, CK laments about how everything is amazing, but nobody's happy.

You can see Louis CK at either 7:00 or 9:30 pm at the Metropolis on October 21st.

On November 9th, Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, one of my all-time favourites, is bringing his new show, The Man Live, to Montreal as part of his current Canadian tour.

Connolly is a storyteller at heart who made it clear years ago that, despite what some may say about profanity, how it's a limited vocabulary, he has never found a better or more effective word than the F-word. But with Connolly the F-word is not gratuitous, it's more like le mot juste, although I'm not sure Gustave Flaubert would agree. “I've never found the English equivalent for f**k off,” Connolly once told a live television audience, “and it isn't go away.”

North American audiences likely first got to know Connolly from his role as teacher Billy MacGregor on Head of the Class, and its spinoff, Billy. He also distinguished himself playing opposite Dame Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown, and with Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. But he is most at home on the comedy stage. His stories range from his trip to Ibiza with his family, where the water had a rather nasty effect, to graphic, yet hilarious accounts of his prostate exams, to stories from his childhood, like when a Cardinal paid his classroom a visit, when little Billy Connolly, at least according to the story, told The Cardinal to, well, to “go away” the way that only Billy Connolly can.

Billy Connolly's The Man Live comes to Place des Arts Tuesday, November 9.