Immigrants are funny
Montreal Anglo stand-up comic Sugar Sammy was on the radio last week promoting le Show Raisonable, a comedy event showcassing funny guys from Québec’s minority communities.
Sugar tried out one of his jokes on the air. “You know, there’s two types of Québécois, there’s the 50% that are educated, cultivated people, then there’s the 50% that voted Yes in the referendum.”
Ha!
If I had had the opportunity to go onstage after him, this would have been my comeback: “You know, there’s two types on anglophones in Québec. There’s the educated and cultivated anglophones, those with an open mind, a passion for ideas and a love of democracy. Then there’s the 99, 9% of those who voted No in the referendum.”
Sugar described himself as an anglophone although as the son of immigrants from outside Canada he is one of the so-called Children of bill 101 ‘forced’ to go to french school. If they had had the choice his parents would have sent him to english school, he said.
I can only admire Sugar’s participation in a french-language show. Allthough Montreal is filled with many perfectly billingual people like him, we almost never see artists, and even less comedians, with the talent or balls to cross over to the other solitude. More power to him.
I happen to find comedy based on truths funnier than jokes based on prejudice. Sugar might be interested to know that support for Québec independence rises with scholarity and that the first PQ cabinet had more PhD’s than any other cabinet in Canadian history.
I suppose you have to excuse Sugar for not knowing that, after all, he didn’t have the smartest parents. They wanted to raise their son in English and chose to live in the Only city in North America that was not English-Speaking.