The Gazette
Sid Khullar is set to make a major splash on the production side with the launch of his inaugural anglo Montreal Comedy Series festival.
Sugar Sammy (Khullar) has a younger brother named Sid set to make a name for himself on the comedy front as well.
“He calls me Spicy Sid,” notes the junior Khullar sibling.
But before getting hopes up of catching Sugar Sammy and Spicy Sid waxing irreverently together on stage, the latter has absolutely no intentions of trying to match wits with his heralded bro.
“He’s the performer in the family and I’m the producer,” explains Sid Khullar, who has been packaging comedy shows here the last three years.
Khullar is now ready to make a major splash on the production side with the launch of his inaugural anglo Montreal Comedy Series festival, starting Friday and running until Sept. 6. Quite the ambitious fest, too, with 17 shows at 10 socially distanced venues and featuring more than 100 comics. Affordable as well, with prices ranging from $5 to $20.
Among the headliners are Gino Durante, Amer Rez, Wassim El Mounzer, Daniel Tirado, Lucy Gervais, Andrew Albert and Franco Taddeo. Oh yeah, count on Sugar Sammy to drop in for some surprise visits, too.
“We can’t let audiences know in advance, otherwise there would be a thousand people at the door and our club spaces are limited to 35 to 45 people because of distancing rules,” Khullar says. “But he has always come to do surprise sets at my shows, often lasting an hour.“
The series is intended to be a celebration of the local anglo comedy scene.
“I believe our comics can go head to head with the best anywhere in the world,” Khullar says. “We had lots of requests from out-of-town comics to appear, but we felt we could pull it off well just with locals.”
Khullar initially wanted to do the festival last year, but he was sidetracked when he and his wife had a baby. Then he had planned to go ahead in June, but he was sidetracked then by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were going to postpone it again until next year, but we felt that with local venues, local comics and the entertainment scene in general in need of a real boost, we wanted to give it a go now,” Khullar says. “Besides, we can all use the laughs at this time, too.”
Khullar has been building up to this festival by staging smaller events the last two months.
“The response has been good, and people have felt comfortable, seeing that we were taking all safety precautions seriously. We have had no issues so far and we’re getting a lot of return clients coming in, because the product is strong.”
One of the comedians Khullar is particularly high on is Rez, who will be performing Saturday at Rosewood and Sept. 6 at McKibbins and hosting Sept. 1 at Melrose, Sept. 2 at Rosewood and Sept. 6 at Brass Door.
“He is hilarious and also quite the story,” Khullar says.
To say the least.
Rez has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from McGill and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Polytechnique Montréal. But he decided to give all that up plus a six-figure salary for chump change in the chuckles trade. Needless to say, Rez’s decision initially left his parents pulling out their hair.
“I got my degrees and achieved one of the highest levels in engineering someone can achieve in this field,” Rez says.
And when he says “highest,” he’s not kidding.
“I sent satellites into space,” points out the Beirut-born Rez. “But my dream has always been to be a comic, and the same intense work I had to put in as an engineer, I’ve had to do as a comedian.”
His humour entails, not surprisingly, much material about his still shell-shocked family and Montreal.
“When I was a young boy in Beirut and my father told me we were moving to an island, I had visions of going to some tropical paradise,” Rez recalls.
“But when I woke up after the flight, I found myself in a traffic jam on the Décarie Expressway in the middle of winter on this island called Montreal. Not what I had fantasized. And who knew that snow was grey?”
The Montreal Comedy Series runs Friday to Sept. 6. Information: mtlseries.com
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