Just For Laughs: Sarah Silverman Gala Leaves Fans Wanting More

When the most outrageously funny woman alive – as Rolling Stone Magazine calls Sarah Silverman – says a list of comedians is her “dream lineup” you gladly take her word for it.   

Indeed, Friday night’s Sarah Silverman Gala at Massey Hall, part of Just For Laughs Toronto Festival, featured top-notch performers hampered only by 15-minute sets that were too short to leave fans feeling completely satisfied.

The flip side though, was that the two-hour show offered a sampling of some of today’s top talent in stand-up comedy, personally pieced together by the sardonic Silverman.

The host unassumingly took to the stage to an eager and enthusiastic crowd. Drinking a Red Bull, she remarked how nice people in Toronto are. “You even put garbage in the streets to make it feel more like New York,” she joked.

She plunged into some painfully funny anecdotes, pausing when she noticed some commotion in the front row. “What’s going on?” she asked in her quirky, child-like way. “You were in the wrong seat and you were only one seat over?” she asked. “Some people just want what they can’t have.”

John Mulaney (above), a writer for Saturday Night Live, was up next, receiving a lot of laughs as he recalled his experience of moving to New York from a small midwestern town.

Arj Barker (above), most famous for playing Bret and Jemaine’s friend Dave on the HBO series The Flight of the Conchords , took over the stage with his fact-paced and unconventional style. He talked about his first visit to Toronto, and didn’t leave the Bata Shoe Museum unscathed.

“The mere presence of a shoe museum forced me to ask myself one very important question,” he said. “Would my body be able to endure, would my body physically survive, the amount of marijuana I would need to smoke in order to pay a visit to a Shoeseum?”

A guitar-carrying Silverman walked on stage during an interlude when someone heckled her about Jimmy Kimmel, with whom she recently split. “Thank you for breaking my heart on stage, that’s so sweet,” she replied to all-round laughter.

“Yelling out the name of a lost love, that is so thoughtful of you. You must be the best friend. I wish you were my friend,” she said, using the incident to seamlessly set up a bit about male insecurity. She then sang a couple of acoustic songs and introduced her next performer, Todd Glass.

Glass’ self-deprecating humour went over well. “I’m gonna tell this joke for the last time and then I’m putting it to rest,” he began.  “It’s the last time that I’m gonna do it. Not to whole act, just this one joke. Here we go. Do I look like Fred Flinstone and Mel Gibson had an ugly baby?” The tone was set for another 15 hilarious minutes.

A bearded and baseball-capped David Cross, looking distinctly different from Tobias Fünke, his Arrested Development character, managed to turn mundane observations into hysterical scenarios.

“On the flight out here, they continue to remind people that it’s a no smoking flight,” he started off.  “I’m sitting there, and I don’t smoke, but I’m thinking from now on, I’m just gonna have a cigarette and a lighter and just wait.  This is a reminder, it’s a no-smoking flight … you’re right! I keep forgetting … since 1971. It keeps slipping my mind every time I fly!” He spent much of the rest of his set talking about heroin and NyQuil.

Emmy Award-nominated comic Louis C.K. took over for the home stretch, candidly talking about divorce, dating and raising children. He described helping out at his kid’s school during lunchtime, opening milk boxes.

“It’s 2009 and we still put milk in this paper box, put it in a bottle!” he ranted.  “A 7-year old can’t work it. It’s the subtle gesture of peeling back the paper and then gathering it forward.  I’m no better at it.  I just deal with the stress better.”

Photos by Aaron Miller, CityNews.ca