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Jan. 17, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
01:26:23
Fined FOR A JOKE! Interview with Comedian Make Ward - Viva Frei Live
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But I wanted a plan B. My plan B was going to McGill University.
So when I got accepted to McGill, I told my parents I'm going to McGill, but it was to do comedy.
So I went to McGill, and then all my friends knew I was going to start doing comedy, and I'd come back to Quebec City every month or every other week, and they'd ask me, how's comedy, how's comedy?
And I'd just say, I haven't started yet, haven't started yet.
After about six months...
They were just annoying.
So I lied.
I told them.
They were like, how's comedy?
And I was like, oh, it's good.
And they were like, okay, you started?
I was like, yeah, I've been doing open mics every week at the Comedy Works.
They were like, every week?
I was like, yeah, every week.
And they were like, are you going to be there this week?
And I was like, I don't know, maybe.
And they were like, okay, we're coming up to Montreal to see you.
So this was a Saturday night.
In the old days, you had to call the Comedy Works to get on the open mic list.
I knew that.
I had the number.
So I called them from Quebec City at 3 in the morning when I got home, hoping to leave a message on the answering machine.
Someone picked up and I told them, look, I'm in Quebec City.
I have 15 friends that are going to come up on Monday.
Can you put me on?
And the open mics usually attracted about four or five people.
So they were like, okay, you're on.
And so they booked me, and then I told the emcee, he was like, this is your first time?
I was like, yeah, but when you bring me up, say, this guy's a regular here.
So the first time I was ever on stage was, the guy brought me up, he was like, this next guy, you know him, you love him, here's Mike Ward.
That's actually, I mean, that's hilarious.
First of all, what were you studying at McGill?
Business.
Well, commerce and marketing.
Okay, very interesting.
Comedy Works, at the time, where is it?
Is it on Bishop?
It was on Bishop.
It was an amazing little club.
I saw Rogan there.
I saw Ray Romano there.
I saw Chris Rock there.
Everyone that was...
Once they'd become big, if they'd come to Montreal to do a theater show, they'd always stop by the Comedy Works just to do a spa.
And I'll explain that for everyone in the chat there.
Bishop Street is downtown Montreal.
It's off St. Catherine.
Bars, clubs, all the stuff.
You're 50, 54?
I'm 49. 49. I thought you were much older than me.
I look older.
No, no, no, no.
Because I'm thinking, I thought you were much older than me, which you're not much older than me.
No, but so back in the day then.
You got Comedy Nest.
Was there Comedy Works?
Comedy Works was on Bishop.
Comedy Nest, when I first started, was on Crescent for like a minute.
And then it moved to a place called the Nouvelle Hotel.
There was some hotel on Rene Levesque.
And that was a fun room too.
So I used to do both of the English rooms.
And they generally didn't let comics do...
Both clubs.
But they let me for some reason.
And so I was doing that.
And then I had friends.
People knew I spoke French.
They were like, why don't you try it in French?
And I didn't want to.
Because I always saw French comedy as being kind of like the way Bumblebee Man is on The Simpsons.
Like cartoonish and costumes and very vaudeville almost.
And then I found out that there were French guys doing stand-up.
So I was like, okay, let me try it.
I tried it in French and the crowds were amazing.
Like whenever I'd do English shows, there'd be 10, 12 people.
The French shows, people would come out.
People would pay to see you.
So it was way, like it was more fun doing the shows in English.
In French, sorry.
Do you think that's because in Quebec, I mean, you have a big...
It's 85% French for the province, 50-some-odd for Montreal, but that's because French Canadians, there was not much options for stand-up comics at that time?
Yeah, and I think because of the Montreal Just For Last Festival, people in French Canada love comedy, I think because of the festival, and on the English side, it's all the Americans and the Brits that come in, but on the French side...
French Canadians don't like people from France, so they had to kind of make local stars to attract people to the festival.
So they built up a bunch of French comics to attract people during the summer, and then the rest of the year, these comics were playing around the province, so they were selling out.
There's a star system in French Canada.
That doesn't exist for English Canada.
It's an interesting thing.
Is it because, if I'm going to make a generalization, French humor, French from France, is very different than French humor from Quebec?
And a lot of stand-up comedy is anecdotal, so someone coming from France talking about political problems in France probably won't resonate very well with Quebec.
And the accent is like...
French-Canadian is like the American accent, and French from France is like the British accent.
And we're actually, French-Canadian is probably more like, it's a thicker accent for French people.
So it'd be like someone from London playing in Mississippi.
And the funny thing is, I've used that analogy very often.
It's like, French from France view Quebec the way the Brits view Texas in the southern states.
One thing I always found interesting is, swear words in French all have to do with women.
Prostitution and swear words in Quebec all have to do with religious iconography.
Yeah, all the Catholic Church.
So your first night out, it's not a fraud.
This is, you know, fake it until you make it.
You tell the guy, be part of the gig.
Tell him I've been here before.
Your friends come down.
How did they find it?
I mean, it's friends watching a friend on stage.
They loved it.
And the reason why they loved it is because it was since I knew all of them.
So I was doing jokes that you shouldn't be doing when you're starting out.
Jokes that were like very, like almost inside jokes.
You had to be an English person from Quebec City to get.
And they were killing because they were all from Quebec City.
So the next week when I went on, it wasn't as good.
But I knew, I was like, okay, if I can make my friends laugh, eventually I'll make strangers laugh.
And I fell in love with it right away.
That's fantastic.
Did it lead to you dropping out of McGill or did you finish your degree?
Yeah, right away.
Because at first I was like, okay, McGill will be my plan B. And then I saw a bunch of really funny comics that weren't going anywhere in their careers.
And I realized it's because they had real jobs.
Like if you're making $100,000 a year at a real job, you're not going to go to some shitty open mic or some show to get paid like $10 for driving an hour for...
No one that has a real job will do that.
So I was like, if I don't have a plan B, this has to work.
So that's what I did.
How many semesters in did you bail?
Just during my second semester.
And you never went back?
Never went back.
No university degree.
You went all in on the comedy.
Exactly.
And are you doing, I mean, I've always been sort of fast.
I'm fascinated.
I don't know if it's in a good way or a concerned way about the life of a stand-up comic who has to travel the country, goes and makes people laugh during the evening, and then afterwards retires to a hotel room, sometimes alone and otherwise, if not alone, maybe not doing the healthiest things.
Do you go on tour in Quebec or do you go on tour across Canada?
I mostly tour Quebec.
And I have a little tour bus, so if I can make it back home, I do.
I don't go out to drink in bars after the show.
I'll just drink in the tour bus, and then when I get home, I stop drinking.
Very cool.
Okay, so now you've dropped out of McGill, or you've decided to pursue that later if it doesn't work out.
You're going all in on the comedy.
What is that racket like?
Until you develop a name for yourself.
And then what does it mean to actually develop a name for yourself in stand-up comedy in Quebec?
It was rough at first because my comedy is very blue.
And that's the thing I like, too, about being on the French side.
On the English side, people would go, oh, you're a little like, in those days, like Andrew Dice Clay was still big.
Sam Kenison had just died.
So people were like, that's a little like Kenison, a little bit like Dice.
But in French, they had no, like...
No reference.
People were like, you can't say that.
And I was like, how come?
They were like, you can't say that.
I was like, but it's laughing.
They were like, yeah, but you can't do that.
No one's ever done that in French.
And I was like, that's why I want to do it in French, since no one's ever done it.
There's something fun about being the first.
To do something.
I can imagine.
When you say blue, blue means sort of darkish.
Yeah, yeah.
I swear a little.
I don't really talk about sex, but whatever.
I don't have taboos on stage, so whatever.
Whatever I think is funny, I'll do it.
If the audience laughs, I keep doing it.
If the audience doesn't laugh, then I don't do it because I don't want to go on stage and just say offensive shit just to say offensive shit.
I want people to laugh and have a good time.
I want people, when they leave, get in their car and go, that was really funny.
The best compliment I can get, there was a girl, I did a show once in Berlin.
And the crowd was super woke.
Super, super woke.
So I went in hard.
Everything that I thought would offend them, I did.
English or French?
English.
And there was this girl from some university in Boston.
I don't know if it was Harvard or Yale, but she was like an Ivy League type girl.
And she was like, I wanted to hate you, but you were so funny.
I couldn't.
And I was like, thank you.
That's what I was going for.
Do you remember any of your earlier bits, the essence of the jokes, or do you have them memorized like piano pieces?
No, I forget quickly.
As soon as I record something and stop doing it, I forget.
Sometimes I'll listen to old tapes of me, and I have no memory.
I can't remember anything.
Okay, so this is phenomenal.
So now you start doing tours, or you start doing the rounds.
Yeah.
How long until you establish a name?
And also, how long until you establish a consistent, predictable income lifestyle from this before you even get into where you've gotten now?
So I started doing comedy in 93, and I started making a real living at it maybe 96, 97. Not like an amazing amount of money, but enough that I could pay...
My rent, pay a car, eat three times a day.
Because at first, the first couple of years, my friends thought I was paying for everything, but it was my mom.
She'd send me money every other week.
And my dad, I was talking to him about this a couple of weeks ago, and he was like, yeah, we didn't want you to die.
So my dad, he was amazing for that.
My mom thought I was really funny.
She thought I was going to be a huge star.
My dad didn't think I was funny at all, but he just kept on giving me money just because he was like, I don't want my son to die.
Enough to survive, but not enough to get lazy or get comfortable.
Yeah, exactly.
It's also kind of amazing that you have parents who don't immediately murder you for dropping out of university to pursue stand-up comedy.
So three years, it gets reliable, it gets consistent.
What is the...
How do you know when you've made a reputation on the Quebec stand-up comedy scene?
I knew when the people at the festival, the people that booked the festival, used to hate me.
And then they started loving me for some reason.
And it was doing the same type of material, but I think times had changed a little.
And the guy that used to book the galas...
He'd book me every year on one of the gallows, one of the TV gallows, and it never went well because my material was too dark, and I kept on telling him I don't want to do it anymore.
I don't want to do it, but he'd offer me money, and I was making a living but not a lot, so I was like, okay, I'm going to take the whatever $10,000 or $12,000 they're offering me.
I'd take it, and then I wouldn't do well, but they'd keep booking me anyway every year.
And then the last year, when I finally did sort of pop in Quebec, the guy that booked it wanted me and I said, look, I'm not doing it.
I'm not doing it.
I don't want it, but I can host the auditions for you.
So I hosted the auditions at the end of the gig.
He told me, he was like, what you did hosting, I want you to do that on One of the Gallas.
And I did.
And that year, for some reason, went really well.
I got the year after.
I wrote a bit.
My wife had just left me.
I wrote a bit about that.
And I was the Révelation, which is, I guess, the best newcomer or a breakthrough artist at the festival.
And as soon as I got that award, the Just for Laughs award opened all the doors for Quebec and for pretty much all of the anywhere French.
As soon as you have a trophy from Just for Laughs.
You're good.
So like the Just for Laughs, that's like the Johnny Carson type moment.
Yeah, in the old days, in French, the galas were exactly Johnny Carson.
Okay, amazing.
Now hold on.
You mentioned that you were married and no longer married.
Yeah, I'm married.
We weren't married at the time.
We were living together.
She left me.
And the whole bit was about the stages I was going through during the breakup.
And the end of the bit was, because I kept on saying, she'll be back, she'll be back.
And the more the bit went on, the more pathetic I became.
I was like, she doesn't know what she's missing, just me crying in my car.
And then at the end, it was now.
I'm over her.
I don't want her anymore.
And fuck, she came back.
That was sort of the joke.
Doesn't translate all that well.
But she saw that bit on TV.
And when she saw that bit, she came to one of my shows and she was like, I made a terrible mistake.
She was so touched that I'd written a bit about her.
And then you actually ended up together again.
Yeah, we ended up getting back together, getting married.
Still married?
Still married, yeah.
We're going on 20 years.
That's an amazing story in and of itself.
And for those who don't know, in Quebec, Quebec is not a stereotype.
It's the land of people hooking up.
The land where people live together without getting married the most in Canada.
At least predominantly in French Canada as well.
So it's sort of a phenomenon.
What I like too about that is the confidence that her...
Because she had a new boyfriend.
And it was her new boyfriend's idea to watch the gala.
You could pay, like it was on pay-per-view.
So he paid...
Because he knew I was on, and I think he thought I wasn't going to do well, so he wanted to show his new girlfriend, look at the fucking loser you were with.
But then I ended up killing, and then she was crying and loving it.
I would love to be a fly on the wall of that when that happens.
The boyfriend is watching his girlfriend now laugh and become enamored by her ex-boyfriend.
Tempt faith.
That's what happens when you tempt faith.
And so she went to a show.
This was during the festival, and I guess the emcee had said, because I was hosting a series during the festival, so she, the next night, came over to the show, and yeah, that's how it started up again.
Phenomenal.
Kids?
No kids?
No kids.
Well, one dog.
One dog just died.
Okay.
Okay, so now that's the ascension.
To both comedy and marriage.
Yeah.
What year are we in, give or take, when that happens?
This is summer of 2002.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, the saga, I guess we're going to fast forward unless I can think of anything in the interim.
If there's something in the interim that I skipped over, we'll get back to it.
The incident that put you on the map for, I won't even say English Canada, I'll say more America.
Because when I started doing my YouTube thing, and I was the Montreal litigator turned YouTuber and now a rumbler, and...
2016, I was doing videos and people were always making a joke about how Canada has no free speech.
And I didn't understand at the time, but I certainly understand now.
At what point was it that you got fined for the joke?
And they said, did you hear about this Canadian comic who got fined for a joke?
And I said, it's got to be a joke.
This has got to be misinformation.
And I look it up and lo and behold...
Mike Ward fined, it was $43,000 by the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal, monies that were ordered not only to be paid to Jeremy Gabriel, not to name him, he's a celebrity, everybody knows this, the kid, but his mother as well.
I think the father, the...
Yeah, it was, the first one that came out was $42,000.
It was $35,000 to the kid, $7,000 to the mom.
To the mother.
Yeah, maybe it was $8,000.
But I always, like, this is like...
This is one of my qualities.
It's actually not a quality, but when I want to forget stuff, I just forget it.
So I don't even remember the exact amount.
You can forget the details.
Something tells me you're not going to forget about it.
This saga lasted eight years?
It lasted about ten years because the first time I heard about this was in 2013.
So I did a joke in a tour, and the tour lasted about two and a half years.
So, like, close to the end of the tour, I do an interview with a journalist on TV, and he starts talking about the joke, but he had never heard the joke.
He had just heard people talking about the joke, and then he started talking about the joke with me.
And I had noticed before, and I've noticed after, whenever comics get in trouble for jokes, it's never...
The people that get offended aren't the people that were in the room.
It's always people that heard about the joke.
So this guy starts talking about the joke, and I answer the best I can.
This goes on TV.
The family sees this on TV.
They find out I have a joke about the son.
So they contact the Human Rights Commission.
Human Rights Commission calls my manager to tell him that there might be a...
There might be a verdict about my joke.
So he calls me and he goes, yeah, the Human Rights Commission is checking to see if they're going to judge your joke or not.
And I thought that was a joke.
I was like, that's insane.
That's insane.
The people that were, you know, it's an organization that was started because racist landlords didn't want to rent to black people.
And now they're going to.
So he was like, yeah, they want.
They want tickets for one of your shows.
And I was like, fuck them.
They want tickets.
They can just buy tickets.
So I was like, send them a link to Ticketmaster with my name.
So he sent a link to Ticketmaster, Mike Ward.
They bought tickets.
And then I thought I'd never hear about this again.
I get a letter.
From a bailiff.
Bailiff comes to my house.
He gives me a letter that said I owed them $86,000.
The first verdict was $86,000.
Because they had sort of decided in one of their offices, okay, and it was a little, it was $25,000.
I'm not sure the exact amount, but it was like $30,000-ish to the kid.
$30,000-ish to the mom and then another $15,000 for the stepdad.
So I was like, this is insane.
Okay, we got to fight this.
Well, I want to back it up a little bit because people, they're going to understand the context.
The joke, we don't need to go over the ins and outs.
The kid is, his name is Jeremy Gabriel.
He was a kid who was...
He became famous.
He sang for the Pope.
He was a little kid that had an illness.
Treacher Collins syndrome.
Treacher Collins.
But he was sold in the media as this little boy that was dying of this weird disease that we'd never heard of.
He sang for the Pope.
It was super cute.
He was front-page news of pretty much every French paper in the province.
And then the Canadians booked him.
He sang the national anthem for our hockey team.
Again, front-page news.
Celine Dion heard about him, booked him to open for her in Vegas, went there.
That was front page news, came out with an album, came out with a book, came out with.
And the joke was like after three years and after his second book, Like, wasn't that the, like, he's supposed to be dying.
Why isn't he dead?
And then I had this big, long rant about me saying that I tried to murder this kid and he's unkillable and I tried to drown him and he won't die and blah, blah, blah.
And then I end the bit, which I think is the thing that got me in the most trouble, just by saying...
I googled his illness.
You know what he has?
He's ugly.
That's the only thing.
So that's the bit.
But then after that, when the media was talking about it...
It was the bit that Mike Ward did about this ugly little boy, and I was like, that's not the bit.
The bit isn't about him being ugly.
That's just a stupid little tag at the end.
It's about the fact that the media portrayed him as this victim, and they were using pity instead of talent.
And also, when it came to the mother, the joke that got you in trouble with the mother was that she...
Yeah, and that wasn't even on stage.
That was a thing.
I didn't even remember I'd done that.
I used to have a blog, and this was before YouTube.
This was a video I had done that I just put, like, transferred myself to Flash.
So maybe...
Maybe 80 people heard that joke in, like, whatever, 2007, whenever this kid was popular.
And, yeah, saying that she was kind of a showbiz mom and how she was doing this to buy a nice car.
And then she lost her mind.
When she was in court, she pulled out her keys and threw them on the desk and looked at me.
And she was like, you said I have a sports car.
Where are the keys?
Where are the keys?
And I was like...
Okay, this is very bizarre.
And then the judge was like, ma 'am, can you put your keys back in your purse?
The amazing thing about this, which I never understood how they got past, is that the media depicted it as you picked on a handicapped child.
Yeah.
Omitting the fact that the kid was a celebrity.
And there's a different threshold in law because basically the ultimate decision was that we're not using the Human Rights Tribunal to determine defamation.
It's not within their jurisdiction.
The kid was a celebrity.
His mother made him a celebrity, willingly.
And it's not to be mean.
There's no but to that.
It was an inspirational story and not a story of talent.
So when he sang for the Pope, it was inspirational because of how audibly imperfect the rendition was.
And so when you make the joke, everybody who wants to get it is going to get it, but you're not picking on...
Some random kid on the corner of the street you're picking on.
And especially, I think the name of the bit was called Les Vaches Sacrées, which is French-Canadian, or it's Québécois for sacred cows.
The people you can't make fun of.
And you made fun of Germain Gabriel, who apparently you can't make fun of.
And Céline Dion.
I had Céline Dion and a bunch of, like everyone famous in Quebec I made fun of.
And like, they were all...
Fairly, fairly violent jokes.
But, you know, very, very harsh jokes.
Dark jokes.
I mean, it's dark humor.
It's in the context of a stand-up bit.
Okay.
What was very bizarre, though, is the way, like, English Canada portrayed me.
Like, CTV News, when I finally did win at the Supreme Court level...
The way they talked about me, they said, comedian Mike Ward who tried to drown a boy in one of his jokes.
And I was like, you can't say tried to drown someone in a joke.
That's insane.
Oh, you can if you see TV news.
I mean, it's whatever the most malicious framing they can.
And the joke, yeah, he said at one point in the joke, the kid won't die.
I tried to drown him.
Yeah.
The bit was le vache sacrée, sacred cows, people you can't make fun of, so let's go ahead and do it.
Nobody else sued you, but it wasn't like a random kid.
I did hear, though, Celine Dion's, because Celine Dion's people are very, like, in the old days when her husband was still alive, he was like a control freak.
And I know he sent his lawyer and his son-in-law to my show to see.
And then they had a meeting after my show, Rene was in Vegas, and he was like, what can we do?
And they were like, but you can't sue him.
It's clearly just a joke.
But you can weaponize the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal, which is, I've talked about it on the channel, but it's a specialty court to deal with human rights violations, which are such as denial of services based on race, religion.
And on this, they got you on...
They said it was discrimination, which is very bizarre because I was like, okay, I don't get the discrimination.
They were saying it's discrimination because he's disabled, so you shouldn't make fun of someone that's disabled.
And I was like, isn't that discrimination?
If you're saying, okay, we can make fun of everyone.
I can make fun of your life, your lifestyle.
Nothing's off limits except for disability.
You don't make fun of those people.
White males?
Fine.
But you can't make fun of a disabled kid.
You can't poke fun of a disabled celebrity the way you would poke fun of an able-bodied celebrity, which I tend to agree is itself a thing.
They're not equal.
They can't deal with the same type of ridicule that able-bodied people can.
You can make someone for being fat, for being ugly, whatever.
I love the story about how you get...
This letter from the Human Rights Tribunal.
And I know of your awards.
I know of your philanthropic work, fundraising and stuff.
The year that I got that letter, too, I had gotten an award for the work I do with disabled people.
There's this guy I met on Twitter in, I think, maybe 2011.
He's this guy named Alain Gade who has a form of multiple sclerosis that he's severely disabled.
And he was very funny, very dark, and then he started writing jokes about how he wanted to commit suicide but he couldn't.
And I felt that the jokes were a little, you know...
Too close to the truth.
Too much truth in jest.
So I DM'd him.
I was like, what's your phone number?
He called me.
And I was like, what do you need?
Because the government wanted to take him out of his apartment and put him in an old folks home, which is where they put even young disabled people.
So he was like, I don't want to live in one of those.
I want to live in my apartment.
And it'll cost me less to live in my apartment than it would in a government home.
But he said the government won't give me money.
And I said, what do you need?
And he needed $40,000 a year extra.
So I was like, okay, perfect.
Every year we'll do a show and we'll raise $40,000.
So I started doing that for him in, I guess, 2011.
And after two, three years, I don't deserve an award for that, but I thought it was funny that they did give me an award.
It was the Comedy Festival in Quebec City gave me an award for the work I did with him.
And there was another organization that they have an arm called...
The name of the company is Canova Robotics.
They do an arm that they put on wheelchairs that someone can eat with it and control, you know, remote control, get a drink.
And they had a sort of a happy hour thing with me just to show me all of their stuff and to thank me for the work I had done for them.
And then I get this letter, so I was like, okay, this is insane.
I can't get an award for the stuff I do to disabled people.
Be a monster at the same time.
What I love, I saw, I was watching, it was a highlight from Rogan, but your initial reaction when you got this letter was, oh, I'm winning another award.
Yeah, yeah.
And then you read the letter, and it's, I don't know the process, they demand a certain amount of money, they internally investigate and adjudicate.
Yeah.
Now you pay this.
Yeah.
So kid, mom, dad, you read this letter.
And your theory at the time, or your thinking is, they ordered you to pay like $83,000.
It's a big number, but not too big to immediately pay.
That was what my lawyer said.
My lawyer, Julius Gray.
Because when I saw this, I was like, okay, I'm fighting this.
I'm definitely not going to pay.
I didn't want to be the guy that ruined it for comedy.
I didn't want to be like, if you get offended for a joke and you go, hey, you made fun of me, give me money.
No, you don't deserve money.
No, but Mike Ward gave $86,000 for that joke.
So I think my feelings, maybe not $86,000, but I deserve $48,000 or whatever.
So I didn't want to be that guy.
So I asked around who the best free speech lawyer was in Quebec and in Canada, and everyone told me Julius Gray.
So I was like, okay.
I booked a meeting with him.
And he told me, he said, look, the amount, $86,000 is a scary amount, but it's not huge.
Like, if it was a million or two million, everyone would fight.
Everyone would go, fuck you, I'm not paying two million.
But $86,000 is low enough that you can go, okay, they're asking for $86,000.
Maybe they'll settle for $40,000.
He was like, this feels like they want you to make an offer.
He goes, you can offer...
$20,000 and then they'll probably accept $30,000 and then it'll be good.
And I was like, no, I'd rather give you $100,000 than give them $5,000 because it truly felt like I was just a shop owner and the mafia was coming in telling me, look, if you want to keep your business, it's going to cost you $86,000.
And you say it.
It's not like it would have become...
Quebec Human Rights Tribunal decision precedent, but it would certainly become precedent that would be used on a going forward basis.
And I'm asking this question not because I want to know how much Julius Gray got paid.
First of all, Julius and my dad, they're old of the same community.
They've known each other for years.
And Julius is well known for human rights law and free speech in Quebec and Canada.
What did it cost you at the end of the day?
So far, it's up.
There's a new thing going on now.
A bit over $400,000.
To not pay...
$80,000.
Yeah, to not pay $80,000.
So nobody freaks out with it.
That's $400,000 over a decade.
It's not unreasonable.
It's the cost of litigation.
You go through...
It's mind-blowing.
We'll get to the stress and the heartache of this, but you go through a decade, so you get...
You get the original hearing is before the Human Rights Tribunal.
Yeah, so the first one, that was, like Julius Gray even told me, he goes, look, you're going to go to court, because I told him, I was like, we're going to fight this.
And he goes, you're going to lose, because the first time you go to court, it's not a real court, it's the Human Rights Tribunal.
So you have the Human Rights Commission taking you in front of the Human Rights Tribunal, so it's the same people judging you.
After they've investigated to see whether or not there's a claim to pursue, they pursue it.
And for anybody who doesn't know, on behalf of the claimant, so Jeremy and his mother are not fronting any fees, your tax dollars are paying this tribunal to persecute you while you're paying another lawyer to defend you.
And to say, you know, the Human Rights Tribunal, the Labor Tribunal, the Régis du Logement, the Rental Board, these are tribunals that exist for their purpose, and so they call them biased, call them objective-oriented.
Employers...
Landlords are going in there with several strikes against them off the get-go.
You're going in there.
Yeah, I would agree with Julius.
You're probably going to lose the first time around.
What is this hearing like?
People are watching this saying this is Kafkaesque, Orwellian.
It was very bizarre because I didn't tell anyone because I wanted to keep this under the radar.
But then the kid on his social media said, tomorrow I'm going to court, so if you want to come support me, come.
And then he put the video.
Of the joke on his Facebook.
So the first time it was ever online was on his Facebook.
How old is he at this time?
Is he 16, give or take?
I think he was 18 by then.
Yes, maybe 17. Adult-ish.
Yeah, almost an adult.
So then I go to court and it's all...
People that hate me.
I'm there with me and my manager and that's it.
The thing that was really weird though, because they wanted to show the joke.
They wanted me to do the joke in court.
I was like, I'm not going to do that.
That never works well.
They were like, okay, so we'll play it.
I was like, you can't play just the joke.
You have to play the whole...
Like, 12-minute bit so that you get the essence of the bit.
And so they did that.
And it was very bizarre because there was, like, people, at first they weren't laughing, then they started laughing a little, but you could feel they were holding in the laughs.
And then when there was a joke about Jeremy Gabriel, one person laughed, and that was his grandfather.
And that for me, I was so happy.
It was so stupid.
But I was like, oh, laughter felt good.
They asked you to perform the joke?
Perform or just recite?
Recite.
I guess recite.
A recital is a performance.
They want you to go in there and dance like a monkey.
But they were insane.
That summer I was doing a show at...
At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.
And my friend Jimmy Card told me, he was like, you have to write a show about this.
Write a show about your court case.
And I was like, I don't think I have the energy to write a show right now.
Because it was very...
I didn't want it to affect me, but it did.
And then Jimmy was like, I've seen you a million times on stage.
You have about 20 bits about free speech.
Just put them all together.
Write one bit about your court case and that'll be the show.
So I go, okay.
So I write that bit and then the Human Rights Commission finds out I'm doing a show in Scotland.
So they contact Julius Gray, my lawyer, and they go, we want to see what he's going to say in Scotland.
And then I was like, no, they're not.
The Human Rights Commission in Quebec isn't going to dictate what I say or do in...
In another country.
And then Julius was like, no, but technically they're allowed since you're a Quebec resident.
So then I was like, okay, so do I move my main house to Florida to be free from them?
But it was very bizarre.
I didn't actually know that.
Yeah.
That's outrageous.
Yeah, that's insane.
And I can hear people screaming at the...
The Quebec Human Rights Tribunal says we want to...
It's not vet your material, just want to see it, but it's a vet...
Disguised vet.
Yeah.
To see what you're going to see in Scotland.
Did you show them?
No, no.
I didn't show them.
I told them.
I was like, look, I don't write material down.
It's all written in my head.
And I did the same thing I did the first time.
I was like, if you want to see it, come to the UK and buy tickets.
Did they ask you to buy them a plane ticket and tickets to the show?
But they were insane.
I had a joke.
I was hosting the...
The nasty show, Just for Laughs.
And I had a joke.
I'd never done this joke in English, but since everyone was asking me, since it was front-page news, even in English, people were asking me what the joke was all the time.
So I wrote a bit about the joke, and then I explained the joke, and then I had a joke after that.
I was like, this joke, I've only done it in French, but it's costing me so much, I'm going to do it in English.
I'm even going to learn Spanish, so I can do this joke in Mexico.
And the night I did, the first night I did the Nasty show, the next day, they called Julius Gray to see if it was true that I was taking Spanish lessons to bring my act to Mexico.
And I was like, what is wrong with these people?
This is beyond, people have an issue with these administrative tribunals at large because they're, I say, communists for lack of, for the hyperbolic term, but this is like administrative judges who are not real judges.
Dictating free speech.
I had no idea it went to the next level.
Vetting your...
I hear...
Maybe this computer.
I hear they want to see your content.
How many days in the administrative tribunal did this hearing last?
It was...
The first time, it was three days, but spread out over several months.
We did the first day, and then I think someone from the Human Rights Commission couldn't be there the second day.
So they were like, okay, so the first day will be in January, and then the next two days will be like in March or something like that.
The hearing goes down.
I mean, the wildest anecdote or the wildest memory.
Mother throws the keys down in shock about the allegation about the car, which some people might construe as me thinks she does protect this too much.
But set that aside, the hearing goes and comes.
Is there any other memorable moment?
The thing that was memorable was the first time since I hadn't told anyone, the first day was all people on his side.
But then the next two days, it was mostly comics that were coming out.
Because as soon as comics heard about it, because the first time they heard about it was on the news since I wasn't telling anyone.
And then they were like, oh shit, this is important.
And it doesn't just affect, like oftentimes when people, the way they portrayed me in the media, it was, look at this rich white man attacking this poor young defenseless boy.
But the truth was, I'm not that rich.
And two, it's a government organization.
So if there is a David and Goliath thing, I wasn't Goliath.
I was alone against the government.
It's an administrative machine funded on indefinite tax dollars with interested parties who are motivated to find the result that they ultimately came to.
I read that tribunal decision.
It would be an Orwellian Kafkaesque novel if it weren't reality.
The damage is against the kid.
The damage is against the mother.
Motivated reasoning is an understatement, but they basically came in and said, violation of the rights of dignity of the child.
Despite the fact that he was a celebrity, setting aside the...
They acted as a defamation court in absence of jurisdiction and in ignorance of the law because the kid, like it or not...
Was not just a celebrity, but was a sacred cow of Quebec.
You get the decision.
Disappointed but not surprised?
Yeah, not surprised, but really, I took it worse than I thought I would.
Because I knew I was going to lose, but then when I did lose, it made me angry.
I think the fact that the thing that made me the angriest was that I had to give $7,000 or $8,000 to the mom.
I was like, this is insane.
This just doesn't make sense.
And I was assessing this back in the day when I was more reluctant to share my personal opinion because I didn't want to upset people.
Lo and behold, you'll upset people through silence.
I looked at the mother's role in this and I said, she's not a victim.
She's a participant, if not the perpetrator.
Like, the world is mean.
The internet is mean.
Stand-up comics, they are cutting by definition.
And you take your kid who suffers from Treachery Collins Syndrome and you get him before the Pope to sing in a way that nobody's going to say is technically...
Good, but it's inspiring.
You know that there are going to be people who are going to make fun of him, comics or just mean-spirited people, but you put your kid out in the limelight.
And then when it happens, claim to be the victim and then go after the people who do the inevitable but not the illegal.
She said even a thing that when she was in court, she said that I was responsible for memes that were made about her son.
She said there was a meme that she saw that it was her son.
Like it was a sexual thing, like a gangbang of the Pope and a Cardinal and the kid.
And then my lawyer was like, you do realize that Mike didn't make that meme?
And she said, no, but his fans made it because of him.
And then he was like, but that meme came out like four years before the joke.
So she was saying that I was responsible for shit that happened before I even knew about this kid.
It's amazing.
I mean, it's passing off on the buck of responsibilities.
And it's not to say that bullying, or some people will call your dark humor bullying.
This is not any ordinary kid at this point, and the kid's an adult in any event, but some people call it bullying, but a mother who knows that this is going to happen and then complains when it happens, and by and large...
One can question the motivations of anybody who would willingly put their kid out in that spotlight and only to complain about what invariably comes with the good of that spotlight.
But I get his reaction when he found out about the joke.
I get her reaction.
You're allowed to be offended by jokes.
You're allowed to hear something and go, that is horrible.
I hate that.
But I don't think the government should come in and tell you, look, he can't say that.
Why?
Because it was very mean.
I think comics should be allowed to be mean.
Well, we're entering a realm now where it's going to be a very real discussion.
If you make fun of or mock gender identity, gender expression subsequent to that, we're going to get to the...
I was so lucky.
I was the last comic that got in trouble that everyone in comedy had my back.
Everyone on the left, on the right, even people that...
Now I'd be like, okay, if this happened now, they'd definitely fucking throw me under the bus.
But when this happened 2015-16, everyone had my back.
And now a lot of people that shit on Chappelle last year, shit on Rogan, they would have shit on me if this happened like three years later.
It's funny.
It was before the...
The woke...
Well, I'll say it was before...
I'll just...
2016, it was before the Trump derangement syndrome really hit a peak where people would defend their ideological adversaries instead of exploiting of that political tide to suppress them and to abuse them.
You lose in first instance.
It doesn't go to the superior court, right?
It goes straight to appeal?
Yeah, so we appealed it.
And everything took longer than what was supposed to.
When we went to court the first time, my lawyer told me, he said, look, you'll get the verdict in about six months.
From the tribunal?
Yeah, from the tribunal.
Between six months and a year.
But it took something like 14 or 18 months.
It was very long.
It was a long decision, regardless, but preposterous.
So we get the decision, and then we appeal it.
It took about another six or seven months before we knew if it would be accepted in the appellate court.
It got accepted.
Then we waited another year or so before we went to court.
Then we waited about another year and a half before we got the verdict.
So by the time I went to the Supreme Court, I got the last verdict, I think, like nine years after I had done the joke for the last time.
I want to say 2018.
Does that sound about right from the Court of Appeal?
And you lost to the Court of Appeal, right?
Yeah, Court of Appeal I lost.
This is the absolute state of Canada.
The Court of Appeal.
I think it was 2-1 if I'm not mistaken, but I'm not a thousand percent certain.
You lose in the court of appeal.
And I remember being flabbergasted.
This is going too far.
I remember Julius Gray when he told me, he said, you're probably going to lose the first round.
But he said, appellate court, you're winning your appeal for sure.
For sure.
And then the day of, he's always very honest.
That's what I like about him.
The day of...
I was like, yeah, so we're going to win for sure, right?
And he goes, I don't know.
He goes, the way things are changing, like five years ago, for sure you would have won.
He goes, I'm not sure.
But he was like, if you don't win now, I think the Supreme Court, that you'll win because I think...
Free speech is more important to English Canadians than French Canadians.
True, but then the ultimate punchline to this is you lost at the Court of Appeal and won by the skin of your teeth at the Supreme Court.
5-4.
Yeah, I lost 2-1 the appeal and then won 5-4.
I read that decision in the Supreme Court and I was blown away by the emotive drafting of the dissenting opinion.
Four of the five judges.
It's not that the position is totally indefensible in law.
I think it's ill-founded in law, but the drafting, it's pure emotion.
It basically causes emotion to trump the law.
And the five got it right, but by the skin of Canada's teeth for the time being.
Who knows?
Maybe next time they're going to say, well, it's not the same with gender expression, gender identity, and it'll be five or four the other way.
And then some jokes are off limits in Canada.
While this is all going on, I mean, nobody understands litigation.
It's expensive.
And losing money hand over fist year over year for non-value...
And plus, I didn't want...
At first, there was something very weird, too, about me.
I didn't want to do stand-up anymore.
Because I was like, this is the only thing I love doing, but it's not making me as happy as I used to be.
Because now I do a joke instead of going, oh, that was amazing.
Now I'm always thinking, okay, are people going to record this?
And then in two weeks I'll get in trouble.
So I just didn't like doing shows anymore.
But I have no other skills since I don't have a plan B. So I told my manager...
I want to work one week a month.
Book as much stuff as you can in one week.
I'll do anything for a week, and then I need three weeks off.
Because I hated comedy for a couple of years.
I was going through a depression, too.
And then once I got out of that and started liking comedy again, then everything was good.
But the first couple of years, I didn't have much money saved up.
I make a good living, but I just bought a house.
I bought a condo for my mother-in-law.
After six months in court, I was already like, okay, what do I do for money?
I can't really think of a bigger spiritual curse than to be conditioned or traumatized into hating what you once loved.
It's a psychological...
Distress, psychological abuse.
You own comedy clubs, right?
Yeah, I'm part owner of two clubs.
Did that happen at the same time?
You say, if I can't stay in comedy, if I hate comedy, the act, at least I can be involved in the community?
I think we started...
I think the first club was already started or about to open.
When this happens.
So I still love comedy.
And now I love comedy again.
I want this.
The day it happens, you get the decision.
5-4-9-0 is only a question of degree.
I'll ask how drunk you got the night you got it.
But what was that feeling like, finally?
If you don't read the dissenting opinion, you won't read the bad stuff.
But how vindicated is that?
I felt like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders.
Because the night before, I knew the verdict was going to come out.
But my lawyer hadn't told me it's going to come out on Wednesday or on Tuesday.
He just said we'll get the verdict next week.
So Monday morning, I wake up, I look on Twitter.
There's a guy that he's a cameraman for some local...
TV station, and he goes, the verdict just came in.
Here's a scoop before everyone, Mike Ward lost.
So I was like, fuck, I call my manager.
I'm like, did you see I lost?
And he goes, no, you didn't.
And then I Googled myself, and then I was like, okay, just some random guy that works for a TV station that said I lost.
But I felt like I'd lost.
So then the Wednesday, or whenever I got the real verdict, and I won, I was like, Oh, thank God.
Thank God I won.
But the two days, I didn't know.
At first, the whole time, I was like, if I lose, I lose.
But at least I gave it my best shot.
But then, right before I got the verdict, I was like, if I lose, this sucks.
I gave 10 years of my life.
I gave my health.
I aged about 30 years in 10 years.
It cost me a fortune.
I don't like, you know...
There's so many things I hate about my business now that I used to love.
And I was like, if I win, it'll all be worth it.
And I think I'll be able to love comedy again.
But if I lose, I think I'm just going to quit comedy.
So I don't know if I would have quit comedy, but it would have been rough.
Nobody can understand the stress and pressure of litigation, but did you put on weight or lose weight?
I put on a ton of weight.
Yeah, I put on about...
I gained maybe 40 pounds.
I was going through a depression.
Most people in a depression lose weight, and some people gain weight.
So I was one of the lucky ones that got very fat.
Okay.
Earlier on, when I thought you were older, I was trying to show that I had done my homework because I thought...
The thing is, this was a generation past me, it feels like, but I was only 13 when you started getting into comedy, and I wasn't socially or legally...
Politically aware of any of this when it first went down.
2013, which kid was I up to?
I had left my practice, but I wasn't paying attention to this stuff.
I wasn't paying attention to the downfall of Canada in slow motion before 2020 when it happened as a full avalanche.
So you get the good news.
Victory dance.
How long does that sense of elation last?
Not long at all.
I wasn't even happy.
I was just like...
Thank God.
It's over.
It's over.
And then I didn't want to do any interviews.
I didn't want to.
So I recorded one video in English, one video in French just to say.
And I wanted to remind people that it wasn't me against this family.
It was me against the Human Rights Commission.
And I was happy that I beat the Human Rights Commission.
Because I didn't want people to go after this kid, right?
So I just put that out, and then I felt like, yeah, it was relief, I guess, the best way to explain it.
I'd never thought of this beforehand, but have you ever made amends?
Like, has Jeremy ever reached out to you?
Have you spoken since, or never?
No, never, never, never.
Because I always wonder, and I do wonder this, I think the kid, when he was a kid, arguably exploited.
By everybody, by parents, by media, and, you know, celebrity kids, they're inspiring, but they are also making money for people.
Not even the money, but the media, everybody has a benefit from the exploitation of a kid with Treacher Collins Syndrome.
I always wonder, sorry, if he regretted what his parents did in terms of taking this to the human rights tribunal, because at the end of the day, it doesn't make him look good.
This is an adult.
Who is now basically saying, I want to suppress freedom of speech of those who, everybody should benefit it from me equally, but for those who it's most important to, performers, political commentary, comedy.
And I want to suppress this for everybody because I decided to become a celebrity through my mother and I got offended by a joke that was made.
I can't imagine that he feels good about it, but if he's never reached out, it's...
Yeah, I have no idea.
I have no idea.
He did say a thing once he was on a podcast and he said he'd like to have a beer with me.
And then my lawyer contacted me and he was like, if he wants to have a beer, do you want to have a beer with him?
And I was like...
What are we going to talk about?
I was like, okay.
I don't know.
It's just weird.
It's just weird.
I think I would have liked to have talked to him before everything went down.
I think I could have made him understand that it wasn't...
I wasn't aiming him.
I was just talking about the personality, like the media personality.
Well, I guess that is the idea, is that anyone fitting that description would have fit for the joke.
Any celebrity who gets famous on not necessarily talent, but inspiration with the edge of humor to it.
My ultimate 30,000-foot overview.
The issue with this entire scenario is still that you have a bad precedent at the lower level, you have a bad precedent at the Court of Appeal level, and you have a razor-thin decision at the Supreme Court.
Change one minor factor, make the joke one notch a little more offensive, and you can allow all the lower courts to say, well, we already had that as a foundation for suppressing freedom of speech.
Now we really get to go ahead and finish it for Canada.
I'm visualizing the Mortal Kombat, like, finish him.
Because that's almost where we're at now.
You go back to comedy after all of this.
Are you weighing your words now?
No, no, no.
Not at all.
But that's why when I went through my depression, I knew that if I started...
When this happened, every time I wrote, all I wrote about was my court case or the Human Rights Commission.
And it was, again, Jimmy Carr told me, he was like, you've got to get that out of you.
He goes, maybe you have...
You have a hundred bits about free speech.
Just write them, right?
And if you don't want to do them, because I didn't want to be like the...
I didn't want to just be known as a free speech guy.
When you say get it out of him, you mean get it out of your system so you can move on?
Get it out of my system, yeah.
So he told me, he was like, just write.
Write every...
Every joke you can about free speech, about the Human Rights Tribunal, about the Human Rights Commission, about the kid even.
Just write, just get it out of your system.
And he goes, eventually you'll stop writing about that since you'll have written everything.
And then, so I was doing that and I wrote, like it took me over 100 days.
I don't know how many days exactly, but I must have written like maybe over 100 bits.
And then eventually I wrote a bit about baseball and I was like, okay, alright.
The mojo's back.
Yeah, so then, because I knew there's some people that, like there's a comic in France called Zou Denis.
I know of Juzene.
Juzene in English means God-given.
God-given.
He's a comic that he did a joke that was considered anti-Semitic.
And he did the joke, and I don't think the original joke, his intent was to shock Jewish people, but the way he reacted, so people got offended, and then...
His reaction was, fuck you.
So people would go to his shows, boycott his shows.
And then whenever he was doing interviews, he was always talking about Jewish people.
So he became an anti-Semite.
And all of his shows now, they're all about Israel.
They're all about Jewish people.
And you're like, God damn, just fucking...
And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It attracts certain people who...
I say this, I have no problem with Jewish humor whatsoever, and I'm not even sensitive to it.
I'm actually probably more of a proponent of defending people's right to do it, which gets people to call me one of them self-hating Jews.
But nobody becomes like sort of you become a stereotype of yourself.
Yeah.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The crowd expects that.
You generate more of it.
And it's sort of like caricaturizing yourself as a profession.
And that becomes impossible to get out of.
I was afraid I was going to go either that route.
Or I was afraid I was going to be, like, afraid of everything.
So I'd become, like, a pale version of what I used to be, a pale copy of what I used to be.
So I think the fact that listening to Jimmy and just writing and getting everything, all of the hate out of my system, then I was just back to being the comic I was.
And you'll hear people say, oh, we can't say anything anymore.
But, like, crowds, my crowd is really good.
And they let me...
I do the same stuff as I used to.
And just now the only thing, I'm a little more careful where I put it.
So I went to see Trevor Noah pre-COVID.
And I don't like Trevor Noah as a comedian.
I don't find him funny.
Whatever show he had, I dislike it.
But someone invited us and we went.
Didn't find very much of the show funny, but I found something insightful where he said, what stand-up comics or what comics can get away with in society is a reflection of the sense of security of that society.
So the safer societies feel, the more they'll tolerate by way of humor.
the more insecure, unstable the society, the less they'll tolerate by way of comedy, which I think is very insightful in terms of what we're going through now.
Yeah, yeah.
But when you, and we have a society that is unstable, at war with each other, when you get up on stage...
Do you find that people there are less willing to accept or less willing to laugh at the really over-the-top comedy and that they need something a little bit more tamed down to feel comfortable?
No, I think people need...
I think any time a comic goes dark...
They love it.
And I feel like I get reactions now that I didn't used to get.
It's almost a thank you.
Thank you for still existing.
Thank you for still doing what you do.
And my crowds, this summer, my French podcast, we recorded at the Bell Center.
We sold over 21,000 tickets.
I understand that's a world record, right?
It is a world record.
You said a world record for, what is it, a live show podcast?
Biggest live podcast.
Is it for French or for outright?
Right.
The old record was a British couple called Chris and Rosie Ramsey.
They did the O2 Arena and they had 13,000 people.
So we beat them by like 8,000 people.
You get a certificate from the Guinness?
I haven't gotten it yet.
Damn it, you need that.
It doesn't even matter if someone breaks it in the future.
You had it and that should go on a wall.
But yeah, they told me it's supposed to take six months before I get it.
This was July.
Six months, I guess, was December.
So I should have it, but I haven't gotten it yet.
I applied for a Guinness World Record for the largest bass, smallmouth bass caught off a drone.
My application to create the category was rejected.
Five dollars in however many months lost.
So you're back up and doing it full-time now.
English and French?
Yeah, English and French.
Mostly French.
I'm starting in English again this winter.
And so, I know a lot of comics talk about it.
I mean, that the pressures not to push the limit or push the envelope are silencing.
They're censoring, self-censoring the comedians.
You don't find that?
No, not me.
I don't self-censor myself.
And you find the crowd not only is...
You're not getting boycotted.
You're not getting hate.
People want edgy stuff.
There's something that...
And I've even noticed this with...
Andrew Schultz said a thing that was brilliant the other day.
I forget where he said this.
But he was saying how people say that his comedy is a type of comedy you can't do anymore because people don't like it.
And he was like, every...
Night I play, there's always thousands of people and they lose their shit.
I think there's always been offensive comics and the comedy I do in the old days, the amount of people that were offended by what I did 20 years ago is the same percentage as now.
It's just 20 years ago we didn't hear about them.
Well, that's the idea is that there's no more now than there were then, but they have a much bigger bullhorn.
They give the impression of representing a lot more people, so they get to go onto Twitter and bully sponsors and bully venues.
I'm sure you've experienced this.
When you say something on Twitter and people come after you, when there's a bunch of people, sometimes you think, God damn, everyone hates me.
Then you go out to the store and you realize people don't care.
Regular people don't care.
There's only 12 people that hate you, but they're so loud.
They put so much energy into hating it.
No question about that.
On Twitter, I don't get that much of it, but my rage is directed mostly against Justin Trudeau and politicians, which, you know, they're hard to defend in general.
And, you know, we've gotten to the point now where the discussion about, let's just say, you know, transgenderism, gender-affirming care for kids, what do they call it?
That whole discussion.
It's gotten not more acceptable, but it's gotten less adversarial to say, yeah, no, you shouldn't be doing things.
Hormone blockers for kids is not acceptable.
You can say that you consider it to be child abuse, which I do.
And you'll get some pushback, but it's become much more, because of other people who have been the tip of the spear, less risky for the brigading on social media.
And that's what I'm hoping is sort of the white pill.
Turning of the tide where we're getting to a point now where the vocal minority who says you should be performing top surgery, bottom surgery, all this stuff, you can't make jokes about this, that they're starting to be drowned out by now an increasingly vocal majority.
I feel like the tide is turning now, but it's taking a long time to come back.
I've been feeling that for a couple of years, that I'm like, okay, it's coming back, it's coming back, but it's a slow comeback.
This is going to bring us back to Canada a little bit.
You're familiar with Bill C-16.
That was the one that added gender expression, gender identity to, among other things, aggravating factors for hate crimes.
We're getting now Bill C-11.
We're in Quebec, where we have that Bill C...
What was it?
The one that removed parental supremacy from the Youth Protection Act.
We're living in a country, or I'm out of it for a little bit, but coming back, presumably, where...
Censoring free speech, censoring ability to do what we do online.
What's your long-term vision or what's your long-term projection for what's going to happen in Canada and what's your long-term plan?
I don't really have a long-term plan on the...
Like, I've noticed, like, what I really like about doing comedy in French, French crowds aren't as easily offended now as English crowds.
And I really saw that this summer.
I did a show.
I had a bit about trans people.
There's a comic named Eddie King.
He's a black guy in Montreal.
He had told me once we were talking, and I was like, can white guys make fun of black people on stage?
And he said, if you'd be willing to do it in front of an all-black room, then you can do whatever you want to do.
So as soon as he told me that, that's the way I've been living my life.
So if I have a bit about black people, I'll go do a black room to see, okay, am I comfortable saying this in front of 100 black people?
If yes, and it works, then it's a good bit.
I had this bit about trans people that I'd written a couple years ago.
I tried it out in a gay bar and it worked.
So I was like, okay, this is going in the act.
And then they were doing a thing for the Pride Week in Montreal.
And they were doing this big show, like a drag queen show.
And they were like, I didn't know what, there were trans people.
And they were like, would you do your trans bit?
And I was like, okay, I think I have to now because I've been telling people I only do jokes, I'd be comfortable.
But then I was thinking, Jesus, like Chappelle's stuff wasn't...
It wasn't mean, and he got so much hate, but I was like, I'm hoping French trans people are nicer than American trans people.
And then I did it, and it went over super well, and I knew the audience was going to like it, but I was like, is there going to be a thing in a blog in like a day or two?
And nothing came out, so I was very happy.
I have a bit of a theory about that, that the people feigning outrage to Dave Chappelle are not doing it because they're outraged by the material, but because everybody...
stands again to profit in some way by going after Dave Chappelle.
Yeah.
It's a symbiotic relationship where Dave Chappelle puts out the content and they can grow their base by feigning outrage to it, but take someone who's not quite at Chappelle's magnitude...
The reach, and it becomes less profitable to feign that outrage, and so they just don't do it.
And see, a guy like Chappelle, the French papers this summer when they were talking about him, I forget what show he did, but they described him, La Presse described him as l 'humoriste transphobe, the transphobic comedian Dave Chappelle.
And you're like, he's not transphobic.
Even if you do think what he did was transphobic, he's not.
You can't.
Call someone.
You can't call someone, hey, homophobe, and then name the name, or racist comedian, Mike Ward.
You're like, no.
I think they can and they do, but everybody is seeing through it at this point in time.
Which publication was it?
It was La Presse.
La Presse.
Within the French community, and I suspect I know the answer already, but...
People have as much disdain for the media, the French media, as Anglos do for MSM.
They come out and do it, and I think they get laughed out of the room, and nobody's reading it for that very reason, and even La Presse is trying to score some goodwill off of Chappelle's notoriety.
The first show was not transphobic, period.
Neither was the second.
I just found the first one to be a lot funnier than the second.
The second one sort of sent an essay-type response and not as much of the...
The great comedy that was in the first one.
But no, I think it's become an industry.
And so the bigger the target, the more the incentive.
And sometimes a smaller target, it might even be counterintuitive.
You pick on someone who's...
No one's going to say, yeah, that's disgusting.
Or they don't know your material as much.
And so they can't even jump on the bandwagon.
So it's interesting.
So no plans to alter, wind down?
No.
Anyway, I'm 49. I'm heading...
Close to my 50s.
And I've been a comedian since I was 19. So I haven't taken care of my body.
So I have maybe 15 good years left.
It's never too late to start with that.
You can undo some damage.
But if I see the way it's going, I'm just going to drink even more and then die before everything explodes.
I have to ask you one question.
The Rogan experience, by the way.
How do you get on Rogan to tell the story at the time?
It was a Pantelis-bullied Keith the Cop, who used to be Anthony Cumia's producer.
So I used to do a show for Compound Media for Anthony Cumia, and it was me and Pantelis.
And Rogan had...
We reached out once.
We followed each other on Twitter.
And one time, I just DM'd him suggesting a guest.
I don't even think I was suggesting myself.
It was someone else.
And I didn't know that Rogan knew me.
And he was like, hey, I'd love to talk to you and hear about your story.
And I was like, okay.
And then he goes, tell me when you're going to be in L.A. And I never go to L.A. So I just made up a week.
I was like, I'm going to be there.
I looked at my schedule.
I had nothing in late March.
I was like, I'm going to be there last week of March.
And he goes, all right, I'll get back to you.
He never got back to me.
So I was like, okay, I'm going to book tickets, go to L.A., book tickets, went to L.A., went to the store, saw Rogan, but he was already all booked up.
We talked a bit.
And then I went back to Montreal, and I was like, well, at least I tried, you know?
And Keith the Cop, he texted Penthouse.
He was like, hey, I'm with Rogan on Anthony's boat, or on his boat, and we're talking about Mike.
And then Penthouse was like, yeah, tell him to book Mike on the podcast.
And then he was like, I can't tell him to book Mike.
And he goes, I think he called him a fag.
He just bullied him.
And then he was like, quit being a fag and get me and Mike on Rogan.
So then that's how Pantelis got on Rogan, too.
It was just Keith the Cop was like, hey, would you want Mike Ward, since he has a show for us, would you want him on the show?
And then he said, sure.
So then they booked the date.
So it was a mix of Pantelis bullying Keith the Cop and then Keith the Cop.
Again, the underlying subject matter is relevant for Rogan in particular, but the world at large.
I mean, nervousness?
Is this like you perform all the time?
No, I wasn't nervous at all.
It was just...
Yeah, I wasn't nervous at all.
I was very excited because I like Rogan.
I like listening to him.
And I was like, this is going to be fun.
But his neighborhood was on fire, so he had been staying at the hotel because of the forest fires.
He had told us he hadn't gotten much sleep the night before.
So I was like, oh, this is a bad time to be on Rogan.
And plus, he didn't know that Pantelis was on.
He'd forgot.
So it started out weird.
It started out weird, but I was still happy.
It's fantastic.
I think I heard some reaction to that.
I think that was overblown regardless.
There's never a bad time to be on Rogan.
Yeah, yeah.
And the thing is, Rogan is now what Carson used to be.
He's the male Oprah, what Oprah was in the early 2000s.
It's an amazing format.
It's an amazing discussion.
It's like pizza.
Even when it's bad, it's good.
Everything is good.
No, I just imagine what that experience must be like because that is what brought the...
The joke of the decision to the national forefront.
Yeah.
Fortuitous.
That was years before the Supreme Court decision.
Yeah, yeah.
Four or five years.
I don't even know if I had had the...
Court of Appeal decision.
The Court of Appeal decision.
And the thing that was impressive, like, when we got...
Because he had...
Now he's, like, in Austin.
But when I did it, it was in L.A. And he was, like, a neighborhood in an industrial park.
And just a huge building.
I remember the building was bigger than the Bell Media building in Montreal that has like eight or nine radio stations in it.
His building was bigger than that for one podcast.
And then he parked his car inside so the people, if they followed him, they wouldn't know what building he was in.
He had two archery ranges.
I was like, who has two archery ranges?
For bow and arrow or for firearm?
Yeah, for bow and arrow.
Indoors?
Yeah, two of them.
And then he had a little MMA gym, and then he had a pool table, and it was just amazing.
It sounds like an amazing compound.
The experience comes, and then it goes, and life goes on now.
The last three years in Quebec, where have you been since the pandemic started?
Since the pandemic, I was on tour.
And then when the pandemic hit and they closed everything down, I was just trying to think of ways to...
And my podcast is live in front of an audience.
At first, I was just struggling trying to find ways to do it in front of an audience.
And I used the thing that SNL in New York, they used to...
In New York, they didn't allow audiences for TV tapings.
So SNL was like, no, these are audio extras.
We have audio extras for our shows.
So I was like, I think I'm going to use that.
And I didn't have the money or the contacts with the government to see if this had passed.
So I talked to one of my friends that runs a festival in Quebec City.
I gave him the idea.
He used it for his festival.
So just for laughs, did galas with no audience.
The one in Quebec City had an audience, but it was just extras in the audience.
And that passed.
And as soon as he got accepted for that, I started doing my podcast with an audience again.
And just telling people, look, you're unpaid extras.
I made them sign a little thing like they were kind of like my employees.
Because my goal was just to do shows again.
I'll ask you the obvious question, but were you...
I mean, you saw what happened in Quebec, Canada, the world for that matter, but it seemed like it was...
A little bit on steroids in Quebec.
Yeah.
I mean, the French Canadians, I mean, a lot of people ask me, like, Viva, how did Quebec go so far off the deep end?
French Canadian population, Patriots, you know, the rebels who fought against the English, have a defiant spirit in them and went so far off the tyrannical edge that they willingly let the government lock them in their homes, basically take away all of their most fundamental freedoms, and not only didn't complain about it, but rewarded it.
Legault with more seats.
Yeah.
Were you surprised to see what happened in Quebec in particular?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was just weird.
It was weird.
Like, for my reaction, I've always done this, like, because they had rules, but you didn't really need, you didn't have to listen to them.
Like, you weren't allowed outside of your house after 10 o 'clock unless you had a note from your boss.
I'm self-employed, so I wrote a note to myself.
Saying I was allowed.
You didn't get stopped by the cops.
That might not have sufficed had you gotten pulled over.
But I had a bunch of them.
Since I have a couple of businesses and I have a couple of houses, I was like, okay, I'm leaving here to go there.
So I'll say I left this business to go to that house.
But not everyone has four businesses and three houses.
So I was just lucky that I could...
I could do that.
Do you attribute it to anything?
Among brethren, among friends and family, what the hell is going on?
Why are people willingly putting up with this?
I've no idea.
I've no idea.
I talk to people and no one knows.
Do you have any aspirations of potentially...
We've got a lot of political turmoil in Quebec and Canada.
Not to get too political, but we've got that new law or the revamping of Bill 101.
The language laws making it even more restrictive in Quebec.
In the beginning part where you said you studied English in a French area specifically to be bilingual and to ensure success and marketability internationally, where the new laws seem to be prohibiting that very same freedom for the next generation.
Which is very bizarre when you think about it.
The more languages you speak, it just opens doors for you, especially when you're little.
I have friends that, well, like, Pantel speaks three languages fluently because he learned all those when he was little.
And now, like, if he's tried to learn a new language now, it'd be next than possible.
So you should, I think, just get stuff and, you know, get languages into kids' brains as young as you can.
And we're going to go soon, exclusive to locals.
I have some questions that I've thought up in the meantime.
Plans on the horizon?
No, right now, my podcast, the French one, I'm going to do a little world tour with it.
Do a couple of towns in Europe.
A couple of cities in Europe.
I want to do one city.
Since we drink a lot, I wanted to do one Arab country.
And the only Arab country that I think we can drink and get away with it is Lebanon.
So I want to do that.
I want to start doing stand-up in English again.
I signed a deal with a company called 800-pound Gorilla.
They're going to put out an album.
So I got to just...
Work until the hour is good.
I'm new to Florida, but comedy joints in the area?
I guess in Miami there's probably more, but have you done any touring in Florida?
No, there used to be, because I'm in Orlando, there used to be a comedy club right like...
Two minutes from my house.
So I used to go there all the time.
It closed down.
So this last month, I haven't even performed once in a month, which is probably the longest I've been since early COVID.
And when do you go back to Canada?
I go back tomorrow.
Okay, well, we made it just in time.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so now what we're going to do here, first of all, before I forget, things that I need to remember every time.
Where can people find you?
Not that they're going to need much help, but where can people find you?
And I'll put all those links.
Yeah, the best thing is I have an English podcast called Two Drink Minimum with Pantelis and Poseidon.
It's on YouTube.
It's on wherever you get your podcasts.
So yeah, that's pretty much it.
Two Drink Minimum.
And Poseidon is the producer for Pantelis.
And Pantelis, I've been on with him now.
Oh my gosh, I didn't go down.
I was in Montreal and I forgot to follow up.
I was supposed to go back on when we were there, but Pantelis is great and everyone knows where to get that link.
And if people want to see my stand-up in English, if they go to mikeward.ca, I have my last special in English on the homepage.
And it's on YouTube too.
If you Google me, you'll find me.
Okay, now, Justin, we're going to go to Locals exclusively, where I have a few good questions.
In fact, they've all been good questions, but a few more personal questions.
Okay.
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