You’re walking down a quiet city street, minding your own business. In front of you is a woman wearing headphones, a shop-window mannequin is tucked under one of her arms. The mannequin’s head suddenly falls off and lands on the sidewalk, bouncing by your feet.
Nulman seems reluctant to talk about Just For Laughs. He left the company in 2015 and recently started consulting for rival event Festival du rire de Montréal, which launched after the founder of the French half of Just For Laughs, Gilbert Rozon, was accused by 20 women of sexual assault and harassment. “I’ll be honest,” Nulman says “The less I’m quoted, the better.”
The decision to go the Mr. Bean route unintentionally made the show catnip to international networks. Just three years after it debuted on Quebec television in 2000, Gags was in 70 countries. In 2006, it became the first Canadian-produced comedy series to air on prime-time on a major U.S. network . At one point, Gags earned the company more than $20 million in a single year.
There are also so many of these pranks online . Whenever I think I’ve come up with a good idea for a gag, I find its carbon copy on Gags’ YouTube channel. It seems like the show has already created every non-verbal prank that could possibly exist. After trying and failing to come up with a single unique pitch in three days, I understand the challenges of creating these schemes.
“There’s been a big evolution from the beginning to now. First it was: Action, reaction. ‘Boo!’ ‘Ahh!’” Girard explains. I think the Paul brothers are the worst things to have ever crawled out of our computer screens, and they’re gaining on shows like Gags. At publication, the duo have a combined 10.2-billion total views on their YouTube channel, while Gags — which had a two-decade head start and is searchable on English, French, Spanish and Arabic YouTube — has 14.5 billion.
My reaction to the premise — “Oh no. Oh my god.” — seems to rein in Girard. “But we cannot do that,” he explains. “If you believe that this person will suicide, it’s not funny.” When I show them a video from March 2017 of Logan Paul faking his own death by artificial shotgun blast in front of a bunch of children, Girard chuckles, but then stiffens. “We will never do something like that — to children. Never, unacceptable. I will never do that to children.”