MONTREAL – The Just for Laughs Museum will close its doors on Jan. 1.
The comedy museum, which opened with much fanfare in 1993, has never broke even and the economic model for the museum simply wasn’t working, said managing director David Heurtel.
Just for Laughs founder and head Gilbert Rozon has put in $10 million of his own money to keep the museum going over the past 17 years, according to Heurtel, and the museum was a project dear to the heart of the Laughs head honcho.
The shutting down of the museum is also bad news for the local concert biz, because it means that the two venues housed in the museum on St. Laurent Blvd. – Cabaret and Studio Juste pour Rire – will be closing along with the museum.
“It’s a serious drag,” said Nick Farkas, director of talent buying at Evenko, the city’s top concert promoter. “I’ve seen some of the best shows in my life at Cabaret. We have other places, like the National and (Club) Soda, but Cabaret was definitely one of my favourite places in the world to see a show.”
Looking back at the history of Cabaret, Farkas recalls “a couple of nights of Calexico when it was like 150 degrees inside. A legendary Afghan Whigs show. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It was the most intimate place. You could high-five people in the balcony. The last show I saw there was Mumford and Sons, and it was unbelievable.
The connection between the band and audience was just ridiculous. It’s a very sad day.”
In its 17-year existence, the museum hosted 30 exhibits and around two million people visited the site, for either the museum or the venues. But the profile of the museum had dipped considerably in recent years. The last exhibit was the World Press Photo exhibit, which ended in October.
“The Just for Laughs Group, which is affiliated with the museum, after a long strategic planning process, ultimately decided that its core business had to concentrate on two key things, creating shows and artist development,” said Heurtel.
“So managing and operating venues spaces was not part of that core business. The comedy museum model did not work and operating the exhibit space and the two music venues, the Cabaret and the Studio, were not generating enough to sustain the enormous maintenance and operational costs of this building, which is over 100 years old.”
The museum is separate from the Just for Laughs Group, which is a private company run by Gilbert Rozon. The Just for Laughs Group offices are in a building right beside the museum building.
The museum is run by a non-profit corporation and has its own board of directors independent of the Just for Laughs Group, though Rozon is president of the museum board.
The museum building at 2111 St. Laurent Blvd. is owned by that non-profit corporation in partnership with Quebec’s Ministry of Culture and the Société d’habitation et de développement de Montréal, a housing body.
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