Open Mike with Mike Bullard: finally a late-night talk-show host to call our own

When asked what he would choose to give him a sense of power when walking naked through a room filled with strangers, Mike Bullard, host of the first successful late-night talk show in the history of Canada, finesses a pause, lowers his chin, and says, "Nothing. I've already got it." Ba-da-boom.

This is not the expected answer--particularly not from the man who insists on being a nice guy, not nice as in sucrose beaches of sweetness, but nice as in he doesn't play Andrew Dice Clay and sacrifice the people who offer themselves up to him as joke fodder. This is also not the answer expected from the man who makes a point of telling people that he knows he doesn't match the "pretty boy" image ("I'm a regular-looking guy with a potato face"; or "We paid $5,000 to make me look bald.") And this was especially unexpected from the performer whose career, until a year ago, was a combination of comedian (a group network dignitaries regard as "substance-abusing seven-year-olds") and a bureaucrat for Bell Canada.

This is, however, the kind of answer that one might expect from a man who can stand patiently in front of a live audience, hands in his pockets, looking out at the crowd, and as the trademark laughter rises up from his shoulders, everyone knows his private chuckle means he has found a target. Mike Bullard has been through the valley of the shadow of stand-up and fears no audience. Having travelled the backwaters of this country, he has met the population on its own turf and has returned stronger for the experience. This is what stand-up comedy does--it teaches its practitioners a reality and a humility that many film, television and radio performers do not have the opportunity to learn. It goes deep, and if you can't cut it, you don't come back up for air.

Sitting in the "smoking room" of the offices of Open Mike, located down the street from where the show broadcasts at Studio 99 at the back of Wayne Gretzky's restaurant and bar on Blue Jay Way, and well within falling distance of the CN Tower, Mike Bullard looks out the window and observes dryly that he works in the shadow of the CBC mothership. "I like the fact that I can see them right from here; it means they can see us, too." And CBC has been looking, according to Bullard, since the second week of the show on October 1997. The Canadian press have been watching as well. The success of Open Mike made him the flavour of the month, and the press had him for breakfast, lunch and dinner, putting his mug on the cover of anything that wrapped around editorial content. Another wave of publicity hit when the show moved to being included not just on The Comedy Network, Monday to Friday at 10 p.m. (plus three repeats each weekday), but also on CTV's nine stations at 12:30 a.m. Yet a third press opportunity came up when Bullard successfully hosted this year's Gemini Awards.

For that specific reason, I wanted to see what was left of him during the last week of his first season, a season which, by rights, should have ended seven weeks prior, except for a season extension called in at the last minute. What I found was the daytime version of what continues to walk in front of the audience every night. Bullard is comfortable, which is a place somewhere between smooth and servile. He is also friendly in a manner I have not experienced outside of visiting the homes of my friends. He took my jacket, and then he carried my briefcase. He was very much the host.

After all the press, Bullard's history is an open book. He wanted to be a talk show host by the age of 10, which would have been 1968, six years into Johnny Carson's 30-year reign as king of late night. It took another two decades, but by 1988, Bullard was doing stand-up, except he didn't do traditional comedy. He MC-ed. "Yuk Yuks couldn't get me to do anything but talk to people. David Letterman was never anything but the host at The Comedy Store and that was intentional on his part. For the same reason it was intentional on my part. I headlined three times a year because they made me. I got to the point where, in this country anyhow, I made MC-ing a respectable comedy position." While doing comedy at night, he spent his days working at Bell Canada, first as an installer, then in corporate affairs and finally as an investigation executive. Although he learned the territory, he was never corporately potty trained.

On March 29, 1995, under the aegis ofEd Robinson (deputy head of variety at CBC), Joe Bodolai, producer of Comics, ran Bullard's own episode produced in a talk-show format. It was the culmination of conversations Bodolai had been having with Bullard about late-night programming in Canada since 1992. Although there was no promise that CBC would have the funding for original programming, Bullard says, "I thought even if they won't use it, I've got a tape. Knowlton Nash was on, along with Bob MacDoland from Quirks and Quarks. I asked Nash because he is newsman emeritus of Canada. I wanted him to show a whole new side of himself. He was fantastic."