Stand-up comedian, Sugar Sammy performing at the Salle Andre-Mathieu in Laval, Quebec.Mario Beauregard
Mocking Quebec nationalism has long been part of the stage routines of the Montreal standup comic Sugar Sammy, and he recently raised hackles with a provocative ad campaign poking fun at the province's language bureaucrats.
But things got uglier Thursday night when he was targeted by a phone threat just before a show.
The comic, whose real name is Samir Khullar, was appearing at the Maurice O'Bready Hall at the University of Sherbrooke, 150 kilometres east of Montreal.
After the box office received a threatening call, Sherbrooke police officers searched the hall before the show and checked the bags and coats of spectators as they entered, Constable René Dubreuil said.
He said officers also stood guard in the hall and behind the stage during the performance. Afterward, Mr. Khullar had a police escort as he left town to return to Montreal.
A representative for Mr. Khullar said he won't comment about the threats. "We'll let the police do their investigation," Sylvie Savard said.
Mr. Khullar, who performs in four languages, has long irritated some Quebec nationalists because he likes to ridicule them and is the rare Quebec entertainer who is openly federalist.
The backlash has been increasingly virulent since a publicity stunt last month when he posted an ad for a coming show in the Montreal subway that deliberately flouted Quebec's language regulations for commercial signs.
"For Christmas, I'd like a complaint from the Office de la langue française," said the English-only ad appearing in 11 Metro stations.
Montreal lawyer François Côté quickly obliged, filing a complaint with language bureaucrats and urging others to emulate him.
The comic quickly blacked out the offending English words and bragged about the extra publicity he was getting. "Thank you to my 'fans.' That's exactly the gift that I wanted," he wrote on his Facebook page.
Maxime Laporte, president of the nationalist Saint-Jean Baptiste Society, also complained that Sugar Sammy's material was fuelling francophobia. Appearing on television, Mr. Laporte grumbled that he had gotten a crude, insulting e-mail from Mr. Khullar's agent but later conceded that the e-mail was a hoax.
Mathieu Bock-Côté, a sociologist and Journal de Montréal columnist, accused francophone fans of Mr. Khullar of being "contented cuckolds, colonized people who are happy to applaud those who scorn them."
Mr. Bock-Côté's column pointed to what perhaps troubles Quebec nationalists most about Mr. Khullar: He is a child of Bill 101, a scion of immigrants who was required to attend French school, whose knowledge of French language and culture is flawless, but who is also unabashedly a federalist.
This, Mr. Bock-Côté wrote, suggested that Bill 101 hadn't created "francophone Quebeckers but bilingual Canadians, who interact without problems with the host society, understand its codes and more important, its weaknesses, but refuse to embrace its great aspirations."
The son of Indian immigrants, Mr. Khullar also performs in English, Hindi and Punjabi.
For the past two years, he has received the Olivier de l'année, the award for Quebec's top comedian.
His big breakthrough in francophone Quebec happened at a French-language gala of the Just for Laughs festival in 2009. Many of the jokes he told that evening mocked those who voted in favour of independence in 1995.
"There are two kinds of Quebeckers. There are Quebeckers who are educated, cultivated, well brought up. And then there are those who voted Yes," Mr. Khullar joked.
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