All Mike Bullard wanted to do was make people laugh.
Few in Canada ever had more success at it. Sadly, the iconic funnyman died last week from a suspected heart attack at 67. Tributes are pouring in.
“The thing with Mike is he did his comedy without a net,” said Mark Breslin, co-founder of Yuk Yuk’s. “He had a quick brain and it was fascinating to watch.”
Dangerous sometimes. But never boring. Most of the time his humour light the room into a fire frenzy of laughter. Occasionally his comeback line would go up in flames.
That was Mike Bullard.
“When he was good, he was great,” said one peer. “When he wasn’t…”
The best descriptor was he was like a kid trapped in a man’s body. People loved being around him. He was witty, intelligent, wise and always hilarious. He could write jokes on the fly like no one else. Most of the time Mike was not only good but made the people he met feel good too. The centre of attention, you always knew when Bullard was in the room.
“He was very generous with other comics,” said Breslin. “And he would do any gig we ever asked him to do.”
In fact, said Breslin, when Mike first made the move from being an investigator with Bell Canada to the comedy world, he had a specific request: “He told he wanted me to book him in more as a master of ceremonies than as a stand-up because he wanted to be a talk show host and he thought it would be good training.”
Mike went on to do Open Mike on CTV for seven years, between 1997 and 2003 and for a stretch on Global TV in 2004 before finally succumbing to the ratings juggernaut that was American late-night television of David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart – all of whom he held his own against and sometimes even beating in the ratings.
He did it by being Canadian.
He was the everyman’s Canadian.
“Having worked at Bell for so many years he was blue collar,” said Breslin. “He identified very well with working people – firefighters and cops — they all loved him.”
Prime ministers, or those wanting to be, too. Jean Chretien and Stockwell Day both did hilarious appearances. Tom Green, Nelly Furtado, Melanie Doane and Nickelback also made appearances.
American stars like to come on too — Tony Bennett, Warren Zevon and Meatloaf. In fact, after the Meatloaf taping, Bullard showed up at Massey Hall halfway through the show and the Bat Out of Hell star stopped his performance and humorously lambasted him for coming in so late.
“I just told him I was so late because I was outside trying to scalp his tickets,” teased Bullard.
Vintage Bullard comeback. People were on the floor laughing.
Usually it was Mike playfully making audience members the butt of the joke.
“His crowd work was the best in all of comedy,” said Breslin.
Mike would stand there on his TV shows or in a comedy club and just talk to the audience and converse with them – making up jokes and one-liners all in the moment. Breslin called it a high-wire act. It made up for lack of writers but it also connected Mike with his beloved audience.
Mike was Canada’s comedian. He got Canucks. And they got him.
But with that came the reality of being a Canadian star. When Conan O’Brien brought his Late Night show to Toronto for a week in 2004, Mike was doing his show on Global and was not able to compete with the stars from Mike Myers to Jim Carrey, who were on the big U.S. network show.But he gave it his best shot and fellow patriots tried to help him. Don Cherry guested on the show and legendary Publican Pat Quinn for one week changed the name P.J. O’Brien’s to O’Bullard’s. Even O’Brien talked about how funny Bullard was in a shout-out.
It wasn’t enough and not being able to get back the numbers he had on CTV, Global pulled the plug on the show. Bullard went on to have a good run in corporate comedy and eventually landed on Newstalk 1010, CFRB for a one-hour, hugely popular, noontime show.
“He had a way of making everything lighter, especially when it was inappropriate,” said Mike Bendixen, who at that time was Newstalk 1010’s program director and his now over as director of talk at AM640 and CORUS stations. “Mike’s humour was a gift, and if you got to know him, you’d realize that his heart was bigger than any joke.”
It’s so true. Bullard felt the news. It may explain why he tried to find humour in everything. A way of coping.
It was different than anything else on the airwaves.
“Every weekday for the crossover, for nine minutes, I would blindly walk into the craziest, aimless, scattered brilliant genius seat of pants segment on the dial,” 1010 afternoon drive host Jim Richards posted to X. “The gift is in the bravery to be yourself and not to be scared of what people might think. He had that and it raged out of the radio daily.”
He was like everybody’s crazy brother or uncle. The non-woke, uncontrollable, unleashed guy who left people in stitches.
Breslin said there will be a celebration of Mike’s life – likely at Yuk Yuk’s in a couple of months in what won’t be a sad affair but one filled with laughter. This is important because Mike seemed to be doing better in recent times — which was rooted on by his friends who understood the toll the dark period of his legal troubles caused him in the harassment case against his former girlfriend Cynthia Mulligan, also a beloved television figure.
It was an ugly period for him in which he felt his mother died from the stress of it. Mike struggled for a while because suddenly the life of the party was no longer welcomed at the party. Although there have been far worse examples, his case happened in the beginning of the Me Too movement, it made the news, resulting in him losing his 1010 gig and everything else.
It was such a problem for him that he had difficulty letting it go, despite friends encouraging him to move past it. Many tried to help him – like B.J. Dichter who produced a podcast series in which I was actually a guest. When on there, I saw the flashes of Mike’s brilliance, but I also saw the hurt he suffered out of that sordid chapter that only he seemed to fester over. People would tell him; stuff happens and to move on. It took him a while but he eventually did.
And went back to his first love of making people laugh. But first, he wanted to help out the people of Ukraine and volunteered in the war zone at the Russian border as a humanitarian volunteer and documenter.
“I was disgusted,” he said of Russia’s invasion, adding he wanted to do his part to assist.
It also offered him a clean slate. Mike embraced it and appeared to be clawing his way out his dark hole. He was coming back, and his fans were glad to see it because nobody wanted to feel badly or negative when they were in Mike’s presence.
They wanted to laugh. Mike Bullard was good at helping them do that. In fact, one of the best ever.