Sorry! Comedy Festival 2026: Matteo Lane, Chris Fleming and a Rating System for Shame

The Sorry! Comedy Festival ran from Wednesday, November 4 to Saturday, November 7 in London, Ontario: four nights and more than 25 shows in a city that, as the festival likes to remind you, was once dubbed the saddest in Canada. Most towns would bury an insult like that. London built a festival on it. That is the Canadian idea of revenge. You take the worst thing anyone ever said about you, sell tickets to it, and then apologize for the parking.

The organizers' own pitch is a small masterpiece of low expectations. Their About page takes a cheap shot at Brantford, compares the festival to a local pub famous for keeping expectations low, and closes by telling the audience to keep theirs low too. It is the only festival I know of that promises to be better than a bar, and I believe it. The owner and operator is Colin McDougall, with Martha McDougall running improv and the volunteers, which is how small festivals work: one family does the labor, the sponsors get the logos. The sponsorship page said it expected 4,000 to 6,000 people, which in London is either a festival or a hockey game that went badly.

The main stage was Centennial Hall: Matteo Lane on Thursday, Steph Tolev on Friday, Chris Fleming on Saturday, tickets from $45. Tolev's festival bio lists a Netflix hour produced by Bill Burr, a role on Shane Gillis's Tires and a turn hosting the AVN Awards, the adult film industry's big night out, which is the only awards show where nobody in the room pretends they're there for the craft. Fleming, meanwhile, is booked for Charleston Comedy Week in January, so his winter runs from London, Ontario to Charleston, South Carolina, two cities that share a habit of being named after somewhere fancier. Comedy is the only line of work where touring the knockoffs counts as a promotion.

The week's best idea was the rating system: four labels: Sorry!, So Sorry!, Sincerely Sorry!, and finally Utterly Remorseful, which the festival says may leave you needing "a dictionary and a therapist." American clubs have one rating, and it's the two-drink minimum. I would like this adopted nationally, and then by Congress.

Below the main stage ran a Spotlight series at $35 and up: Brendan Sagalow with two shows at Lazer Quest, Jeremiah Watkins, Mike Rita, Brittany Schmitt, Casey Rocket, and Kevin McDonald telling stories of the Kids in the Hall at the Grand Theatre on Saturday. The Kids in the Hall formed in 1984, so the name is now less a description than a dare. A few more years and it will be the Kids in the Hallway Outside the Cardiologist's Office.

The club tier, at $25, had a Best of the Fest showcase, a Dirty Show, a drag night and Your Hood's a Joke, a territorial roast battle hosted by its creator, Danish Anwar. It began in Toronto and now has franchises from Tokyo to the other London. Somebody invented a show about insulting where people live, and it turned out the world had no shortage of places that had it coming.

For comics, the way in was not a submission form. It was Canada's Next Best Comic Search, run through twelve cities from Vancouver to Charlottetown, with the city winners flown to London for a final on November 4 at the Wolf Performance Hall. The prize was an opening spot for one of the three main-stage headliners. One festival page says the search ran six weeks and another says eight; they didn't want to brag about the extra two. Past winners are Ryan Visser and Bradley Fung. As of Wednesday the site had not named the 2026 winner, and no review of any show turned up in the press, so I can't tell you who killed and won't pretend to.

The verdict: no fee is published, no pay terms are published, and nothing has been announced for 2027. If you're a Canadian comic near one of those twelve cities, enter the search the minute it opens; one good night at a search show in Moncton could end with you opening on the main stage at Centennial Hall. If you're American, you can buy a ticket and apologize like everybody else.

A city that can laugh at being called sad is in better shape than most cities that were never asked. Happiness, like a comedy festival, mostly comes down to keeping your expectations low and your tickets under fifty dollars.