From the Just for Laughs perspective, we have a number of ways we do that. We have a worldwide scouting network that includes Canada. We have representatives, most of them part-time, some people who are in the entertainment business, and some people who are in other businesses but have a particular interest, love, and passion for comedy. I think you could repeat that. Cirque du Soleil has the same thing for the circus, where they go to Outer Mongolia, to the mine shafts of Russia, where they found a lot of their talent. There's a formal international scouting network that is kind of reproducible in any field of the arts.
The second thing is that, since we're in the entertainment business, as you underlined with the worldwide success of our Gags, we also have something in French called En route vers mon premier gala, which means “On the Road to My First Gala” or “On the Road to My First One-Man Show”. We work specific events into our kind of television, media, and stage platform. They sometimes are done with a different broadcaster, an affiliated broadcaster--a smaller service--where we have on a year-round basis a vehicle to identify young people and engage them.
Also, people thought we were pretty crazy when we suggested the idea of creating a comedy school, but the same thing was said for the beaux-arts a few hundred years ago, and the same thing was said for television and radio 50 years ago. People said that you can't teach this, right? They said that either you're a genius or you have an inbred talent, that it instinctive, that you can't teach it. But you can teach comedy the same way you can teach sculpture or painting, etc., and it doesn't mean that some people aren't fantastic artists without going through that process.
I think there are formal pathways, some definitely media related, and the same thing exists today with user-generated media, which is a more informal, spontaneous, less organized or produced pathway. So I would say that in that frame, just in our business and a lot of related areas of the arts, there could be a number of projects that could go on.
Another example coming from Quebec is La Ligue Nationale d'Improvisation. This national improvisational league started as a bunch of comedians who wanted to improvise together on the basis of.... I don't know if you know about this. It takes place in a small hockey rink, with a referee and different timed types of improvisation: one person, two-person duets, and team improvisation. Well, that went right into high school, CEGEPs, and universities and became a worldwide phenomenon, with a national championship.
So I think some ideas that seemed like just kernels of something that's a local happening that started on Le Plateau-Mont-Royal in Quebec became a phenomenon that went vertically and horizontally within the school system and society.