Comedian Sugar Sammy is a Quebec success story — not just insomuch as he's from Quebec and successful, but insomuch as he's what's known as a “child of Bill 101.” The son of first-generation immigrants from India, he was educated in French — as Bill 101 requires — and emerged from the experience fluent in Quebec's official language, in English, in Punjabi and in Hindi.

This was how the architects of Quebec's language laws intended to assure the survival and flourishing of French on an anglophone continent, among the pure laine and immigrants alike. Not everyone appreciated the plan; it drove thousands out of the province; but it worked.

Alas, Sugar Sammy won't toe the line. He performs not just in French and English, but sometimes in the two languages combined — very touchy stuff in Quebec, as we saw with the recent fracas over unrepentantly “Franglish” rap group the Dead Obies. Or at least, it's very touchy stuff on certain newspapers' op-ed pages. Neither the Dead Obies nor Sugar Sammy seem to have any trouble selling tickets, but it's not for lack of trying by a small cadre of cultural obsessives who see French-English commingling as a form of slow-motion societal suicide.

Sugar Sammy was never popular in that cadre. But he sent it over the edge recently when he bought some provocative advertisements on the Montreal Métro: “For Christmas, I'd like a complaint from the Office de la Langue Française,” they read — in English only. And he got his wish, as he knew he would: Lawyer François Côté (and perhaps others) called up the OQLF, and wrote grandiloquently about it for Le Journal de MONTRÉAL.

“Sugar Sammy (Samir Khullar, by his real name) has gone too far by openly mocking a law fundamental to Quebec identity,” he wrote. “It's one thing to express a political opinion through humour, but it is another to constantly ridicule the national identity.”

“English will always be welcome in Quebec in the private sphere,” Mr. Côté continued, charitably. “In public matters, it's a different thing.” Well, good news: As was the plan, the English in Sugar Sammy's ads is now blocked out with black tape. Small print now reads: “Pour Noël, j'ai eu une plainte de l'Office de la langue française” — “For Christmas, I got a complaint…”

Joke made. Tickets sold. Mission accomplished.

Journal de MONTRÉAL columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté called the ads “a political manifesto and a declaration of war against the very principle of Bill 101.” Sugar Sammy's francophone fans are “cuckolds” and “colonized,” “proud to applaud those who despise them,” he said.

When fellow Journal columnist Sophie Durocher suggested this was all being overblown, that nationalists were (again) charging towards harmless provocation like a bull towards a matador's red flag, the president of the Société Saint-Jean Baptiste, Maxime Laporte, penned her a remarkable letter trying to change her mind.

“Sugar Sammy says he's mocking everyone equally, but this is simply wrong,” Mr. Laporte wrote. “He specifically targets Quebec.”

“Duh,” Ms. Durocher responded. Just like Jimmy Fallon specifically targets the United States.

Indeed, Mr. Laporte's argument is baffling … that is, until he suggests Sugar Sammy is offside for lampooning a society that “welcomed and accepted him” — that he is, in essence, an ingrate. Mr. Bock-Côté makes a similar argument: If children of Bill 101 are trying to change Quebec society, he suggested, then something has gone terribly wrong.

It's utterly toe-curling. Samir Khullar was born in Montreal; he speaks perfect French; he has done everything Bill 101 asked of him and more. He is a Quebecer in every sense of the word. And yet, as Ms. Durocher observed, it almost sounds as if he should get down on his knees and give additional thanks for being allowed to do it while having dark skin.

In recent history, when confronted with criticism from afar, Quebec's chattering classes have tended to set aside political differences and unite to denounce it as “Quebec-bashing” or “francophobia.” It seems less true nowadays. The upside of overblown nationalist crises like Sugar Sammy's Métro ads — indeed, the upside of the hideous provincial election campaign earlier this year — is that it beats ugly opinions out of the bushes and forces them to be confronted.

I don't know if Sugar Sammy is just out to sell tickets; or if he just wants to poke some fun (as many francophone Quebecers do) at the OQLF; or if he's mounting a cunning campaign to turn Quebec into a place that embraces multilingualism and marginalizes those who view it as an existential threat. But the latter would certainly an honourable goal.

The protectors of French in Quebec society needn't give up, and almost nobody is proposing that they do. They just need to accept victory. French predominates. Smart, successful, multilingual people from all over the world have come to Quebec and had kids who speak French — and they have their own opinions on what Quebec society should look like going forward. You're free to think that's a problem. But you're going to have to get the hell out of their way.

PHOTO : John Kenney / Postmedia News

The fully bilingual — quad-lingual, actually — comedian made Quebec's cultural warriors look silly ... just like he intended.