I finally caught Sugar Sammy's absurdly-popular bilingual show You're Gonna Rire Thursday night at the Olympia Theatre and now I get why so many Quebecois nationalists are hot under the collar about Samir Khullar's subversive humour.

I was on Medium Large – the mid-morning show on La Premiere chaine – the other day debating with Nathalie Petrowski and Ecole nationale de l'humour boss Louise Richer about the spread of Franglais in Quebec society. They're worried the French language chez nous is under attack. Me I'm not so convinced of the seriousness of the threat posed by Korean depanneur owners.

Now this chat was obviously sparked by the Sugar Sammy phenomenon – he plays up the whole Franglais thing and makes it explicit that this bilingual show is a political statement.

Right at the start of the show, he says – “Why bilingual? Because we're in Montreal baby!”

Them's fighting words. And Petrowski, who has never hid her nationalist convictions, doesn't much like it. And I can see why. A big part of Sugar Sammy's thing is making fun of franco Quebecers in general and nationalists in particular.

At one point, he asks the crowd – “Are there any sovereignists in the house?” And there's almost no reaction. This is not something an old-school PQ type wants to see and hear. Here's a full theatre of bilingual twenty and thirtysomething Montrealers, probably majority francophone Thursday night, and with representation from all kinds of cultures and countries. There were Latin Americans, Haitians, Indian Montrealers, pure laine Quebec francos…..you name it, they were there. But almost none of them was willing to put up their hand and say out loud that they were a sovereignist.

And Sammy talks of how much he loves spoofing nationalists. He has a great story about living through the 1995 referendum in his French very multi-ethnic public high-school in Cote des Neiges. How he was happy to ridicule the separatist history teacher the day after the federalists narrowly won the vote.

“We won,” said Sammy. “I was so f—ing happy.”

What's amazing about this is he says things that virtually no one ever says in public in Quebec. Do you see English-Montrealers getting up in public forums to celebrate the 95 referendum victory? Are you kidding me? No one openly expresses federalist sentiments here. It's just not done. You go and quietly vote for the Liberals but you certainly don't go on TV and say you're glad the sovereignists lost.

I always remember the comment from Rene Levesque all those years ago who said he always thought the English would react more ferociously to Bill 101. That he was surprised that we were so docile. But with the exception of the brief Equality Party episode, Anglos have mostly put up and shut up over the past 40 years.

That's what's so cool about Sugar Sammy. Here's the poster boy for the Bill 101 generation – an ethnic guy who went to French school 'cause he had to and so can parlez-vous with the best of them – who openly laughs in the face of the nationalists. That my friend is radical stuff.