Barry Julien

Barry Julien is a stand-up comedian, one-time contributor to The Onion, and Emmy-award-winning writer on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. His adventures as an amateur magician began in the late 1980s when his burgeoning interest in the art was fueled by regular visits to Montreal's Perfect Magic. It was there that he met and became friends with David Acer (who was a demonstrator at the shop) and Richard Sanders (a regular at Perfect Magic’s Saturday morning shows). In 1989, they formed a comedy magic trio called The Running Gags, which performed strange and unusual magic at comedy clubs and colleges around Montreal. A year later, Sanders moved to Toronto, but Julien (like Acer) continued to pursue a solo career in stand-up, and eventually became a writer for a variety of Canadian television shows. This in turn led to a writing job on Fox’s Talkshow with Spike Feresten, then, in 2007, Barry joined the writing team for Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report.

Over the years, Barry has occasionally channeled some of his creative energy into magic, and a handful of his original routines have appeared in books by David Acer (Natural Selections, Random Acts of Magic), with more rumored to be on the way.