MONTREAL — They say you should always open a speech with a joke, but organizers at Just for Laughs instead ended a week of jokes with a speech (and a few more jokes, and some PowerPoint), as Just Comedy, its sideshow conference about the business of funny, made its debut on Thursday.

But business is a little sluggish these days, noted Turner Entertainment Networks president Steve Koonin in his opening address, noting the slide of sitcoms on U.S. airwaves, and the fact that comedies have lost much of their grip on the theatrical box office — down to a third of receipts from 50% just a few years ago.

‘That’s frightening because there’s a huge need to laugh,’ he remarked before running through some of the sunnier numbers at his channel, and its formula for using re-runs of second-hand shows (The Office, Sex and the City) to prop up a roster of broad-appeal originals (10 Items or Less, My Boys).

‘We’ve hoarded and bought every contemporary comedy we can find,’ said Koonin.

Ask Ivan Reitman, and he’d blame the box office slide on the studios, grumbling during an on-stage talk with his son and fellow filmmaker Jason Reitman that the visionary ‘grand old men’ of Hollywood have been replaced by committee-minded MBAs who meddle too much in the creative process.

‘Groupthink is really not a good thing for filmmaking in general, and it’s really not a good thing for comedic filmmaking,’ he said to a hearty round of applause.

The elder Reitman nodded to the films of Judd Apatow — who will tomorrow take the conference’s comedy person of the year prize — as one of the few directors in the genre who has managed to do good work in the studio system.

He had words of encouragement for his son, too, not just commending his handiwork on Thank You for Smoking and Juno, but urging him to take on as many and as different projects as he can. His ‘great regret’ about his own career, he said, was how he grew shy about directing after his heyday in the 1980s.

‘When the rhythm is right, work towards it,’ he told his son, tearing up.

Between 200 and 300 delegates have turned out for the two-day meet — above expectations, say organizers — and early reaction to the light lineup of seminars has been positive, though it remains to be seen how much business will be done.

One network exec noted that she was already ‘kind of meeting’ed out’ after the Banff festival, but predicted that the new event will find a place on the calendars of entertainment execs, in no small part because of the international draw of its parent festival, which is expanding to Chicago in 2009 following its successful move last year into Toronto.

Others note that the conference — a joint effort by JFL and Achilles Media, which runs Banff and other industry meet-ups — stands to formalize the ample deal-making that already goes on at JFL, giving those in the comedy trade a place to do business somewhere other than in the back room of a club. Now they’re all in the bar at the Hyatt Regency.