John Tobin and Jim McCue want to make Boston the laughingstock of the nation.

Here's hoping they succeed.

Tobin and McCue last March put together something they call the Boston Comedy Festival. They persuaded about 100 comics to perform at a few nightclubs around the city. There were 20 shows in all, with the final show before a standing-room-only crowd at Nick's Comedy Stop. The top five comics split prize money of $1,200. The winner, Malden resident Dave Russo, was crowned best comic in Boston.

The festival was a fun albeit small-time affair. It received favorable press coverage but was not much known outside of the relatively insular circle of fans that regularly sees live comedy in Boston.

This year will be different.

Instead of $1,200 in prize money, the second festival will pay out $10,000. The event, planned for the first week of April, will run for nine days, with 50 shows in 20 venues. Based in Boston's theater district, it will be covered on cable and broadcast television. The bigger shows will be at the 1,000-seat Emerson Majestic Theater.

The biggest change, however, is that the festival will no longer be Boston focused. It plans to draw comics from all over the country and even from overseas.

Just this week, Tobin and McCue kicked off a series of auditions for the festival. The first of those is now taking place in New York, but auditions also will be held over the next few months in Los Angeles, Montreal, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, London and, of course, Boston.

The comics who will be lining up for their chance to be in the festival know that comedy is a tough business. Thousands of men and women regularly perform around the country, playing in large and small cities and on college campuses, living a life on the road full of late hours, lousy food and low pay. Every comic's dream, of course, is to break through to the limelight - to capture the attention of some agent or producer who says something along the lines of, ``How'd you like to be the next Jerry Seinfeld?''

Nowadays, those big breaks often happen in Montreal, which for the last 17 years has every summer hosted the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival. Comics and those looking to hire comics make an annual trek to Canada, looking for fame and a decent income.

Tobin and McCue figure it's Boston's turn.

McCue is a standup comic himself, giving him a logical pedigree for coming up with the idea of a comedy festival.

Not so with Tobin. Although he and McCue are partners in a small booking agency called Atlantic Entertainment, for much of the last five years Tobin has been a community activist and aspiring politician.

Indeed, at the time the two began batting around the notion of a comedy festival, Tobin was embroiled in a bitter campaign against incumbent City Councilor Maura Hennigan. It was Tobin's second race; he first ran against Hennigan in 1995. He found himself spending days knocking on doors in West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain and nights planning the festival.

As luck would have it, Tobin lost his race for City Council.

Just imagine the jokes:

Win or lose, Tobin would have been working with a bunch of clowns.

Boston's longest running comedy show? The City Council's regular Wednesday meetings.

What's the difference between a city councilor and a stand-up comic? Stand-up comics are trying to make people laugh at them.

Even Hennigan, much relieved by Tobin's new career, notes that politics and comedy are both forms of entertainment.

But seriously.

If Tobin and McCue can pull it off, the festival may be one of the best things in a long while to happen to Boston's cultural scene.

Boston's theater district is still somewhat moribund, in need of the vitality that a comedy festival might provide. Moreover, the festival could have a significant economic impact. Montreal figures its annual  event brings in 1.5 million visitors and $35 million in revenue. And for Boston, which regularly anguishes about its status as a world-class city, a well-known festival could become one of those cultural events that helps define what the city is all about.

Can it work? Tobin and McCue's dream sounds great, but right now it's a complicated and difficult undertaking. ``We're financing it with credit cards,'' says Tobin.

Boston native Dan Reddington, now a comic and actor in Los Angeles, thinks a Boston festival can succeed. ``There's definitely a Boston style of comedy,'' he says, citing well-known Hub comics such as Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Paula Poundstone and Steven Wright.

``Besides,'' he adds, ``if it becomes as popular as the Montreal festival, it'll give undiscovered L.A. comics yet another place to which they can travel 2,500 miles to showcase for agents and producers who won't drive 10 miles to see them in L.A.''

Tom Keane writes every Friday for the Herald. He can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.