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Do you remember Joe Flaherty? He died yesterday at age 82, according to this obituary in the Times. I only half remembered his name. But I definitely remembered him, his various characters and even more the show he was part of, Second City TV. Did you watch this show either at the time it aired (1976-1984) or since? I’m not sure how well known it is today. But I watched it as a little kid when it first ran and even today I can remember my uncontrollable bouts of laughter. It was the kind of stuff I’d remember or play back in my head the next day in school and just start giggling in a way I couldn’t control and then get in trouble for disrupting class. Eventually I came up with a list of really sad things I would have on hand to think about if some part of the last episode popped into my mind during class or even worse during a test. Like that funny.
What made SCTV more than just a funny show from almost half a century ago is the sheer degree of influence and reach it had on entertainment, comedy and improv style shows over succeeding decades. Some of the other principals in the troupe included John Candy, Martin Short, Rick Moranis, Harold Ramis, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas and Catherine O’Hara. And this was a really little, out-of-the-way show. It eventually got picked up by NBC in 1981 and then it was a late night show. But before that it ran on Canadian TV and you had to watch on those non-network affiliate channels that picked it up as an independent show and ran sometime late at night on like Channel 29 or something.
When I say above that I only half remembered Flaherty’s name that’s in part because, while he had a successful career after SCTV, so many of the others became such huge names in entertainment. And that’s not including others who also went on to appear in various movies and shows but didn’t achieve quite the same level of fame as like a John Candy or Rick Moranis or Martin Short.
But Second City TV was also genetically tied, as it were, to its far better-known cousin, Saturday Night Live. If you’ve ever dug into the origins of Saturday Night Live you’ll know that Second City functioned almost as a farm team for the show. But here I need to back up and unpack some of the organizational family tree.
Second City is an improvisational comedy theater based in Chicago which opened in 1959. Second City TV grew out of its Toronto offshoot, Second City Toronto. There was also a Detroit offshoot but it seems to have disbanded in 2009. But back to Saturday Night Live. Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Gilda Radner from the original cast were each Second City alums. When Chevy Chase left the show after one season they replaced him with Bill Murray, who was also a Second City alum. And that’s continued through the whole life of the series. You can see just a sampling of the SNL stars over the last half century that came out of Second City on this page: Tim Meadows, Tiny Fey, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Amy Poehler, Cecily Strong, Bob Odenkirk, Aidy Bryant. I’m serious, basically everyone.
I said above that Second City is an improvisonal comedy theater in Chicago. But if you read about the history it’s been that but also had various traveling revues, training centers, the various regional offshoots. It’s a whole bunch of things. But what has always interested me is that a huge amount of the comedic entertainment, which is to say a huge amount of all entertainment over the last half century, traces back to this place. Either shows and movies are the product of Second City alums, whether they be actors or writers or directors, or more broadly the style of improvisational comedy that it played a very big role in spawning.
Most of us know, for instance, that SNL alum movies have almost been a part of the show’s business model back to the very beginning. You put in a few years on the show and then if you really get traction Lorne Michaels produces your movies. Difficult to count how many big movies followed this model. But you have iconic movies like Stripes: Bill Murray, John Candy, Harold Ramis. There’s an overlapping set of players in Ghostbusters, with the addition of Rick Moranis, an alum of Second City and SCTV. Ramis, who my mom apparently knew at least somewhat in college, was reasonably well-known in front of the camera. But his impact as a writer and director were far greater. Just a few examples: Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day. I won’t belabor the point. It’s hard to think of a comedy movie or genre from the last half century that isn’t populated by this outfit’s alums, or offshoots or genetic descendants.
But I want to come back to SCTV. It wasn’t just another version of Saturday Night Live or one point in this constellation. It was actually different in a basic structural way. It wasn’t ad hoc sketches. The show was based on the concept that it was a show about a local TV station in a town called Melonville, which is to say somewhere in the middle of nowhere. So everything was set around this story line with lots of recurring characters and each of the actors playing multiple characters. Most of it would turn on the shows on the TV station or the people who worked at the TV station. But then there were also characters in the entertainment business who appeared on the station, like Johnny LaRue (John Candy) or has-been singer Lola Heatherton (Catherine O’Hara) or comedian Bobby Bittman (Eugene Levy). One advantage of the concept was that since Melonville only had a podunk, low budget TV station it made sense that SCTV was also fairly low budget in terms of sets and everything else. So it was sort of like a sketch show in that it didn’t matter that one actor might play half a dozen different characters at one point or another.
This is probably part of the reason why only a few of the characters spawned movies or had lives off SCTV. The big example I can think of is Bob and Doug McKenzie. Martin Short also had Ed Grimley who started on SCTV.
I haven’t seen any of these episodes for at least thirty years and most closer to forty. I’m curious how well they’d hold up comedically today. What made it unique in my mind though was that it managed to be both very adult (in the sense of humor, sophistication, multi-layeredness) while also managing to be very innocent. I was a pretty precocious kid but I could watch it and almost bust my gut laughing at the same thing for days when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. It was so good.