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Stand and Deliver: Inside Canadian Comedy

by Andrew Clark

Canadians are funny. There’s Jim Carrey and his $20-million mug; there’s what’s left of the SCTV gang; there’s Lorne Michaels, who invented Saturday Night Live. Before them went Wayne and Shuster, who are still famous for their shtick, and Aylseworth and Peppiatt, who are not (they created Hee Haw, among other things, so their obscurity may be divine justice). Put ’em all together and you get the question: why are Canadians so darn funny?

It was inevitable that somebody would write a book that would attempt not only to trace the history of Canadian comedy, but also to – God help us – explain it. Andrew Clark’s Stand and Deliver fails on both counts. If its spotty history (he completely ignores vaudeville, begs off French Canada, and could care less about radio), fuzzy thinking (“The Canadian comedian has all the nerve and drive of the individualist combined with all the group ethics of a collectivist”), and hackneyed prose (“Radio consumed jokes the way a ravished dog would eat a steak”) weren’t bad enough, the author’s insistence on inserting himself into the story, like a deli owner posing for celebrity snapshots, makes it unbearable.

But never mind. The heart of the book is the territory that Clark has been covering for years as “Canada’s first full-time comedy critic,” originally with Toronto’s Eye Weekly, and lately with its parent publication, The Toronto Star. There, he’s been writing about the city’s stand-up and sketch comics, and it’s these front-line workers who give Clark the most space to ruminate. And he does, in his typically humourless and confusing way. He condemns arts agencies for not supporting comics, then claims that no self-respecting comedian would ever take a grant. He seems hurt that sketch comedy is not considered theatre, but not before claiming that “comedy, by my definition, is not about funny plays.”

The stand-up material also gives Clark a chance to justify the subtitle of the book. Here, in talking about the brilliant, underachieving Mike MacDonald and a dozen other comedy club mainstays, Clark gives us a taste of the parties, the booze, the drugs, the women, the abusive relationships, and the back-biting that characterized the heyday of stand-up comedy, which, Clark tells the reader, was killed by the mainstreaming (i.e. televising) of the Angry Young Comic.

By the time he gets to Second City, Kids in the Hall, and CODCO, he’s run out of gas. But not ideas. The theorizing continues long after the bar has closed.

 

Reviewer: Jason Sherman

Publisher: Doubleday

DETAILS

Price: $29.95

Page Count: 259 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-385-25602-7

Released: May

Issue Date: 1997-6

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Reference