The Second City has a channel on YouTube — four years after one was set up by Monty Python, who claimed a 23,000 per cent increase in DVD sales as a result of recycling their ancient sketches online. And the legacy responsible for SCTV is still a going concern, right? Which means the vintage clips are presented alongside new bits designed to go viral. Their next local stage revue, Second City For Mayor premieres at their 70 Peter Street mainstage this spring. But last December, as the original Chicago company celebrated its 50th anniversary with a reunion that included the original 1970s Toronto troupe from the Old Firehall, waning influence of the Second City on Canadian show business was starting to show. Andrew Alexander, the Second City CEO, cited the fact that their mid-1990s application to launch a cable channel was rejected in favour of the parties responsible for The Comedy Network, was a blow to the prospects of reviving the glory days — or at least gaining a bigger stake in the career of the next Mike Myers. In fact, Myers was only just wrapping up his post-high school stint with the Second City Touring Company when plans for the second coming of SCTV were originally being sketched out around Hollywood. Continue Reading

Three years after Toronto comic Guy Earle had a profane exchange with a few indifferent patrons at Zesty’s Restaurant on Commercial Drive in Vancouver — which culminated in calling the bird-flipping water-throwing women who taunted him with some spontaneous smooching “fat and ugly” — he has a March 29 date with the BC Human Rights Commission. Last fall, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against the notion that they had a case against him, but the possibility of collecting $40,000 in damages remained. “I’m pretty left-wingy myself, I’m a stand-up comic, I’m socially conscious” he explained earlier this week to Calgary radio station AM770 host Rob Breakenridge. So, what seemed like just another legal nuisance in July 2008, when a “Comics For Freedom” rally at Comedy Bar — consisting of 40 one-minute rants — was meant to stick it to the human rights industry publicly pilloried by Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant (who wrote a best-selling book about it last year, Shakedown) now sounds like a real inconvenience for Earle, who drained his savings for legal fees. “It makes me sick,” he says. “And it makes me a little bit dysfunctional.” Continue Reading

The media blitz for Death Comes to Town, the eight-episode CBC Television comeback for Kids in the Hall which premieres tonight, is a reminder of a more innocent time — when something could show up on the screen without a deluge of reminders to watch. And, since nothing is less amusing than funny people talking about their craft, at least they are trying to make it entertaining for themselves. Monday, the troupe convened in the Front Street atrium for a lunchtime screening, hosted by one of the CBC’s in-house hucksters. “Comedy bonds die hard,” reported comedy blogger Sharilyn Johnson, “and it didn’t take long for the boys to give Jian Ghomeshi a headache.” Just like what happened days earlier to Globe and Mail scribbler Gayle McDonald: “The end result is intense. Insane. And exhausting, until one of the lads gamely agrees to a game of ‘let’s try to help this poor woman out by identifying ourselves before we let rip.’” Globe critic John Doyle tries being adult about it: “[J]ust awful, an absolute mess of lame, laughless ineptitude, and a dismal coda to the comedy troupe’s outstanding career.” Not that you’d know from the tweets from the screening at old KITH performance haunt the Rivoli on Monday night — even Mayor David Miller was there, posting TwitPic evidence of hanging with Toronto FC player Dwayne De Rosario. But a demographic slant remains unavoidable: “A lot of people don’t know who the fuck we are,” Bruce McCulloch told Eye Weekly. “If we visited Ohio State University 15 years ago, we would’ve been mobbed. Now people think, ‘Whose dads are walking through our campus?’” Talking to them again this morning on CBC Radio One’s Q, Kevin McDonald posited his theory of who currently comprises the core audience — those in their late-20s and early 30s who grew up on the reruns in the latter-1990s. “Which is good news for you,” reacted Ghomeshi. “The audience remains younger than you, right?”

With its star booked for a weekend residency at tourist-unfriendly laugh resort Comedy Bar — whose year of scrappy operations at 945 Bloor Street W. earned it a story in the Toronto Star — the question begs asking: did any respectable critic actually like The Ladies Man? Shot in Toronto, the Reginald Hudlin-directed flick based on Tim Meadows‘ excessively suave character Leon Phelps ended up acquiring its own infamy amongst the once-endless string of Saturday Night Live cinematic spin-offs in the wake of Wayne’s World; after Meadows’ turn tanked in October 2000, Lorne Michaels gave up on producing them for a decade — a drought that will end next April with the not-particularly-anticipated release of MacGruber. The only wag to credibly defend the attempt to extend SNL movies to the African-American market was A.O. Scott of The New York Times : “It may cross your mind that this is a movie about a black man pursued by a mob of whites intent on castrating him for improper attention to ‘their women.’ But Mr. Hudlin is not Spike Lee, and he smothers the potentially volatile political and sexual subtext of the movie in genial silliness.” Nor was the director, previously responsible for House Party, destined to have the career of Tyler Perry — it was the last feature film by Hudlin, who was later named president of entertainment for BET, while directing sitcoms. Meadows returned to Toronto a few years later to play the high school principal in the quasi-SNL masterpiece Mean Girls, but his entire career was but a dress rehearsal for this weekend. After Friday and Saturday night rounds onstage, Meadows will then host sketch troupe the Sketchersons‘ weekly Sunday Night Live. (Which already sold out.)