JOHN CANDY: A LIFE IN COMEDY
A CONVERSATION WITH AUTHOR PAUL MYERS (PART ONE)
“The cover of my book has this great picture of John Candy. It’s not a fancy picture, but the one thing that I loved about it was the twinkle, you know, the twinkle in John Candy’s eyes. I think everybody reacts to it. Everybody gets it. Every kind of person gets it. And he’s a mirror. So, truck drivers might bring a truck driver thing to it. And I know ladies like them. He had an innate humanity about him that was absolutely never, never, never stifled in any role.”
With the release of his latest book, John Candy: A Life in Comedy, musician, journalist, songwriter, author, and podcaster Paul Myers is uniquely positioned to write about the late, great SCTV comedian and movie actor. Like Candy, Myers is originally from Toronto and shares the late actor’s love for classic movies. A self-proclaimed comedy nerd, Myers also has connections to Toronto’s Second City improv sketch comedy group, and by extension, to the SCTV family.
In the past, Myers has written books about legendary British bluesman Long John Baldry, Canadian music icons Barenaked Ladies, and the American pop-rock-prog artist and producer Todd Rundgren. His last book, One Dumb Guy, delved into the career of the Canadian sketch comedy troupe Kids In The Hall.
With his history of writing about musicians and comedians, it was perhaps just a matter of time before Myers tackled the larger-than-life figure that was John Candy. To this, Myers states, ” I don’t know if it was John Candy in my head for years, and I will give credit to [editor] Douglas Richmond at House of Anansi. When I wrote the Kids in the Hall book, I went to them and I said, ‘Here’s an idea I have.’ Just to quickly talk about that, One Dumb Guy, the Kids In The Hall book. I had stakes in that one because I grew up with them. I was around as a musician on the same scene playing the Rivoli club in Toronto, and I knew those guys. I’d even taken improv, sketch comedy classes adjacent to them at the same time as my famous brother Mike was doing it. So, there was a feeling I had, that I watched their career. I’d been on set for Brain Candy, and I’ve been on set for the CBC series, and these guys had become friends of mine as well. So I always said, ‘When I’m good enough, or when I’m experienced enough to write their story, I would love it if they let me’. And they said ‘yes’ this time. So that book kind of opened me up to writing about sketch comedy in a way that I could apply all my fan knowledge and also sort of adjacent knowledge too.”
AUTHOR PAUL MYERS
Myers had originally approached editor Douglas Richmond about writing a book on Second City Television (SCTV), but balked on that, as director Martin Scorsese was making a still unreleased documentary film about the comedy troupe. Speaking to his editor, Myers picks up the story, “So I said, ‘I don’t know if I could really do a Second City book. I would love that, though’. And he goes, ‘But what about John Candy, because he’s also a movie star.’ And so, it was a chance for me. This is how it happens sometimes. I go, ‘I guess I could put some Second City history in this book.’ You should see the stuff I threw out, because I ended up writing like five chapters on the history of the Second City, because that’s the book I think I was secretly writing. And then the editor, Doug Richmond, said, ‘You know, with the amount of story we’re telling, we need to stay with John. So, whenever the story of Second City veers away from John, you might have to just put that somewhere else. That’s not for your book.’ That’s what an editor does.”
In telling the story of John Candy’s life, Myers works chronologically, starting with early life in suburban Toronto, marred by the death of his father at age five; through high school and onward, touching on significant events that pointed Candy in the direction of what would eventually become his career. Myers covers familiar ground while telling the story in this way, but is also able to fill in gaps, giving a cohesive picture of the actor’s past. Throughout the book, Myers gives the reader a sense of the many sides of his subject by always putting Candy’s humanity first. Says the author, “I really wanted it to be about dignity. As you can see in the book, quite often the concept of body shaming was a constant plague to him, and I think it did get to him. I think a lot of his anxiety in life and a lot of tension, when things weren’t going well, quite often, it had to do with people using his physicality as a punching bag or just being underestimated because of his body type. I think, in this day and age we can look back. It still persists, this kind of body shaming, but at least we have some sort of understanding of the humanity of it. And so I wanted to give John Candy a reappraisal from a 21st century position where we at least know better, even if we don’t always act that way. Call me woke for doing that, but I think if ‘woke’ is just about empathy, then I think that it’s a woke John Candy book!”
“What my goal also is: if you didn’t care about this person that I’m writing about already, how can I make you, or show you things that could be a way into you caring? Storytelling is, I think – I’m certainly not going to give a class on this – but to me, storytelling is about finding a way to bring the listener in and putting them in a place where they can watch the story and not turn away and not get bored. Also, maybe [they] learn something, not necessarily an educational thing, but just if it’s learning empathy, or if it’s learning ‘how they do that’. You know, how did they make that movie? What was it like making Planes, Trains and Automobiles?”
PURCHASE JOHN CANDY: A LIFE IN COMEDY
The conversation turns to actor John Belushi, another physical comic who died young. Considering both actors, Myers observes, “The specter of John Belushi hovers over so much of the John Candy story because we’re dealing with people who were known for physical comedy but were also geniuses of humanity. And I say that about John Belushi too. I think it’s underestimated a lot of times that John Candy and John Belushi both had a skill for seeming like normal people, but in extreme conditions, you know? And they knew where their body was at all times. If you see either of those two actors in a scene, they know what to do with their eyes. They know what to do with their arms. They know how to stand with their legs. And they can get big and they can get small, they can play humble. Candy more so. I think Candy really brought – maybe it’s the Canadian thing – but he brought a certain, almost self-deprecation, but it was always dignified.”
John Candy: A Life in Comedy is enriched by the variety of anecdotes and details shared by the actor’s friends and colleagues, including Candy’s former SCTV castmates Dave Thomas, Catherine O’Hara, and the late Joe Flaherty. From Candy’s movie career, Myers spoke with Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, Ivan Reitman, Richard Lewis, and the sons of the late writer-director John Hughes, to name a few. Touching on a few of those interviews, Myers relates, “Not to take their passing as a victory for me, but in the victory for me, Joe Flaherty gave me, like, four hours of conversation, and some of it very laughably cranky, which I love, because it became Guy Caballero. It was like [in a Caballero-style voice], ‘One thing you got to remember is this!’, and, ‘Ah, show business, is a rat trap!’ I told him a couple of times. I said, ‘I’m just delighted that your angry tone here mirrors so many of your best characters’. And he laughed, ‘Haha! What do you say? That’s funny!’ And I got Ivan Reitman before he passed away. I didn’t know – he passed away two weeks after I talked to him, so there was no indication that he was going to. Sadly, Richard Lewis was such a great interview. Very caring. I had a great conversation with him. He said some nice things about my Kids In The Hall book. Richard Lewis was a guy I used to watch on TV when I was a little kid, and then he passed away. I think we lost a couple more recently, I can’t remember. But those ones, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I talked to these guys!’ In the case of Ivan Reitman, I may have had one of the last interviews with him.”
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