Under the Radar: Joe Flaherty

 

Circa 1971: Here's several members of Chicago's improvisational comedy troupe Second City (the group took its name from a 1950s New Yorker article by A.J. Liebling in which he mocked the Midwestern metropolis for always coming in second to the East Coast metropolis.) You probably recognized John Belushi right off the bat, but maybe not the others, so let me tell you who they are going from left to right. First off is Judy Morgan, followed by Eugenie Ross-Leming, Jim Fisher, and, towering over Belushi, the subject of this post, Joe Flaherty. Flaherty and Belushi acted alongside each other in three Second City revues and were also castmates on the National Lampoon's Radio Hour: Odd to say this about a radio program, but I actually found a 1974 video clip from the latter. Very much of its time (but nevertheless fairly amusing in ours), part of it satirizes Watergate criminals sent off to college dorm-like minimum security prisons, and the other part the era's courtship etiquette:

Along with Flaherty and Belushi, you may have recognized Gilda Radner, Harold Ramis, and two guys who looked like either one could be a young Bill Murray. Well, the one with the beard is a young Bill Murray, the other is Bill's older brother Brian Doyle-Murray.

Belushi's subsequent life and career is pretty well-known by now. He and Gilda ended up on Saturday Night Live, and were joined by Bill in that show's second season. Belushi at first was overshadowed by Chevy Chase on SNL, but then saw his celebrity rise after Chase's departure. Actually, it was a movie he did when the show was on hiatus, Animal House, playing a college student who parties more than he studies, that really secured his stardom, a stardom cut short by a fatal heroin overdose. As for Flaherty, even if he never achieved the same level of success as Belushi, his career was no less interesting (to me), with the added bonus that he got to live a whole lot longer.

After 13 successful years in Chicago, its owners decided it was time for a second Second City, and somehow Toronto was chosen. Sent to that Canadian metropolis as a kind of advance man, Flaherty found it was a very good choice indeed, as the city had as much a performing arts scene as Chicago, and a plethora of comedy talent. Dan Ackroyd, John Candy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas Catherine O'Hara, Eugine Levy, as well as aforementioned Americans Ramis and Radner and Flaherty himself, and probably a few others I'm unaware of, were earning laughs onstage with a mixture of improvised and (this sometimes gets overlooked) scripted material, as had the folks back in Chicago. What didn't happen in Chicago that did happen in Toronto was a television spin-off. Why in one city and not the other? Apparently, the person who owned the Canadian Second City rights wanted to explore new ways make money off the brand, and the Chicago folks didn't. Who says it always has to be the Americans who are the entrepreneurs?

What became known as SCTV ran from 1976 to 1984, first on Canadian TV, then in United States syndication, then as an expanded show on NBC on Friday nights, and finally on premium cable. SCTV had a TV show-within-a-TV show premise: a bunch of people who wanted their own program were turned down by CBS, NBC, and ABC and so, undaunted, put on their own show on their own station. Truth be told, I usually paid no attention to the framing device, and just enjoyed it as a series of unrelated sketches, except when Joe Flaherty showed up as the TV station's sleazy intermittently wheelchair-bound owner Guy Caballero:

Reminds me of a certain orange-haired politician.

1941-2024

 

Not Ready for Prime Time Players

John Belushi and Gilda Radner, circa 1975. No, they're not lovers, just two friends clowning around in a make-up (not make-out) room at NBC's Manhattan broadcast center. They first met a few years earlier when Belushi, a member of Chicago's famed Second City Theater, took a trip to Canada to check out the comedy troupe's Toronto branch, where Gilda (originally from Michigan) was then performing. Soon after, Belushi moved to New York City and the National Lampoon Radio Hour, then secured a job there for Gilda as well. The two eventually ended up as members of the inaugural cast of a late night sketch comedy show called Saturday Night (Live was added during the second season) where both shot to stardom. As it turned out, a short-lived stardom. Short-lived period. Belushi died from a lethal combination of cocaine and heroin in 1982 (he would have turned 70 this year), a death that had Reagan-era moralists wagging their fingers about the drift away from traditional values. Gilda's eventual fate was much less seamy, and in no way an affront to the sensibilities of decent, hardworking Americans. Unfortunately, it was also much more drawn out, and ultimately much more dismaying, not just for her personally but for any decent, hardworking American who would prefer to have their sensibility affronted than deal with the sad fact that sometimes an early demise is just an early demise and not a comeuppance for bad behavior. Gilda lost her three-year battle against an apparently vice-free from of ovarian cancer in 1989 (this coming June she would have been 73.) As brief as their lives and careers were, neither one has yet slipped into obscurity. Had they lived, might they have worked together again? I'd like to think so. After all, as different as their deaths were, when alive they had relatively similar acting styles. But what could they have acted in? Let me take another look at the photo at the top of this post.

Hmm. A remake of Tarzan and His Mate perhaps? With the possibility of numerous sequels.