Before Lorne Michaels, before SCTV, before The Kids in the Hall, there was Wayne and Shuster, the original Canadian comedy team.
PRESERVING CAREERS
Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster met in high school at Toronto’s Harbord Collegiate Institute. Even as teenagers, they found a rapport and began writing and performing short comic sketches together for the school’s Drama Guild. The partnership continued at the University of Toronto, and in 1941, when both were barely in their twenties, they got their own show on CFRB, a local radio station. It was a daytime show called The Wife Preservers, in which the two would demonstrate cleaning and cooking tips… but punched up with lots of banter and comic nonsense.
Their nightclub/variety show act didn’t quite work on daytime, and the duo were fired. But the national CBC knew they were something special, and snatched them up to do a nighttime comedy show called The Shuster and Wayne Comedy Show. It was a huge hit, but went off the air just a year later in 1941. Reason: Like most young men in North America, Wayne and Shuster (or Shuster and Wayne) enlisted in the military to fight in World War II. They didn’t see much combat, however—the Canadian Army enlisted them in “troop entertainment duty.”
RADIO, RADIO
After the war ended, Wayne and Shuster returned to Canada…and mega-stardom. Many of their performances for the troops had been broadcast back home, and they were in high demand. The CBC put them back on the air in 1946 with The Wayne and Shuster Show. The competition: popular imported American radio shows. Wayne and Shuster beat them all—a radio first.
When the CBC debuted television service in 1952, Wayne and Shuster were an obvious fit, and The Wayne and Shuster Hour became one of the network’s first shows and biggest-ever hits. That began a nearly uninterrupted four-decade streak of TV presence from the comedy duo.
In 1998 1,000 University of Guelph students formed the longest human conveyor belt laying down in a row and rolling a surfboard over their bodies.
Wayne and Shuster called their style “literate comedy,” but it also involved a great deal of gentle parody, slapstick, and pantomime. They had a lot in common with other comedy duos, then and now—such as joke rhythm, the straight man/jokester setup, a love of puns and ethnic jokes. The one huge difference was that the duo loved to use literary references. That kind of thing probably wouldn’t fly today, but in the mid-20th century, mainstream audiences would understand Wayne and Shuster’s many Shakespeare-based premises and jokes, because back then more people read Shakespeare (particularly in England-influenced Canada).
And it took off. In 1958, the duo was booked on The Ed Sullivan Show, the most popular and influential variety show on American television. They performed a sketch called “Rinse the Blood Off My Toga,” which was Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar performed in the style of the TV cop show Dragnet. (It also spawned the catchphrase, “Julie, don’t go!”
Sullivan publicly stated that Wayne and Shuster were one of two of his favorite all-time acts (the other: ventriloquist Topo Gigio). He paid them more than any other act (including Elvis Presley and the Beatles) and signed them up to make regular appearances. In fact, they appeared on the show 67 times between 1958 and 1969—that’s once every seven episodes.
Also in 1958, the duo opened Canada’s Stratford Festival. They performed a scene called “The Shakespearean Baseball Game.”
STARS’ SCHTICK
Wayne and Shuster were so busy with TV and live shows (and recording a string of hit comedy albums) that by 1965, they asked the CBC to reduce The Wayne and Shuster Hour from a weekly series to a monthly one. The network complied, and the show ran this way into the early ‘80s. Some memorable sketches from the show:
• “All in the Royal Family”: a reimagining of Hamlet with characters from All in the Family. The king even calls Hamlet “Meathead” and Gertrude “Dingbat.”
• “The Six Hundred Dollar Man,” an obvious goof on The Six Million Dollar Man, in which a cyborg is created with body parts purchased on the cheap “at Loblaws.”
• “Star Schtick,” a parody of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
• When the Prince Edward Island-set TV movie Anne of Green Gables aired in 1985, Wayne and Shuster responded with “Sam of Green Gables,” in with the pastoral community is met with the arrival of not a spirited young girl, but an old codger.
• “The Brown Pumpernickel,” a parody of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
• “Frontier Psychiatrist” was about a therapist trying to analyze the denizens of the wild, wild west. (The audio of the sketch later became the basis of the hit song “Frontier Psychiatrist” by Australian electronic act the Avalanches.)
END OF THE ROAD
The duo’s relevance started to fade in the late 1970s. It was a tough era, and comedy reflected that in edgy voices like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Saturday Night Live (created by Lorne Michaels, Shuster’s son-in-law). Wayne and Shuster’s comedy seemed dated and slight by comparison, and ratings for the monthly specials gradually but steeply dropped. By 1980, The Wayne and Shuster Hour was airing just two episodes a year. The last episode aired in 1988.
But oddly, reruns of the show were doing great. The CBC repackaged old sketches into half-hour episodes and sold them into syndicated in Canada, Australia, and the U.S. The network earned millions.
In 1990, just two years after the series stopped airing original episodes, Johnny Wayne died. Frank Shuster continued to make public appearances, and filmed introductions for Wayne and Shuster compilation videos. He passed away in 2002.
EVERYONE’S A CRITIC
Not everybody was a fan of Wayne and Shuster. In Right Here on Our Stage Tonight, Gerald Nachman’s oral history of The Ed Sullivan Show, Wayne & Shuster merit only three mentions. And two of them are mean remarks by erudite talk show host Dick Cavett:
• “Wayne and Shuster are the only comedy team in which you couldn’t say either one is the funny one.”
• “Ed Sullivan was partially deaf, according to some, which is the only thing that would explain why Wayne & Shuster were on so many times.”
Four hundred mothers in Vancouver broke the record for mass breast feeding in 2002.