The house at 1063 Avenue Road in Toronto had a long association with Second City and SCTV. Althought the house had changed hands a couple of times, somebody or other connected with the show lived there from 1972 until 1980. Martin Short and Eugene Levy were the first to move in and they lived there from 1972 until 1974. Then Sheldon Patinkin rented the house. Sheldon was a director of the Second City stage company and a producter of SCTV. He lived there for a year in 1975. John and Rose Candy lived there from 1976 to 1980. There were parties attended by people like Paul Shaffer, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, Joe Flaherty, Catherine O'Haro, the Murray brothers (Bill and Brian), and John Belushi. Hundreds of pages of comedy have been written there. Eugene, Marty Short, Paul Shaffer, and I had most of our infamous Friday Night Services at 1063 Avenue Road. That little house has a real place in the history of comedy. In fact, Toronto in the mid-1970s was a remarkable place if you were at all intersted in comedy.
I underwent a knid of comic initiation at 1063 Avenue Road back in 1973. Eugene Levy put on Albert Brooks's Comedy Minus One record, handed me the album jacket, and opened up the dining room doors to reveal my audience: Danny Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, John Candy, Paul Shaffer, Andrea Martin, and Eugene's roommate at the time, Marty Short. I was terrified.
Danny Aykroyd and Valri Bromfield also turned up frequently at 1063 because Marty was dating Gilda Radner and Gilda and Valri were friends. Just prior to Godspell, Danny and Valri were performing at Global Village near Wellesley and Yonge.
"Danny and I went up at midnight," Val told me. "When the people who ran Global Village's regular shows had gone home, we would ask them to leave the lights on and one guy to lock up."
Danny and Valri would start their routine barking at the audience, "People, people, make room for your neighbors. Don't push. There'll be room for everyone." Val would try to start the show from the stage and Danny would be in the audience, hitting on some girl or doing something disruptive, and then Valri would scream at him and the two of them would engage in a kind of street-theatre routine. The audience loved it. They built up quite a following with the college crowd.
Andrew Alexander: I was working at Global Village when Gilda was working the box office and Danny and Valri were performing at a midnight-to-dawn venue called Platform, which I was co-producing. They were terrific. Little did I realized that our paths would cross in such a meaningful way in 1974. Val and Gilda became friends at Global Village because Gilda was working in the box office. One night Marty and Gilda were driving to Gilda's house of Pears Aveneue with Danny and Valri in the back seat doing this bit as a husband and wife arguing. Marty came back to 1063 Avenue Road and told Eugene and me that he had just witnessed the funniest improv bit that he had ever seen. This was the first time I had ever heard of Danny and Valri.
The Second City Theatre on Adelaide opened its doors in 1973 and was a startling success for anyone serious about comedy, but a commercial failure. It gave Danny and Valri a regular forum to exercise their insane characters. It introduced Toronto to the sophisticated styles of Joe Flaherty and Brian-Doyle Murray, both of whom are extremely talented comic actors.
Dan Aykroyd was a great physical comedian. I remember one improv where the lights came up on Eugene, Danny entered, and Gene greeted him and told him to sit down:
Dan: No thanks. I've been testing ejection seats all morning.
Eugene: I see. And how has that been going?
Dan: Not too good. I get in them and here's what happens...
[Danny sits in chair and hurls himself and chair against wall.]
Eugene: Well, are all of them like that?
Dan: All the ones I tested.
Eugene: How many did you test?
Dan: Over two hundred.
[Audience laughter]
Dan: I think it's an electromagnetic problem. The weights need to be realigned and balanced so that the charge will direct the chair straight up.
Eugene: Well, get on that right away because we have to meet our production schedule.
Dan: I already did that, sir.
Eugene: And are they working now?
Dan: No. Now they do this...
[Dan sits in chair and hurls himself and chair against one of the other backstage walls.]
Eugene: How many of those chairs did you test?
Dan: Over six hundred.
[Audience completely caves in, imagining this idiot being hurled around six hundred times.]
Dan improvised long raps about guns, airplanes, cars, trucks, police procedures, military ordnance and regulations, the Catholic priesthood and theology, cooking--just about anything you could think of. And when you though you had him at a loss for words, he'd improvise a whole new area--like the night he did this piece with Catherine O'Hara:
Dan: Okay...seven...eleven...seven...eleven...Ah, you're a loser.
Catherine: I'm a loser?
Dan: Oh, sorry...You wanted your chart read, eh?
Catherine: Yes. I want my chart done so I'll know exactly what's gonna be happening with my life.
Dan: Okay, you're Mrs. Gross.
Catherine: Very good. Yes, Mrs. Gross.
Dan: And you're a Scorpio, right?
Catherine: Are you single? (laughs) No. I'm a Pisces--a fishface.
Dan: Well, let's see...you're a Pisces, so that would make you a Gemini rising. Now, this is a very good thing right now because your moon is moving into Saturn and the moon itself--I mean not the moon that is in your aspect, but the moon--is moving into Venus and therefore both of those moons are opposing forces, meaning that Mars is moving away from the sun, you see. Well, the point of the matter is that someone is going to hang a moon soon. Meaning that there will be a contact of that type for you.
Valri Bromfield told me the story of the first night she and Dany performed a routine called "Hotel," which Catherine O'Haro and Andrea Martin later performed on SCTV. It was a routine where a teacher works with an immigrant who cannot speak English.
Valri Bromfield, Second City Writer/Performer: I told Danny I was going out [on stage]. And I remember grabbing a whistle on my way out and catching Danny's eye as I grabbed it. We were always playing tricks on each other. I'd go out first and he'd tell me he would make and entrance and then he'd leave me out there for a long time, forcing me to do something to save myself. Well, this night, I started yelling, "He should be here any minute now," forcing him out earlier, and I remember hearing Danny scrambling around in the back, putting something together. Then I heard this long, funny knock, and I knew from the sound of the knock that there was this really stupid guy on the other side of the door. And when I opened the door, I had to put the whistle in my mouth to keep from laughing because he had put on this long trench coat, and a bad hat squeezed over his face. And he had a cutting board under his arm. I looked right into those stupid, too-close-together eyes and I thought, here's a guy with a brain the size of a chickpea. So I said very slowly, "Hello-o-o-o." And he responded with a twisted incorrect version of my hello-o-o-o. We went back and forth a few times, just the word "hello" and then we moved to "come in." I can remember the feeling right now of what it was like seeing him standing in the doorway and getting such delight from that sight because I would take the rhythm of what he was doing and go with it. And then he would take the rhythm of what I was doing. And once it got started, we would never know who set it up but it would work. It would seem to carry itself.
In that first season I wrote a piece about a little K-Tel type device that warns you of impending midair collisions. I'd been reading that the Federal Aviation Authority in the U.S. wanted to install these devices in commercial aircraft. Now, it seemed to me that if you're travelling at five hundred miles an hour and another plane is coming at you at five hundred miles an hour, your total approach velocity as a thousand miles an hour. That's almost twice the speed of sound. What good is it to have a ten-second warning that you''re about to die? This struck me as hilarious, but Bernie Sahlins said, "That's not funny. People are afraid of flying." So I just said, okay, fine, forget it."
Later on, I told Danny about it. He responded, "David, that's hilarious. I'll do it on 'Saturday Night Live.' You'll be the first person to ever get a piece on SNL who's not a staff writer."
A few weeks later, Bernie saw it on "Saturday Night Live." He came in to the SCTV office the next day and complained, "I just saw one of our pieces on 'Saturday Night Live.'"
I said, "That isn't one of our pieces. That's my piece and I gave it to Danny. I'm under contract to you so I gave it to him. I received no money." And I added, "It got pretty good laughs on a show which is your opposition and I hope you learn something from that." Then I just walked away. This is an example of the difference between Bernie's taste in comedy and mine.
Moranis, who was just cranking out scripts like a comedy robot, frightened everybody except me. He reminded me of Dan Aykroyd. Danny also used the blitzkrieg approach to selling his stuff and I had spent a lot of time wirting with Dan. So tumbling into a working rhythm with Rick was a natural fit for me.
I'd been at SCTV since the beginning. I'd lived through that third season in Edmonton when the show almost folded. It seemed odd, after all that, that the TV industry was nominating the show for awards. We stayed at the Century Plaza Hotel. Danny Aykroyd, who was a movie star by then with The Blues Brothers and Neighbors, came to the Emmy awards with Catherine O'Hara as his date. It was like a double date: I was with Pam, and the four of us went together. When we won, I couldn't believe it. When we went onstage to accept our awards, I felt that I wasn't actually in my body, that I was watching it all from some other vantage point.