Lady Parts (26 page)

Sophia Loren

Ethel Merman

Betty Friedan

In this sketch, celebrities were blown up because of something irritating they did or were known for, and it never failed to make me laugh. It sounds cruel now, the act of blowing someone up, but when you watch the sketch, you see innocence and glee and mischievousness in John’s and Joe’s eyes, not cruelty, and because of the fun they are having, the audience is having fun too.

Eugene Levy did a spot-on impression of Neil Sedaka. He sounded and looked exactly like him. As he sits behind the piano, Joe and John question him about his high voice.

Eugene, as Neil, lets us know that he knows he’s going to be blown up. And he’s excited about it, just as long as John and Joe stop making fun of his high voice. He continues to sing, and when he is asked to sing even higher and does so willingly, he is blown up in a puff of smoke.

It is hysterical, in the same tradition as the “Nairobi Trio,” the unforgettable Ernie Kovacs sketch from the ’50s. Four people dressed in gorilla suits perform the same musical piece week after week. Despite the predictability of the routine, the impeccable timing of the actors and their physical comedy always made me laugh. Our scenes worked because we exaggerated an element of truth about the celebrities we were impersonating.

Most actors will tell you that the best part of a job is getting it—and then it’s downhill from there. In the theatre, the best part for me is the rehearsal process. Because you’re exploring, figuring things out, discovering things, changing things, not being judged.
SCTV,
for its seven years, was a rehearsal. Every day was a discovery. We were writing new scenes all the time. We didn’t have a formula. We created a fictional TV station, SCTV, and we had freedom to program it any way we wanted. We wrote film parodies, news broadcasts, commercials, morning shows, late-night shows, game shows, talk shows, and entire shows built around musical acts who were guest stars. Everyone brought his or her personal experiences and unique talents to the writing rooms, and everyone had his or her own particular writing style.
We didn’t worry whether people would like what we wrote or performed. In fact, we never thought much about the audience. We never even thought anyone was watching. We were isolated in studios in Toronto and in Edmonton without any live audience. There wasn’t the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, iPhones with cameras, paparazzi, and so on. No distractions and no feedback. We were in a creative bubble. We were never thinking,
What can this show lead to? What will it get us?
When you have that toxic expectation, it’s impossible to do your best work.

In 2008,
SCTV
was honoured at the Comedy Festival in Aspen, Colorado. My castmates and I sat on a panel on stage, in front of a big screen on which scenes from
SCTV
were projected. Conan O’Brien moderated and conducted interviews with us.

A huge audience had gathered. We couldn’t believe the laughter from the audience. It’s not that all the scenes were
amazingly funny. It’s just that we had been on our own, on stages in Toronto and Edmonton, for seven years, and we’d never heard live laughs. We had only heard laughs from one another.

When I started writing this chapter, I felt a huge responsibility. I didn’t know how to tell this story. It was not up to me to represent my friends, and thirty years later, we are still friends. It was up to them to tell their story. But how do you extricate yourself from your family? We grew up together. We were just starting out in our lives and careers when we met. We began in the ’70s, when comedy was as hip as rock ‘n’ roll, when comedians were on the front page of
Rolling Stone.
By the ’80s, we were going our separate ways. Some of us were married or were about to be married. Our family grew. We had children and then more children, and our careers went in different directions. We remain very close today. We are at each other’s theatre and film openings, birthday parties, kids’ weddings, holidays, summer cottages, and, tragically in a few instances, as Dave Thomas poignantly pointed out, each other’s funerals.

People ask us all the time if there will be a reunion. None of us has any interest in trying to recreate those years, or to show up looking older and decrepit and then have that become the focus—how we aged, rather than how we made people laugh. Today, you can buy the seven seasons of
SCTV
collected on DVD. That’s enough of a reunion for us. We see our kids laughing at the same things that made us laugh thirty years ago, and it’s both heartwarming and validating that our comedy may just be timeless.

Cast of
SCTV,
1981

EDITH PRICKLEY: Well, there you go, folks. Ms. Martin ended that
SCTV
chapter on a whimsical note, which seems to be her gushingly sentimental style,
but not mine! When I reminisce, there’s nothing sentimental about it. I know how to be concise.

Let me tell you about the time I met Mr. Prickley. I saw him in the touring company of
Hair.
He was playing the role of Woof. He did that famous nude scene at the end of the first act, I took one look at him, and that’s what I said,
“Woof.”
He proposed to me that night. What he proposed, I’m not prepared to tell you, but it involved three girls from the show, a trapeze, and a Shetland pony. That was my introduction to show business. Unfortunately, that’s not what the vice squad called it.
Pahaaaaaa!!!!!

And that’s enough about the past, mine and Andrea’s. It’s time to move forward. I’m on the yes train, baby. Pure and simple. As my old lover, the Dalai Lama, once said to me on a cold morning in a hut in Tibet when he broke his vows and wouldn’t get his hands out of my pants, “Choose to be optimistic. It feels better.” I don’t know what the hell he was talking about, but as soon as I said yes, I felt better. Luckily he got back on track and now he’s saving the world. My life is less complicated. Every morning, with Mr. Prickley by my side, I give thanks. I get down on my knees, Mr. Prickley’s gorgeous manly parts in full view, and woof, do I give thanks.
Pahaaaaaa!!!!!
I just keep going, moving forward, and so must you. Stay on that yes train, folks, until the big man upstairs says “Knock it off.” Yes, eventually everything must go, including this godforsaken book. So put your hands together and let’s bring this baby home!

A
couple of years ago, I was spending the afternoon at the Whitney Museum in New York, taking in all the wondrous art of Edward Hopper. I saw out of the corner of my eye a woman staring at me and then avert her gaze.
Oh boy,
I thought.
Can’t a celebrity get some downtime without being bothered by her fans? Is there always paparazzi lurking about? Don’t I deserve a little privacy? Am I going to have to pull an Alec Baldwin and punch her out?
At that moment, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the woman. She spoke quietly and hesitantly. “Excuse me,” she said, “I don’t mean to bother you. But … are you Cher’s mother?”