Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians Read online

  Corey: You have some pretty impressive dance moves. Where did you learn to dance?

  Dan Aykroyd: I don’t know where that came from; I’m not sure. I guess that’s just the nature of the music itself. I sure didn’t do it in high school; I was a terrible dancer there. I started dancing when I started playing with Steve Cropper and Donald Dunn and those guys.

  Corey: I’ve read some stories about the speakeasy you used to run during ‘Saturday Night Live.’

  Dan: Yeah, 505 Queen Street. Prior to that, when I was on Second City in Toronto, we had the after-hours bar. Then, of course, we had a blues bar in New York City and in Chicago. We always had a bar. Now I’ve got seven of them—The House of Blues, of course.

  Corey: Do you remember when you first discovered rhythm and blues music?

  Dan: Yes, of course. It was in Ottawa, Canada, where I grew up. There was a beautiful club there. We used to go and listen to music and hang.

  Corey: When did you get the nerve to get up there and start singing some of these songs?

  Dan: I was about 16 when I hopped up and started to play harp. I really didn’t start singing until we did The Blues Brothers.

  Corey: Do you still keep in touch with the guys from The Blues Brothers band?

  Dan: Oh, yes. In fact, I played with them just a couple weeks ago for a benefit for the Alzheimer’s Fund in New York City and New York State. Yes, I played with Steve Cropper and Lou Marini and Alan Rubin. They were amazing.

  Corey: If you had stayed on one of your original paths, criminology, where do you think you’d be today?

  Dan: I would be an inspector, probably a deputy chief with the Ontario Provincial Police Department. Why not elevate myself to that field? Why not? I might have been a Mountie, like my grandfather.

  Corey: You had a show a few years back about the paranormal…

  Dan: Yeah, ‘Psi Factor.’ We ran four years on that in syndication, which is a pretty good run in syndication.

  Corey: I’ve heard that you have an interest in that, that your family …

  Dan: My great-grandfather was an Edwardian spiritualist, yes.

  Corey: What do you think about dream analysis?

  Dan: I think that the Carl Jungian school is extremely accurate and full of symbology and gives you a whole clue to living life. And if you dream and take Jung’s symbols, dreams can act as a forecast to what’s coming or a beautiful reflection of the past.

  Corey: Do you still have dreams about John Belushi?

  Dan: Not so much now, but certainly after he died, I did.

  Corey: Did you take that as a good sign?

  Dan: I think he was visiting me. He was troubled in those dreams. A soul intervention was done, and I think he’s crossed over now and he’s happy. I lost a friend on 9/11. She was on that first plane that went into the tower. I had a dream about her. She was all in yellow, flowing. I said, ‘Where are you?’ and she said, ‘I’m helping these other people across. They need help.’ She was just like that in life, and I really feel that she was visiting me.

  Corey: You performed with John for years, and now you’re performing with Jim Belushi. Was it a little strange at the beginning for you with Jim?

  Dan: It was a little strange for him because he didn’t think he could do it. I said, ‘Of course, you can do it. You Albanian-American guys from Illinois know how to sing the blues. Come on!’ And it turned out, he was just great in the show. We do the Have Love Will Travel revue, which is a more informal show than the classic Blues Brothers show. He is Brother Zee, the blood; I am Elwood, the legacy—as you probably know.

  We do the classic Blues Brothers show, but it’s very formal presentation wise. There’s a whole tribute to John in there. There’s material that we don’t do in the Have Love Will Travel revue, which is in that classic show. There’s two concepts here going.

  Corey: There’s some retired stuff that you won’t do again?

  Dan: Yes, I think some of the songs that were really associated with John, Jimmy doesn’t really want to do because they were his.

  Corey: Why do you think the Blues Brothers legacy has lived on for so long?

  Dan: I think it’s accessible to some people. Everyone can look or feel like a Blues Brother. The music is fun. It’s happy. It’s uplifting. It’s all about a good time. People like an icon that represents a good time.

  Kids in the Hall—Dave Foley

  Back in 1984, three MCs and a Dave—Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald Mark McKinney and Dave Foley—met and combined forces in Toronto, eventually adding a token gay, Scott Thompson, to become Kids in the Hall.

  A love of Monty Python spawned irreverent characters like Cabbage Head, an obnoxious lout who tries to gain the sympathies of women because of the fact that a bunch of the leafy vegetable forms the top of his noggin’; and the Chicken Lady, a freak show half-woman, half-chicken beast in need of a shrink—or at least Col. Sanders.

  “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels saw the Kids and helped them produce a TV show in the States, which aired on HBO and CBS through 1995. The pay cable channel was an opportunity to get away with stuff that “SNL” could not, including a bit called “Dr. Seuss Bible,” which chronicles the crucifixion of Jesus via silly rhymes and colorful characters.

  Like Python, the all-male troupe often transformed into female characters, some making better-looking women than others. I was lucky enough to chat with three of the Kids before they took their comedy on the road, and met them sweaty and smiling backstage at The Pageant in St. Louis.

  Corey Stulce: Who do you think makes the best-looking lady then and now?

  Dave Foley: Then, definitely me. It’s one of the few things the troupe agrees on is that I was the best in drag; that I was actually pretty. Now I don’t think any of us look that good in drag. We’re all a little older.

  Corey: I just read an article about a new book coming out about religious parallels to the writing of Dr. Seuss and that’s something you guys played with a long time ago.

  Dave: Wow, yeah, that was over 20 years ago.

  Corey: Combining religion and comedy can be sort of dangerous. Did you guys get any backlash for the stuff you did?

  Dave: Oh, sure. ‘Dr. Seuss Bible’ offended a lot of people. In fact, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) wouldn’t air it when we did it. It never aired in Canada. Even HBO was worried about putting it on the air. I’ve had a few things that didn’t run in Canada because they were religious. I had a monologue about how Christ was a bad carpenter. It was mostly me saying I had unearthed some artifacts that were apparently built by Christ and they were all lousy. They wouldn’t air that in Canada.

  Corey: What did you think about the comparisons to you guys and Monty Python back then, and has your opinion changed at all?

  Dave: My opinion has always been that it’s flattering to be compared to them. I think they are the Beatles of comedy. I like to think we’re a distant second-best to Python, and structurally we’re very different from them. Because we loved Python, we decided very early on that we would never do anything that felt like Python. All of our sketches have endings. We don’t do segues. Out of respect for them we went with a more traditional style.

  Corey: Have you ever gotten any comments about your show from the guys in that troupe?

  Dave: No, to the best of my knowledge none of them knows who we are. And I’ve met Eric Idle several times, and I don’t think he ever remembers me. And I’ve worked with John Cleese on ‘Will and Grace,’ and he had no idea who I was. In fact, the first day on the show I said, ‘I just want to get this out of the way: I’m a huge fan and very excited to be working with you.’ And he turned to the first assistant director and said, ‘Who is this? Do I have to be nice to him?’ And I said, ‘Only in the most perfunctory way, Mr. Cleese.’

  Corey: I’ve been trying to read up on some of the new characters. What can you tell me about the Bartender, the sidekick to Bruce’s Super Drunk?

  Dave: Not much. You’ve pretty
much encompassed the entire character with that description. It’s a pretty thin characterization. I just try to look heroic with my cocktail shaker, that’s it. In fact, all the characters in that sketch are paper-thin.

  Corey: Because you guys are doing a lot of new stuff on this tour, how would you say it compares with the last tour which was, what five, six years ago?

  Dave: Yeah, six years ago. I think this is the best live show we’ve ever put on. I’m really happy with how all our new material has turned out. The crowds are really reacting well to it. I don’t think anyone’s missing the old sketches. For us it’s a lot more fun to do stuff that they haven’t seen yet.

  Corey: What’s Lorne Michaels’ cell phone number?

  Dave: He would never give it to me. I have no idea. I don’t even know if he has a cell phone.

  Corey: You’ve explored a time machine theme in a couple sketches. What would you do if you really had access?

  Dave: To a time machine? It reminds me of a joke I once made. ‘If I had a time machine, I’d use it to go to the girls’ shower room and watch them shower. Oh wait, that’s invisibility.’

  Corey: How is your laser eye surgery holding up? I’ve been thinking about getting it. (In a documentary about the Kids’ 2002 reunion tour, ‘Same Kids, New Dresses,’ Foley gets Lasik eye surgery on camera. It ticked off the other members in the troupe that he would get surgery while they were performing on the road.)

  Dave: Oh, Lasik? I love it. I know people are talking; there’s been some bad press about it lately, but I love it. I like that I can watch TV in bed without glasses; fall asleep without my glasses getting all bent out of shape.

  Corey: Are you thinking about getting any surgeries on this tour?

  Dave: I think I would be well served by a pretty extensive round of Liposuction. That would be pretty good.

  Corey: Which characters from the show, either yours or one of the other guys’, would you not mind spending the rest of you life with—or at least a really long weekend?

  Dave: I don’t even know if I’d want to spend a weekend with any of the characters from our show. I wouldn’t mind dating some of the women I’ve played.

  Corey: How would you explain the TV show to small child if they wanted to know what it was about?

  Dave: I would send them out of the room. My 5-year-old came and saw a live show a couple days ago and apparently really liked it. All the dirty stuff, if you don’t understand it, just erase it in the short-term memory. I would make sure the kid knew it wasn’t really a kid’s show.

  Kids in the Hall—Mark McKinney

  Corey: What do you think of fans still trying to ‘crush your head’ after all these years?

  Mark McKinney: I hate people that quibble with whatever got them famous, because there’s a lot of really good actors who would kill to be the one always getting their head crushed. I’d like to think that I’d equal that someday with something.

  Corey: How did your time as an apprentice writer (with Bruce McCulloch) on ‘Saturday Night Live’ help you when it came time to write as Kids in the Hall?

  Mark: At 3:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, desperate, I learned something about writing. I can’t actually say what it was—it may just be something like ‘Hang in there, baby’; the cat on the curtain rod poster—but we wrote some of our best stuff.

  Corey: What was it like working with Lorne Michaels?

  Mark: My experience working with Lorne Michaels is a lot better than my experience working without Lorne Michaels—in comedy anyway.

  Corey: You guys played women—a lot—during Kids in the Hall, but they were quite realistic portrayals generally.

  Mark: I think that happened really early. We just had one idea about performing as women. I think it probably wasn’t one of our most creative ideas; it was simply that we weren’t going to be those guys with big water-balloon tits.

  Corey: Was there ever the thought of using a real woman like Python did with Carol Cleveland?

  Mark: We were writing a lot of scenes where we did wish we had a female member, but they never stuck. We were too obnoxious for females.

  Corey: Did you dare try to pull off your drag in public?

  Mark: I never had the guts to do it, but Scott Thompson said he was gonna spend an entire summer in a dress, and he didn’t do that either.

  Corey: Will you share the origin of the Chicken Lady?

  Mark: Kevin had written a sketch. The whole idea was he was a guy with a freak show at the circus, and his trick was he could make his nose bleed at will. And the whole scene was these kids taunting him, and he doesn’t need them because he’s in therapy and in touch with his feelings, and he doesn’t need to perform; he’s on his lunch break.

  At the end, the throwaway line is, ‘Get out of here, kids; go see the Chicken Lady. She’s an emotional dependent; she’ll do anything.’ And at the last second, we decided it would be funny to see the emotionally-dependent Chicken Lady.

  Corey: Post-Kids, you played a priest in two films. Do you see yourself in that calling?

  Mark: Either that or I look like I’m after little boys.

  Kids in the Hall—Scott Thompson

  With most of the great comedy teams either dead or disbanded—and chances of a Monty Python reunion about as likely as founding member Graham Chapman returning from the grave—it’s refreshing to see one Canadian troupe still make it work after three decades. During the first season of “Kids in the Hall,” audiences were introduced to Buddy Love, a flamboyant barfly created by Scott Thompson.

  Corey: How do the Kids get along today?

  Scott Thompson: This is now a group that has accepted that we’re together forever. It sounds like we’re dealing with a terrible disease, but in a way it is. You know, a marriage is a disease. You just decide to embrace it or not, and so it’s more of a creative affair.

  Corey: How is Buddy Love?

  Scott: He’s excellent; he’s really good. He just got back from the Middle East, so he’s a little tired. He needs some down time.

  Corey: Buddy seems to celebrate some of the elements that make up gay stereotypes. How much of Buddy is in you?

  Scott: It allows me to say things that I think people wouldn’t listen to in my own voice. It allows me in some ways to say the un-say-able. Somehow the accent lulls people into a false sense of security, like ‘Oh, I know what this is; it’s a stupid queen.’ Then he hits you with something that’s pretty smart and he’s actually kind of tough and aggressive in a way. His femininity I find very alpha—an alpha queen. That’s basically how I see him.

  Corey: What kind of advice would Buddy have for someone coming out of the closet?

  Scott: One step at a time and, you know, just remember what you see now. In the future, you’re gonna look back upon it and be mighty embarrassed by a lot of it, but don’t be ashamed. I mean, you get a little older and go ‘Wow, was I ever a hard-ass.’ You know, everybody has their own agenda. Just because your door’s opening doesn’t mean somebody else’s door is ready, and it might not ever be ready and it’s none of your business. That’s how I feel.

  Corey: You do a great impression of Queen Elizabeth. Have you heard if the royal family has seen you perform?

  Scott: I would love to know. I’m sure some of them have seen it, I’m sure. If the Queen saw me do the Queen, it would thrill me. A lot of comedians do her and especially in the Commonwealth, every comic does the queen, and I like to think mine’s the best. Not because I’m the best at it but because I look like her. I think there’s probably people that do it better, but they don’t look like her.

  And I just happen to have this weird genetic connection, I don’t know. I look at my father and he’s the same age as her and he looks just like her. You know how when people get old and men become women and women become men? It’s weird, because he’s her. Charles is my Dad and we are in some kind of line that was broke off like 1,000 years ago or something. The family looks like us; the boys look like my brothers. It’s weird. I th
ink that’s what I’ll do one day is a one-man show where I play all the members. Princess Anne’s a girl I could do, because I’m a pretty horse-y girl and so is she. She was never pretty.

  Corey: You guys all played women in the show. Who made the best one?

  Scott: Now or then? It’s so cruel. I just don’t want Dave Foley to read this. I would say Dave before.

  And now, I still say Dave. The face. He’s just got more feminine features. Oh, he knows; he’s very aware of it. He’s actually kind of perversely proud of it. It thrills me that I’m the ugliest woman, because I’m the gay guy and I’m supposed to be the best. We’re all about shattering stereotypes.