FUN WITH BOB & DOUG!

One vital reason for me to be in Toronto; recording artists Bob and Doug McKenzie (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, respectively), were being feted by their record company, Anthem, on their maiden release, Bob And Doug McKenzie. The plan was for me to attend the gala back bacon and Molsons bash and then talk the next day to 1981s newest recording stars. The party/press conference, held in a club within the Maple Leaf Gardens and master-minded by Anthem avatars Tom Berry and Perry Goldberg, was large, full of convivial toqued Canadians, and overflowing with good old Canadian lager, but so packed that 1 was forced to just listen to Bob & Dougs snappy repartee, as the news cameras whirred. Being a faithful Great White North viewer helped, though; the next morning I noted with the disdain of the true fan that the Toronto Star correspondent had gotten their dialogue all wrong. Said Dave later.Yeah, he gave me credit for a lot of his lines. I was pleased, actually, because a couple of them were really good! Like: ˜How do you feel about being nominated for the Order Of Canada?—˜We usually order in, I got credit for that!

I noted that I just heard the voice, and could tell it was Rick.

"I just heard the laughs, and I knew it was me, cracked Rick.

With just two Molsons coursing through my genetically-inferior American veins, I found myself being interviewed by a Hamilton, Ont. TV crew who couldnt find the bloke from Rolling Stone (he wasnt a writer anyway), and Im afraid, I just laughed. A lot. Then some guys from a Sarnia radio station put me on the spot withYeah, but why do you guys do so many Canadian jokes...? Knowing when Im beat by a superior, back-bacon fortified race, I made contact withBob & Doug to confirm our interview the next day, was shocked by anormal sounding Dave Thomas in his Doug gear, and, uh, took off. Only to be hauled off by Canadianfriends and force-fed the aforementioned exotic drinks—in asometimes gay bar, no less. Thanks, Don, Robert, Nick... So this is the big city, eh?

Just a word on the Bob & Doug phenomenon: many have asked ˜But what does it mean? Whats the joke? To this we say: Its like the miracle of back bacon. How it happened we dont know, eh? We just eat it, OK? Its no great chore for those of us who wetback it over to Canada a lot to understand, although apparently hot spots like Arizona Were the first to send fan mail to Bob & Doug ("Well, we could see why they might LUST for snow down there, smirked Dave).

Second Citys Sally Cochrane expressed chagrin that all of the kids clamoring for Bob and Doug werent getting the irony intended. Actually, I think the cultivation of stoo-pidity is a vital adolescent—nay, human—activity. We all revel in the asininity of Alfred E. Neuman, the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis, Iggy Pop. Its cathartic!

Rick and Dave met, according to Rick,...at a cabaret in Toronto where they used to feature live acts, and I was working with a partner, and Dave was doing a two-hander with Catherine. And about three years later we met at a party.

But when I spoke to Andrea, she squawkedWhen he met Dave! I was there the night he met Dave. They met at a party—not doing stand-up, just a party. They were playing fake harmonicas together, and then they became...Bob and Doug! Its history!

Or legend, anyway. Well, I met Bob & Doug, again, when they were brought to my hotel by the indefatigable PerryYou gotta eat! Goldberg, and we sat down to talk. Dave was suavely literary in sport jacket, sweater and jeans. Rick played it casual; blue chemise de flannel and jeans (When I pointed out that he was almost dressed likeBob, he shook his head.Oh, no! Bob always wears a red flannel shirt). I could sense a good deal of Bob and Doug in them, despite their sophisticated Rick and Dave personas; Dave would make a blatantly Doug-like obnoxious crack, to be shot down by the coolly Bob-like Rick between bites of pate. Having dinner with two guys with split second comic timing is...funny. 1 laughed like a hyena, talked like a dufe, and ate not a thing. The laughing started in earnest when I ordered a Baileys and Rick let out a Merv-ianMmmmm!

Dave, arent you from Dundas?

Dave: I was born in St Catherines [Ontario] and raised in Durham, North Carolina where I went to public school— Rick: Raised by wolves...

Dave: —And then I went to high school in Dundas.

So thats the origin of some of your Southern accents?

Dave-. Yes, maam. I have an affection fer the old South.

Rick: I was born in Downsview, which is why I do Jewish accents so well...

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Dave, didnt you meet Bob Hope...since youve been doing the Hope impression on the show?

Dave: I got a chance to meet him, and uh.. .FORCED him to watch my tapes. [To Rick] Just as Ive FORCED you to listen to this story a few times, with your tired eyes, but you can put up with it, because Ive heard a few of your pat answers in my day too!

Rick: Yeah, well, the press has heard a few of my pat answers, too.

Dave: Yeah, and now theyre mouthing them along with you!

So, apart from that time, in Toronto, youd never met Hope before?

Dave; No. Oh—yeah! Yeah, I met him twice before. The first time I met him was at the CNE [The annual Canadian National Exposition], in 64, 65, and I vaulted, just vaulted, over the stands and ran backstage to the area behind the big amphitheatre, where the actors were. I was about 15 or 16 at the time...and he was just getting into his limo, and my brother beat me—shook hands with him just as he was getting in. I shook hands with him as he was raising his power window, and he almost caught my hand in it!

So then, three years ago, I did a show with Marty Short and Andrea Martin and Catherine OHara, at the Playboy Gorge Club in New Jersey—a stage show. Anyway, Hope was there, too... I caught him, after the show...He was walking with four security guards and I was waiting outside his room...I stuck my hand out and I saidHi, Bob, how ya doing? and he saidHi. And I said,I met you once before, in 1964, when you tried to close my hand in your power window. And he saidNah, I didnt really do that, did I? And I saidYes you did, Bob. He saidWell, I must have been in a big hurry. I saidYeah, like you are now? He was walking and he stopped, and looked at his guys, arid looked at me, and said: Nah, Im not in that big of a hurry. Whats your name? I saidwell! If it means anything to you, my names Dave Thomas. And then I gabbed to him for about two or three minutes...

Did you remind him of it when you saw him in Torontd?

Dave-. Yeah, he didnt remember it at all! What did he say about the ˜˜Play It Again, Bob tapes you showed him?

Dave; He laughed, but he saidDont you think this is a little ˜in for the average viewer? I saidWell, I never thought it was more ˜in than I do now, Bob! And then.. .he was looking at my face a lot, and he was staring at me, and he said,Jeez, you dont look anything like me! And this writer, Jeff Barron, who works on our show [and had introduced him to Hope], Jeff explained that they do a lot of makeup on me. He goesYeah, yeah, OK. Ana then he scrutinized all these tapes...and he laughed at all the one-liners, the gags...the other stuff he just sort of squinted at, you know? I dont think the conceptual stuff grabbed him.

Rick, youve played guitar on the show — in the Neil Young skits...did you play on the Bob & Doug album at all?

Rick (laughs): I dont play that well! I know enough to fake my way through Jackie Stewarts Wide World Of High Voices, and thats about it, its not album quality...if worse comes to worse, I guess I could fake my way through a punk band.

Dont you have a lot of Bob & Doug stuff you havent used on the show?

Rick: Yeah, there must be about a hundred of them in the can. Theyre two-minute, single camera shots, so they take as long to shoot as they take to do, as opposed to a multi-cut, multi-location piece. So in an hour we can get.. .not quite 30, but close. We bank 30, 40 at a time, and run five out of those 40, because the rest, you know...cause theyre improv, a lot of them go nowhere...

Dave: And weve AIRED a lot of the ones that went nowhere, just because...we are cute, they looked cute, and we thought, lets risk it, for two minutes.

So how did that happen [Daves hand is swathed in a cast]? You were filming theWalter Cronkites Brain skit...

Dave-. The idea there was to burn rubber and have some fun. And unfortunately Im not as good a driver as I thought I was. I saw it on TV so many times, you know, on Adam-12, where the car will be roaring down the street one way, and then theyll hit the emergency brake and the gas, and then poooosh—come roaring back the other way. I just wanted to do that, and have it on film.

Rick: He pulled up in the Corvette, and his finger was hanging there, broken...so we stopped the shoot, and went to the emergency ward of the University of Alberta Hospital, as Cronkite and Brinkley. We shouldve shot that, cause it played really funny in the emergency ward. The doctor coming in,Uh, name please? [Does Dave doing Cronkite]:Wal-ter Cron-kite. (In Brinkley voice)And this is Da-vid Brink-ley. He broke his/in-ger. Werent you guys working on a Bob & Doug script?

Rick: We did. We wrote an outline for a Bob and Doug movie last spring. Dave was in Los Angeles working on another picture, and I was in Toronto, so we did it over the phone, cause there was interest in producing it, and we werent sure whether or not we were going to go ahead with the show. And then it got put on ice because of the show. If the show continues well do that, but if it doesnt, we may do a Bob & Doug movie. Well see...

Why is it that shows like Fridays stay so consistently juvenile?

Rick: Saturday Nights going through a lot of that, too...

What do you think of that sort of thing? Dave: Without a specific sketch or context, its real hard to say.. .all I can tell you is, last season we were asked by the network to put a drug-related piece at the beginning of each show, and a sex-related piece at the end of each show. Their reasoning being, the drug-related piece will bring in tne kids audience, and the sex-related pieces cant be shown early in the show because, as we all know, the people who have clean minds go to bed early, and the people who have dirty minds will enjoy it and stay up late. This is their reasoning, anyway.

Rick: People with clean minds—theyre awake to see the start of the show, at 12:30, to catch that drug-related piece. But then they go straight to bed after that drug-related piece, because theyre on drugs!

Dave-. I started laughing when they said that. I started laughing! I couldnt believe it. Rick: I did a series of David Brinkley editorials in the third season. One was on a Viletones concert, another was on his barber, and another was on the lack of availability of good hash. Those were just suppposed to run as little pacing moments late in the show, nothing intended. We handed a show to NBC and they reordered the thing and stuck it right up front. And...it just really bothered me, you know? Thats not why I wrote it—I didnt write it as a sensational little thing, it was just a joke.

Dave: And he certainly didnt write it to bag kids. I dont know, thats the stuff we dont even fight, we dont even fight that crap. Makes you wonder...It really does. Theres a lot of people in the entertainment business, especially since the oil companies bought out the studios, who believe that comedy—and entertainment in general— is mathematical; if they have a hit like Animal House, they try to break the movie into a formula, where they have, OK—a guy who goes into a cafeteria and eats all the food, and goes out and pukes, and pees on peoples shoes, and its at a school and its about young kids. OK. So well do another movie like that. And thats what creates the pile of derivative garbage sequels to a movie like that, that become a big success...

Does the network keep an eye on you up here?

Rick: We dont have problems with the censors because we just dont write that kind of stuff! I mean, we take our fair share of cheap shots, but its usually not based on drugs and sex or anything, so the censors dont usually have problems with our stuff. The network would like to see a more formulated approach to comedy; theyd ˜ like to see characters repeated because they worked the last time, and we dont do that just for the sake of repeating characters.

There really isnt much meanness to your satire...is there anyone you truly hate that you take off on on your show?

Rick: Theres so little malice...its a clean little family, and we write from 9:30 in the morning to 6:00, and then people go home and have their lives.. .theres nobody staying til three in the morning smoking hash and staying over on bunkbeds. Its... really kind of a blue collar show, you know?

Dave-. Ive heard people say that my impression of Bob Hope is really biting, that it really had an edge to it. ...I have such respect for that guy...theres certain things that people say,Why dont you do this as Hope, that wed never do, you know! Theres a line that I wont cross, with Hope.

Rick: On the air...

Dave.Yeah. Oh, just kidding around, weve done some stuff—

Rick: Thats theA material, as far as Im concerned.

Dave: But—theres a line, you know? [To Rick] Youre the same, you dont want to \ run across Woody Allen in New York and have him SPIT in your face,YOU PIG! You dont want that.

Rick: Nah...thats not why I wouldnt do stuff. I think the guys great—a great filmmaker and a great writer. Why should I pan him, huh?

What kind of music do you listen to these days?

Rick (laughs): I dont have time to listen to music.. .Ill listen to anything thats good,

I listen to classical or jazz or anything, but contemporary, the only thing that Ive really liked in the past few years is Becker & Fagen. Other than that, I just dont find anything that really—

You dont like the Police? (Tom Monroe...)

Rick: Oh, yeah! Of course! I love the Police!

Dave.I love the Police. Theyre great. He[Rick] turned me on to thisFriends Of Mr. Cairo [Jon & Vangelis, Polygram] thing when we were writing the Doorway To Hell act—and we used it as the theme because it has a hellish quality to it.

Thats pretty good singing, Rick—the Mel Torme stuff, the Gordon Lightfoot stuff— had you eversuna before?

Rick (laughs): Not professionally, no... Id like to do a musical album. A musical comedy album, stuff like that. Maybe thats the next album well do, something more musical, cause this album only has a couple of songs on it. And the rest is...in the spirit of Bob and Doug. Beer, back bacon and smokes!