Joe Flaherty, the two-time Emmy-winning author and Second Metropolis alumnus who sparkled as Man Caballero, Depend Floyd, Huge Jim McBob and Sammy Maudlin as an authentic castmember on the landmark Canadian sketch comedy collection SCTV, has died. He was 82.
The actor’s daughter, Gudrun Flaherty, confirmed his death to the Canadian Press. He died Monday. No different particulars had been instantly accessible.
A local of Pittsburgh, Flaherty additionally was recognized for his stint as A-1 Sporting Items proprietor Harold Weir (the daddy of Linda Cardellini and John Francis Daley’s characters) on the 1999-2000 NBC collection Freaks and Geeks and for his flip as a Western Union man in Again to the Future Half II (1989).
And on the 1990-93 Canadian-American sitcom Maniac Mansion, created by SCTV teammate Eugene Levy, he performed the scientist dad Fred Edison whereas writing and directing for the present as effectively.
A grasp of sketch and improv comedy, Flaherty bought his begin with the Second Metropolis comedy troupe at its Chicago flagship earlier than transferring to Toronto in 1973 to assist open a brand new outpost in Canada.
From there, he segued to SCTV, which debuted on the International community in Canada in 1976 and featured different authentic gamers Levy, Catherine O’Hara, John Sweet, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas and Harold Ramis.
Flaherty thrived on all six seasons of the present by means of 1984, taking part in such characters as Caballero, the shady, shameless proprietor of the fictional SCTV station; Floyd Robertson, the intense anchor of the Melonville Nightly Information, and Depend Floyd, the vampiric host of Monster Chiller Horror Theatre; the flashy talk-show host Maudlin; and McBob, the Farm Report host and film reviewer who, with Sweet’s Billy Sol Hurok, made celebrities “blow up real good.”
In the meantime, Flaherty shared 9 Emmy nominations for excellent writing in a spread or music program on SCTV, successful in 1982 and ’83.
“We didn’t have a producer, no one instructed us what to put in writing, who to attraction to, we simply wrote for ourselves,” he mentioned in a 1999 interview with the Pittsburgh Put up-Gazette. “We had been the inmates working the asylum. We created our personal little world and it paid off. … I want we may do it once more.”
The son of a manufacturing clerk at Westinghouse Electrical, Flaherty was born on June 21, 1941, and raised within the Homewood part of Pittsburgh. As a youngster, he studied performing on the Pittsburgh Playhouse.
“I undoubtedly consider myself as extra of an actor than a comic book — my coaching was in drama, I solely fell into comedy by chance,” he told the Globe and Mail in 2002. “And I believe individuals are shocked after they meet me, as a result of they count on me to be entertaining and humorous, like a stand-up. I’m simply not that manner.”
From left: John Sweet (as Dr. Tongue), Joe Flaherty (as Depend Floyd) and Eugene Levy (as Woody Tobias Jr.) on ‘SCTV’
Courtesy Everett Assortment
Flaherty left Westinghouse Excessive College to spend 4 years within the U.S. Air Drive, attended Level Park Faculty for a 12 months and labored as a draftsman earlier than transferring to Chicago to take a job as a stage supervisor for Second Metropolis in 1969.
Within the wings, “I watched it and simply liked it,” he instructed Jen Sweet (John Sweet’s daughter) on a 2020 installment of her Couch Candy show. “Little sketches, humorous bits, satiric bits, after which afterward they’d improvise. I assumed, ‘Wow, that is nice. I’ve bought to be part of this.’ “
Flaherty was promoted to author and performer and labored alongside the likes of Brian Doyle-Murray, Ramis and John Belushi. 4 years later, he, Doyle-Murray and others headed to Toronto to arrange store there, and he had a hand in hiring Sweet, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd and others.
Flaherty additionally did the Nationwide Lampoon Radio Hour in 1973-74 with Belushi, Radner, Invoice Murray and Chevy Chase and spent a 12 months in Los Angeles serving to to open a Second Metropolis in Pasadena earlier than returning to Toronto.
The success of NBC’s Saturday Evening Stay, which had bowed in October 1975, made satire a scorching commodity and helped SCTV get a inexperienced mild.
“Politically, it was charged. Saturday Evening Stay simply took off. It helped us. The producers at Second Metropolis determined to start out up a TV present. They wished to maintain the actors completely happy and provides us an opportunity to do extra,” Flaherty said in 2004.
Whereas he was engaged on the primary season of SCTV, he did double obligation on one other Canadian TV program, The David Steinberg Present.
On SCTV, Flaherty did impressions of Bing Crosby, Alan Alda, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, Peter O’Toole and others. And when Depend Floyd wasn’t teasing such Monster Chiller Horror Theatre flicks as Dr. Tongue’s 3-D Home of Slave Chicks and Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin Pennsylvania, he was being thanked on Alice Cooper’s Particular Forces album and introducing Rush’s “The Weapon” on the Canadian band’s 1984 Grace Under Pressure tour.
Flaherty and different SCTV performers reunited in 2008 for the primary time in 24 years at Second Metropolis Toronto for a charitable fund-raiser, then bought collectively a decade later on the Elgin Theater for An Afternoon With SCTV, a stay occasion hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.
He famously heckled Adam Sandler’s character in Completely happy Gilmore (1996), had recurring roles on Police Academy: The Sequence and The King of Queens and taught comedy writing at Humber Faculty in Toronto.
He additionally appeared on the large display screen in Tunnel Imaginative and prescient (1976), 1941 (1979), Used Automobiles (1980), Stripes (1981), Heavy Metallic (1981), Going Berserk (1983), Comply with That Hen (1985), One Loopy Summer season (1986), Innerspace (1987), Who’s Harry Crumb? (1989), Stuart Saves His Household (1995), Detroit Rock Metropolis (1999) and Freddy Bought Fingered (2001).
Survivors embody his youthful brother, Paul Flaherty, who wrote for SCTV and different exhibits like Muppets Tonight, and his youngsters, Gabriel and Gudrun. He was married to Judith Flaherty for 20 years till their 1996 divorce.
Mike Barnes contributed to this report.
