https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/joe-flaherty-dead-
sctv-1235864525/

Joe Flaherty, Original ‘SCTV’ Castmember, Dies at 82
He drew laughs as Guy Caballero, Count Floyd, Big Jim McBob and others on
the famed sketch comedy show after Second City stints in Chicago and
Toronto.

BY ETAN VLESSING

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APRIL 2, 2024 9:09AM

Joe Flaherty, the two-time Emmy-winning writer and Second City alumnus who
sparkled as Guy Caballero, Count Floyd, Big Jim McBob and Sammy Maudlin as
an original castmember on the landmark Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV,
has died. He was 82.

His daughter, Gudrun Flaherty, told the Canadian Press he died Monday
after a brief illness.

A native of Pittsburgh, Flaherty also was known for his stint as A-1
Sporting Goods owner Harold Weir (the father of Linda Cardellini and John
Francis Daley’s characters) on the 1999-2000 NBC series Freaks and Geeks
and for his turn as a Western Union man in Back to the Future Part II
(1989).

And on the 1990-93 Canadian-American sitcom Maniac Mansion, created by
SCTV teammate Eugene Levy, he played the scientist dad Fred Edison while
writing and directing for the show as well.

A master of sketch and improv comedy, Flaherty got his start with the
Second City comedy troupe at its Chicago flagship before moving to Toronto
in 1973 to help open a new outpost in Canada.

From there, he segued to SCTV, which debuted on the Global network in
Canada in 1976 and featured other original players Levy, Catherine O’Hara,
John Candy, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas and Harold Ramis.

Flaherty thrived on all six seasons of the show through 1984, playing such
characters as Caballero, the shady, shameless owner of the fictional SCTV
station; Floyd Robertson, the serious anchor of the Melonville Nightly
News, and Count Floyd, the vampiric host of Monster Chiller Horror
Theatre; the flashy talk-show host Maudlin; and McBob, the Farm Report
host and movie reviewer who, with Candy’s Billy Sol Hurok, made
celebrities “blow up real good.”

Meanwhile, Flaherty shared nine Emmy nominations for outstanding writing
in a variety or music program on SCTV, winning in 1982 and ’83.

“We didn’t have a producer, nobody told us what to write, who to appeal
to, we just wrote for ourselves,” he said in a 1999 interview with the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “We were the inmates running the asylum. We
created our own little world and it paid off. … I wish we could do it
again.”

The son of a production clerk at Westinghouse Electric, Flaherty was born
on June 21, 1941, and raised in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh. As a
teenager, he studied acting at the Pittsburgh Playhouse.

“I definitely think of myself as more of an actor than a comic — my
training was in drama, I only fell into comedy accidentally,” he told the
Globe and Mail in 2002. “And I think people are surprised when they meet
me, because they expect me to be entertaining and funny, like a stand-up.
I’m just not that way.”

Flaherty left Westinghouse High School to spend four years in the U.S. Air
Force, attended Point Park College for a year and worked as a draftsman
before moving to Chicago to take a job as a stage manager for Second City
in 1969.

In the wings, “I watched it and just loved it,” he told Jen Candy (John
Candy’s daughter) on a 2020 installment of her Couch Candy show. “Little
sketches, funny bits, satiric bits, and then afterward they would
improvise. I thought, ‘Wow, this is great. I’ve got to be a part of this.’
“

Flaherty was promoted to writer and performer and worked alongside the
likes of Brian Doyle-Murray, Ramis and John Belushi. Four years later, he,
Doyle-Murray and others headed to Toronto to set up shop there, and he had
a hand in hiring Candy, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd and others.

Flaherty also did the National Lampoon Radio Hour in 1973-74 with Belushi,
Radner, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase and spent a year in Los Angeles
helping to open a Second City in Pasadena before returning to Toronto.

The success of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which had bowed in October 1975,
made satire a hot commodity and helped SCTV get a green light.

“Politically, it was charged. Saturday Night Live just took off. It helped
us. The producers at Second City decided to start up a TV show. They
wanted to keep the actors happy and give us a chance to do more,” Flaherty
said in 2004.

While he was working on the first season of SCTV, he did double duty on
another Canadian TV program, The David Steinberg Show.

On SCTV, Flaherty did impressions of Bing Crosby, Alan Alda, Kirk Douglas,
Gregory Peck, Peter O’Toole and others. And when Count Floyd wasn’t
teasing such Monster Chiller Horror Theatre flicks as Dr. Tongue’s 3-D
House of Slave Chicks and Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin
Pennsylvania, he was being thanked on Alice Cooper’s Special Forces album
and introducing Rush’s “The Weapon” on the Canadian band’s 1984 Grace
Under Pressure tour.

Flaherty and other SCTV performers reunited in 2008 for the first time in
24 years at Second City Toronto for a charitable fund-raiser, then got
together a decade later at the Elgin Theater for An Afternoon With SCTV, a
live event hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.

He famously heckled Adam Sandler‘s character in Happy Gilmore (1996), had
recurring roles on Police Academy: The Series and The King of Queens and
taught comedy writing at Humber College in Toronto.

He also appeared on the big screen in Tunnel Vision (1976), 1941 (1979),
Used Cars (1980), Stripes (1981), Heavy Metal (1981), Going Berserk
(1983), Follow That Bird (1985), One Crazy Summer (1986), Innerspace
(1987), Who’s Harry Crumb? (1989), Stuart Saves His Family (1995), Detroit
Rock City (1999) and Freddy Got Fingered (2001).

Survivors include his younger brother, Paul Flaherty, who wrote for SCTV
and other shows like Muppets Tonight, and his children, Gabriel and
Gudrun. He was married to Judith Flaherty for 20 years until their 1996
divorce.

Mike Barnes contributed to this report

His sleazy, fully-ambulatory character Guy Caballero used a wheelchair merely to command "respect"...but Joe Flaherty himself truly EARNED the respect of anyone who scrutinized his many various comedic incarnations on SCTV--especially so in the series's long-form "Network 90" editions for two* remarkable seasons on NBC.

Theirs was a incessantly-inspired troupe which week-in, week-out on late-night Fridays** consistently outdid what any of the successive, far-more-celebrated SNL casts typically mustered on NBC.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
==================
* Memory failing here; perhaps the "SCTV Network 90" format merely lasted for a single-season, 1982-3 run?
** Meanwhile, those also-rans populating the cast of "Fridays" over on ABC always came off--due to overwrought comedic acting and even weaker writing--as the third-rate competitors to SCTV and SNL which they, in fact, were.

Actually, on further reflection, maybe I should have cut "Fridays" more slack.

It was a series I REALLY wanted to see succeed and maybe even overtake SNL as the de facto late-night standard. In those days I lived in Hollywood a couple miles west of where they staged it, and watched it religiously; regret never making it into the audience, as it wasn't a difficult ticket to get. Really regret not there for the Andy Kaufman thing.

What annoyed me about Fridays was that most everything they did struck (the late-20s) me as forced. The overall effect was that production was less a tertiary competitor to SNL and SCTV than it was a third-rate knockoff, week-in, week-out.

In my always-inconsequential view, Fridays was terribly weighted down by the rather cockeyed production supervision of Mayberry-misfire and Burns & Schreiber grad Jack Burns...just as that perched bird weighted down Burns's shoulder so inexplicably.

The brilliant Larry David and ever-edgy Michael Richards were part of that mostly sorry Fridays cast, for sure--but way before their talents had matured into their respective Seinfeld-era primes. And while nobody would dispute that Melanie Chartoff is uber-talented, it took "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" to adequately showcase the wide range of her comedic gift.

But it IS true that Fridays produced two of the most memorable moments in late 20th Century late-night television:

(1) that matchless Stray Cats two-tune performance, a stunning yet long unheralded musical moment for the ages (thanks in large measure to Setzer's immactulate guitar work and soaring vocals); and
(2) Andy Kaufman's breaking of character during a marijuana-oriented sketch being broadcast live...a tableau the-by-then-long-freed political pot prisoner John Sinclair presumably would have enjoyed, even if not high.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
-----------------------
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiFq8_BISSA [Chartoff dances during warm-up "Stray Cat Strut", and the scorching "Rock This Town" immediately follows]
-----------------------
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN5vhvIAqY8
[First, Kaufman and Richards get into it, then Chartoff faces off with him, and Burns eventually joins in]
=================

Do you have anyone that you could talk to?

bryan_styble <radioactiveseattle@hotmail.com> wrote:
> His sleazy, fully-ambulatory character Guy Caballero used a wheelchair merely to command "respect"...but Joe Flaherty himself truly EARNED the respect of anyone who scrutinized his many various comedic incarnations on SCTV--especially so in the series's long-form "Network 90" editions for two* remarkable seasons on NBC.
>
> Theirs was a incessantly-inspired troupe which week-in, week-out on late-night Fridays** consistently outdid what any of the successive, far-more-celebrated SNL casts typically mustered on NBC.
>
> BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
> ==================
> * Memory failing here; perhaps the "SCTV Network 90" format merely
> lasted for a single-season, 1982-3 run?
> ** Meanwhile, those also-rans populating the cast of "Fridays" over on
> ABC always came off--due to overwrought comedic acting and even weaker
> writing--as the third-rate competitors to SCTV and SNL which they, in
> fact, were.

I loved John Roarke's version of Reagan of Fridays.
And of course the Brotherhood-mm of-mm Men-mm Who-mm Say-mm
"Mm"-mm Between-mm Words-mm!!

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.