Parody Beyond Compare

Remember “SCTV”?

Remember Eugene Levy crooning as a limp Perry Como, flopped across a sofa in a promo for a special titled, “Perry Como: Still Alive After All These Years”?

Remember Martin Short as Jerry Lewis, live from the Champs Elysees, and the boxing match between Short’s Fred Rogers and John Candy’s Julia Child? Remember “The Sammy Maudlin Show,” one of those talk charades where guests fawned over each other, and where Joe Flaherty’s cheesy host welcomed Catherine O’Hara’s fictional Lola Heatherton and Levy’s made-up Bobby Bittman, an insincere comic with a hair turban and a talentless wannabe little brother played by Rick Moranis?

Remember Dave Thomas’ Bob Hope and the Andrea Martin characters Edith Prickley and Pirini Schlerosi? Remember the “Moulin Rouge” parody, with Flaherty as Jose Ferrer playing Toulouse-Lautrec and Candy as Babe Ruth? Remember the “The Andy Griffith Show” spoof that Moranis hosted as “Merv Griffith,” with Levy as Floyd the barber and Thomas as impressionist Fred Travalena doing Jim Nabors?

Well, I do.

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Getting misty about old television shows has you resembling a creaky antique on a park bench railing against modern baseball players and insisting that no one today hits the ball like Ty Cobb.

Here goes anyway: No one today does parody like “SCTV.”

“Saturday Night Live”? Far too many whiffs, while “SCTV” batted about .800 during its TV run in the late 1970s and early 1980s, from syndication through a two-year late-night run on NBC to its slender last hurrah on cable’s Cinemax.

No one in the past did it like “SCTV” either. The early “Saturday Night Live”? Couldn’t carry “SCTV’s” bat. “In Living Color”? Long ball, low average. “The Carol Burnett Show”? Couldn’t hit the curve. “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour” in the 1950s? Great stuff, but let’s limit this to the modern era.

The occasion for this reel of oldies is a just-published backstage account of the brief, hilarious life of “SCTV” by one of its core talents: Dave Thomas, best known today as Brett Butler’s devoted friend, Russell Norton, on ABC’s “Grace Under Fire.”

“SCTV: Behind the Scenes” (published by McClelland & Stewart Inc.) is occasionally Dave Under Fire. But in a positive, rewarding way that admirers of this Canadian-bred, mostly stage-trained, brilliantly innovative comedy troupe will savor, reviewing the heat and passions swirling around Thomas in his various roles as producer, head writer and writer-performer. The latter designation applied to all cast members, for these were the Beatles of TV satire.

The book is essentially a medley of anecdotes from nearly everyone who worked on the show in its different versions, from executive producer Andrew Alexander to the writers and major cast members, all of the latter taking part here but Candy, who died in 1994, and Martin and Levy. In a phone chat last week, Thomas declined to say why these two wouldn’t participate.

Thomas’ book hasn’t bestseller in its veins, given “SCTV’s” scrawny ratings and relatively narrow exposure by U.S. television standards. And although a double-page photo of limp-wristed Flaherty, Levy, Candy and Thomas as the Village People alone is worth the price, those unfamiliar with “SCTV” probably will find the book a bore. But I euphorically zipped through its 272 pages in several hours, often bellowing aloud at memories evoked by its many photos and insider stories, ultimately feeling sad about the show’s absence.

Spun from the Toronto Second City company, “SCTV” was formatted as a fictional TV station with a full schedule of shoddy drivel, a way to satirize feature films along with TV because movies appear on television.

The show’s creative freedom was astonishing, with members of the company sealed off from interference and able to guide an idea “right through concept, script and production--right to air,” Thomas recalls in the book. “The audience got your ideas in their purest, most unfiltered form.”

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That didn’t sit well with NBC executives when “SCTV” went network, and the resulting friction is chronicled in the book.

It also candidly details the rise of Bob and Doug McKenzie--those goofy, beer-guzzling hosers created and played by Thomas and Moranis--and the cast tensions that arose when Bob and Doug emerged as break-out characters independent of “SCTV,” their popularity generating a successful comedy album and a movie, “Strange Brew,” that fizzled in the United States.

As Thomas acknowledges in the book, the McKenzies were hardly “SCTV’s” “A” material, and he attributes their initial fame to Americans loving “dumb characters.” He says that he and Moranis are now creating another Bob and Doug movie.

On “Grace Under Fire,” Thomas is an actor reading lines written by others, and he says he has no regrets about that or any of the other career choices he’s made.

It’s notable, however, that although many of the “SCTV” crowd have gone on to bigger things financially and commercially, none has since matched the inspired best he or she delivered on that show. Thomas says as much in the book: “We all may have done our best work at the beginning of our careers.”

That’s a startling admission from an artist. Yet I was uneasy in raising the subject with him, for as a featured regular on a successful sitcom, he surely is making more money and is known to more people now than at any time in his career.

Sensing where I was going with my fumbling, Thomas asked the question himself.

“You mean, am I a has-been? Believe me, I’ve thought about this a lot, and it’s possibly quite true, although I like to think I have more things to offer. I just left Marty [Short] a half-hour ago, and we were talking about this. We found that when we left ‘SCTV’ and tried to get our own shows going again, no one wanted to give us the power to write and do our own stuff. They’d look at what we’d show them and say, ‘Oh, real cute, but you’re performers.’ So our work would pale. It happened to John Candy. It happened to Rick Moranis. He finds himself on a set making a giant salary but really disgusted with the work he’s doing.”

So, that’s the history. Perhaps “SCTV” was one of those incomparable Camelots of the moment, a rare perfect mingling of creative juices in a perfect environment that could not be repeated even if its creators chose to do so. In any case, Thomas’ book is a grand way to stoke the memories.

Now, back to feeding the pigeons.