061. Who are the country’s leading stand-up comedians?
Mark Breslin answered this question in his book, The Yuk Yuk’s Guide to Canadian Stand-up (2009). A student of comedy, Breslin knows what is funny ... or at least what is comic. It was 1974 when, in Toronto, he founded the Yuk Yuk’s chain of comedy clubs, which has sixteen locations across Canada.
He was asked to name the “ten most influential Canadian stand-ups” by Bruce Demara, who published the list in “Breslin a No-brainer for Book,” The Toronto Star, November 8, 2009. Here is his choice of names, in alphabetical order:
1. Dave Broadfoot.
2. Brent Butt.
3. Jim Carrey.
4. Larry Horowitz.
5. Elvira Kurt.
6. Mike MacDonald.
7. Howie Mandel.
8. Paul Mandell.
9. Russell Peters.
10. Kenny Robinson.
Although these comics are known to write and perform their own material, he leaves off the list those people who are strictly writers or movie and television personalities known for their light comic touches. Among the Canadian performers and contributors to the Second City revues and Saturday Night Live are such talented comedians and comic actors as Leslie Nielsen, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, etc. All of them make Canadians — as well as North Americans — laugh (and sometimes groan!).
062. Who discovered the Calypso borealis?
John Muir discovered and described the Calypso borealis, a rare white orchid that he encountered on his trek across the Holland Marsh, north of Toronto. At the time (1865–66) he was in his mid-twenties and a wanderer, working as a sawmill-hand and living in a log cabin outside Meaford, Ontario. In 1892 he established the Sierra Club to protect the environment.
“The flower was white and made the impression of the utmost simply purity, like a snow flower,” he recalled at the age of seventy-one. “It seemed the most spiritual of all the flower people I had ever met. I sat down beside it and fairly cried for joy. It seems wonderful that so frail and lovely a plant has such power over human hearts. This Calypso meeting happened some forty-five years ago, and was more memorable and impressive than any of my meetings with human beings excepting, perhaps, Ralph Waldo Emerson and one or two others.”
These details come from Cameron Smith’s column “Muir’s Long Cabin the Bush,” the Toronto Star, October 11, 2003.
063. Who was Quebec’s “rural cartoonist”?
One of the country’s most charming illustrators was Albert Chartier, born and trained in Montreal in 1912, where he worked as a freelance illustrator. “For almost sixty years, from 1943 until 2002, Chartier drew the monthly comic strip Onésime for Le Bulletin des Agriculteurs, a magazine that, like The Old Farmer’s Almanac, remains a fixture of rural Québécois life.” So wrote Jett Heer, in “Culture High and Low,” National Post, November 20, 2003.
The central character of his comic strip is Onésime, a chinless, pipe-smoking, Walter Mitty figure of a man who is married to Zéonïde, an opera-going matron. As Heer points out, Chartier’s subject is rural attitudes, but his style was as modern and cosmopolitan as the cartoons that appeared in The New Yorker of the day.
Chris Oliveros, publisher of Drawn and Quarterly, in Volume 5, fall 2003, devoted more than seventy pages to the reproduction and study of Chartier’s art, which may be compared and contrasted with that of Jimmy Frise, who at approximately the same time drew “Birdseye Center” for the Toronto Star Weekly. Chartier’s audience was at once more rural and more sophisticated than Frise’s.
064. Was Sir Henry Baskerville a Canadian?
Sir Henry Baskerville is the principal character in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). In the Sherlock Holmes mystery, Sir Henry is an Englishman “who had been farming in Canada until he inherited a baronetcy from his uncle, Sir Charles Baskerville, upon the latter’s mysterious death.” The location of Sir Henry’s farm is unspecified in the novel, but Doyle wrote that he bought his boots in Toronto, from a bootmaker named Meyers. (The “Meyers, Toronto” reference led to the founding of the fan group known as the Bootmakers of Toronto in 1972. At the turn of the century, a shoemaker named Meyers had a shop on Wellington Street in the city. Donald Campbell Meyers was a leading psychiatrist at the turn of the century in Toronto.) He returns to the Moors and is confronted with the mysterious Hound! Further details appear in Christopher Redmond’s article “Sherlock Holmes from Sea to Sea” in Lasting Impressions: The 25th Anniversary of the Bootmakers of Toronto, The Sherlock Holmes Society of Canada (1997), edited by George A. Vanderburgh.
065. Was Sherlock Holmes a Canadian?
Enthusiasts of the Sherlock Holmes stories enjoy arguing strange theses and proving odd theories, such as the fact that Dr. Watson was five-times married and the suggestion that Holmes was a Canadian. The latter notion stems entirely from the fact that Canadians have the habit of adding “eh?” to the ends of their sentences. Holmes, it seems, uses the construction a number of times, notably in his first adventure, A Study in Scarlet (1887), where he says to Watson, “I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I ever came across: a study in scarlet, eh?”
066. What is “The Scarlet Claw” all about?
In the Universal Studios movie The Scarlet Claw (1944), Basil Rathbone plays Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce appears as Dr. Watson. It is a propaganda film set in Quebec City and the rural village of “La Morte Rouge.” As Christopher Redmond wrote in “Sherlock Holmes from Sea to Sea,” Lasting Impressions: The 25th Anniversary of the Bootmakers of Toronto, The Sherlock Holmes Society of Canada (1997), edited by George A. Vanderburgh:
Holmes solves a series of murders which are initially being blamed on a monster or a supernatural influence. The film ends with a coy scene in which Holmes and Watson are driving through a forest on the first stage of their journey home to England. Watson says he would like to have seen more of Canada on the trip, and Holmes agrees, speaking in the style of a civics textbook about Canada’s “relations of friendly intimacy with the United States on the one hand and their unswerving fidelity to the British Commonwealth and the motherland on the other. Canada, the link which joins together these great branches of the human family.”
The film appeared the year following the first Quebec Conference in September 1943, which saw the meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
067. Was Richard Hannay a Canadian?
Richard Hannay is a character in a series of popular thrillers written by the Scots novelist John Buchan. Hannay makes his debut in The Thirty-nine Steps (1915) as a South African mining engineer who recently settled in London. In later novels he joins the British Army, rises to the rank of general, and exposes a series of espionage rings, saving England from unspecified enemies on a number of occasions. This Hannay thus has no Canadian connection.
Yet, when Alfred Hitchcock filmed The 39 Steps (1935), described as “adapted from the novel by John Buchan,” he went out of his way to identify the hero as a Canadian. Hitchcock was assuring himself of a North-American market for the film by transforming an Australian hero into a Canadian one. In one of the film’s celebrated vaudeville scenes, Hannay — played by English actor Robert Donat — asks the character Mr. Memory, “How far is it from Winnipeg to Montreal?”
Mr. Memory (played by Wylie Watson) replies, “Ah, a gentleman from Canada. You’re welcome, sir. [Applause from the audience.] Winnipeg, the fair city of Canada and the capital of the province of Manitoba. Distance from Montreal? 1,454 miles. Am I right, sir?”
Hannay replies, “Quite right!”
Buchan’s novel remains in print to this day and is highly regarded by its readers; however, it is Hitchcock’s version of Richard Hannay that most people remember, not specifically as