{"id":154596,"date":"2025-09-13T19:54:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T19:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/154596\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T19:54:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T19:54:06","slug":"essential-documentary-for-comedy-heads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/154596\/","title":{"rendered":"Essential Documentary for Comedy Heads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe comedy revolution referred to by the title of Nick Davis\u2019s sharp and effusive documentary \u201cYou Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution\u2026\u201d is the one that took place on television in the \u201970s: the creation of \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d and \u201cSCTV\u201d and everything that grew out of them. \u201cYou Had to Be There\u201d makes the case that the Petri dish from which the DNA of those shows was sprung was the 1972 Toronto production of \u201cGodspell,\u201d the Jesus-and-his-followers-as-hippie-clowns musical that had rocked the world when it premiered on Broadway the year before. The Toronto production featured a young Martin Short<\/a>, Eugene Levy<\/a>, Andrea Martin<\/a>, Dave Thomas (all Canadian), and, from across the river, Detroit\u2019s own Gilda Radner \u2014\u00a0who was the very first performer to be cast on \u201cSaturday Night,\u201d a show created by Lorne Michaels, who was also Canadian.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou might say: Okay, those performers all got their start in \u201cGodspell\u201d \u2014 so what? But the niftiness of Davis\u2019s film is that it\u2019s about \u201cGodspell,\u201d and it\u2019s about something bigger than \u201cGodspell\u201d \u2014 a pop movement that didn\u2019t have a name yet, a cultural spirit that found its way into existence almost like (laughing) gas gathering in the air. In 1970, before all of this happened, what was comedy? It was stand-up \u2014 meaning the old guard (from Shelley Berman to Don Rickles) and also the new guard (the young Richard Pryor and George Carlin and Cheech and Chong). It was the Joyce-on-peyote counterculture antics of the Firesign Theater. It was the scorched-earth satire found within the pages of the National Lampoon. It was early Woody Allen.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the \u201cSaturday Night\u201d\/\u201dSCTV\u201d nexus represented something bold and new: a spark of performance that allowed the next generation of comedy to connect with its audience in an unprecedentedly immediate way. These weren\u2019t just comedians. They were merry pranksters turned rock stars. \u201cSaturday Night,\u201d during the year of its launch (1975-76), came to seem like the Beatles of comedy; \u201cSCTV,\u201d coming from up in Canada, was maybe the Stones. And the root of both shows can be traced back to what was happening onstage, and offstage too, in Toronto during that more than year-long run of \u201cGodspell.\u201d As extraordinary as artists like Pryor and Carlin were, the lifeblood of the new comedy revolution wasn\u2019t stand-up \u2014 it was improv. And that\u2019s the spirit celebrated in the documentary, the full title of which is \u201cYou Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way).\u201d What you were seeing in the Toronto \u201cGodspell\u201d were the unofficial first Not Ready For Prime Time Players before they dreamed they\u2019d be on prime time.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou Had to Be There\u201d opens with the documentary version of a self-deprecating joke \u2014 the director\u2019s confession that he\u2019s about to make a film about a fabled theater production\u2026but he has no film footage of it. Because none exists! There\u2019s an audiotape, recorded illegally by Martin Short, who used a cheap cassette recorder and two mics he hung on the chain-link fence that was part of the show\u2019s set. So we do get to hear chunks of the show. And near the end, the film hits us with a special piece of footage that feels like a gift \u2014 especially as we see the players\u2019 reactions to it. But why make a movie about a production that was, in essence, never recorded?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s like the dilemma Todd Haynes faced when he made his documentary about the Velvet Underground (there is almost no footage of the VU in performance). Davis, like Haynes, comes up with ingenious ways to fill the void. He represents the show with witty animated sequences. The film makes canny use of Short\u2019s cassette tape.<\/p>\n

\n\tMostly, though, the players, now in their seventies, sit back and reminisce, so that we get a sense of how Martin Short, for instance, grew up pretending to be Frank Sinatra in his bedroom, and how the prospect of going to college in what was then the very stuffy city of Toronto struck all of them with a faint despair, which is why they landed at the \u201cGodspell\u201d audition, which so many hundreds of people showed up for that it felt (in hindsight) like an \u201cAmerican Idol\u201d cattle call, all of them competing for 10 roles. But various performers rose to the top through sheer moxie, whether it was Radner singing \u201cZip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,\u201d Paul Shaffer proving to be such an ace accompanist that he was instantly tapped, by composer Stephen Schwartz, to be the show\u2019s musical director, or Victor Garber, with his soaring voice and beautiful baby face, so nailing the role of Jesus that he owned it from minute one and was, in fact, the only cast member who made it into the 1973 movie version.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet that hardly mattered, since what was forming was a community that the players now liken to the artists and writers of Paris in the \u201920s. That sounds pretentious, but when we hear another (surreptitious) tape of everyone hanging out in the house where the cast members would gather on Friday nights, after the show (where they\u2019d be joined by folks like Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O\u2019Hara, and John Candy), you hear the effervescence of this group of people all trying to top each other. Comedy was their communication, their jam session, their way of connecting. Life itself had become improv.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGodspell\u201d is a show with a handful of terrific songs, notably the incandescent Bacharach-esque \u201cDay by Day,\u201d but onstage it was essentially the Book of Matthew staged as a childlike free-for-all. It was \u201cJesus Christ Superstar\u201d crossed with a vaudeville version of \u201cPee-wee\u2019s Playhouse.\u201d The actors performing the show eight times at week at the Royal Alexandra Theatre didn\u2019t act so much as they riffed. And by the time Eugene Levy took over the role of Jesus (and refused to wax his body hair off, so they stuck him in a sleeveless T-shirt), it had become a joke that the audience was in on. The actors became local celebrities, and that, of course, was just the beginning. To say that the Toronto \u201cGodspell\u201d ignited the comedy revolution is to embrace a view that feels very chauvinistically Canadian. It\u2019s not anything you can prove. Yet there\u2019s passionate testimony from the likes of Mike Meyers and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who hails the show as \u201cthe \u201927 Yankees of comedy.\u201d \u201cYou Had to Be There\u201d shows you that something was in the air up there, and that it spread like the world\u2019s happiest virus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The comedy revolution referred to by the title of Nick Davis\u2019s sharp and effusive documentary \u201cYou Had to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[94770,88,86389,50988,206,46687,94771],"class_list":["post-154596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-andrea-martin","tag-entertainment","tag-eugene-levy","tag-martin-short","tag-movies","tag-toronto-film-festival","tag-you-had-to-be-there-how-the-toronto-godspell-ignited-the-comedy-revolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}