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Dan and Jay's Comedy Hour. The Podcast. · Jason Klamm

Episode 313 – I Just Wanna Make Things and Play – with Paul Myers

·1 hr 7 min·1 clip
John Candy gave Mike Myers genuine career advice on the street.
Dan and Jay's Comedy Hour hosts interview Paul Myers, author of John Candy: A Life in Comedy, a three-year research project involving 100+ interviews with comedy legends including Joe Flaherty, Dave Thomas, Dan Aykroyd (who wrote foreword), and Catherine O'Hara. The discussion explores John Candy's trajectory from sketch comedy to beloved film actor (Planes Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck, Cool Runnings), his status as a mensch, and his outsized influence on American comedy despite being Canadian. Paul discusses his research methodology and broader Canadian comedy phenomenon of the 1970s-80s (SCTV, SNL era), examining how representation matters to marginalized viewers and how Toronto's comedy salon culture created an exportable cultural phenomenon. The conversation weaves Paul's own childhood creativity (cassette recordings, bucket ball games) with media history analysis, revealing comedy as familial inheritance.

As heard by us

A delayed but easygoing John Candy conversation that opens out into comedy history and the music around it.

Paul Myers sits down with Dan and Jay to talk about John Candy, A Life in Comedy, and the conversation keeps drifting into the records and comedy scenes that shaped them.

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Why you'd press play

You want a John Candy conversation that opens out into a bigger comedy-era hangout.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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