When John Candy was a newcomer at Second City in Chicago in 1973, he was paired with another rookie comedian. “I started the same day as John Candy,” said Bill Murray on The Tonight Show last year. Candy and Murray on the same stage? Sounds terrific — but Murray says it was anything but.
“We were both terrible,” he confessed. “We were both lousy, and no one would work with us. So it was just Candy and I looking at each other like, ‘I guess it’s us again, you know?’”
That was the year when the Second City cast was known as the Seven Giant Goyim because every cast member was a Gentile more than six feet tall, according to The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray. The other five giants wanted nothing to do with Murray and Candy, at least according to Murray, leading to their frequent collabs.
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When the two worked together, the result was “endless death, incredible death.” One sketch was set in a delicatessen in India called, you guessed it, the New Deli. Murray said the bit was “the dumbest thing I’ve ever been a part of.”
Candy’s early days on the Canadian Second City stage didn’t go much better. “John Candy came into the company when they were trying to get it going up in Toronto,” remembered comedian Tino Insana in The Second City Unscripted: Revolution and Revelation at the World-Famous Comedy Theater. “We’d make entrances and exits through all the doors and different slots and nooks and crannies on the stage. And on John’s first night, I made my entrance that I had been making for the two months of the run, and he made his exit, and we collided. Blam!”
It took a while for Candy to find his footing. “For a long time, when John didn’t know what to do onstage — he wasn’t able to find his place — it was like he wasn’t there. He would disappear in front of you,” explained Sheldon Patinkin, an artistic consultant at Second City. “It took him a long time to get past that. He would just go blank. It was trying to figure out what to do next.”
But Candy found his confidence soon after his return to the Toronto stage. He helped the struggling Second City company regain its stature, along with the help of future SCTV stars like Dave Thomas and Catherine O’Hara. Joe Flaherty called him “Johnny Toronto,” as much a part of the Canadian Second City’s identity as John Belushi was to its Chicago counterpart.
“It was very exciting to perform with him, because he could pick you up with one hand,” said Dan Aykroyd. Candy would “go onstage after having a couple, and it would be unpredictable. He picked Dave Thomas and I up and swung us around like beer barrels one night. He picked me up, threw me over one shoulder, picked Dave up and threw him over one shoulder, then twirled us around like a propeller and dropped us.”
Thomas was also in awe of Candy’s strength, which turned out to be a comedy superpower. “I could run at him and jump up and tuck myself into a ball and he would catch me like a football, barely even rocking on his heels,” Thomas remembered. “It was hilarious.”
Maybe Bill Murray should have just jumped into Candy’s arms during those lousy early days.
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