Flaherty parodying William F Buckley -- image via screenshot
By Gabriel Haythornthwaite
Joe Flaherty died appropriately enough this past April Fool’s Day at the age of 82. Appropriate because that day is historically a marker of the subversive satire Flaherty was unusually skilled at and dedicated to. The Anglo comedy world is much poorer for Flaherty’s exit from this mad planet.
Flaherty was, along with Dave Thomas, the head writer of the SCTV sketch show and TV universe. This was a showbiz team who had exceptionally funny things to say about the rightwing state of the world.
Guy Caballaro, Flaherty's most iconic SCTV alter-ego, was a wildly hilarious portrait of the utterly cynical and cowardly scumbag employer and two-bit media mogul.
This was true satire at work. A unctuous union-buster, a shameless shill for McCarthyism, a blithely bankrupt creative, a serial sexist pig, criminally corrupt to the point of writing hundreds of thousands in forged cheques (whitewashed by the SCTV corporate board)...the Caballero portrait was clearly most of the things that Flaherty hated.
Flaherty also must have correctly hated the aristocratic CIA spook-turned-media commentator William F Buckley. The comic’s caricature likely hit a nerve if the drama around Gore Vidal’s besting of Buckley in a polemical feud springing from a head-to-head confrontation at the 1968 Democratic Convention is anything to go by. In that rather funny spat, Buckley revealed an appalling lack of self-awareness or a self-sense of humour.
SCTV stands out as the most consistently brilliant political satire of its time and since. The ceaseless attacks on corporate corruption and business scumbaggery. The hard-hitting anti-colonialism best encapsulated in the sketch on How The Middle East Was Won. The hammering of corporate male women-hating. The bashing of US lies and commercial garbage.
Despite being an American, Flaherty was a key Canadian cultural figure in that strange time when the country had some hints of popular possibilities based on worker power and national freedom in the 70s and 80s.
This may well be why he never achieved the high commercial success of a number of his SCTV colleagues. Perhaps Flaherty was unwilling to do bank ads like Eugene Levy. In any case, his soul and legacy are better for it.
Gabriel Haythornthwaite is a PhD Candidate at Western University's Faculty of Education and a long-time political trouble-maker.