What made John Candy great? A new book is a welcome reminder.
My favorite John Candy moment is just a blink in a semiobscure skit.
It’s from “SCTV,” the Canadian sketch comedy series, and Candy, wearing a suit and a fluffy blond wig, is playing drums for a gawky rock trio with Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy on “The Pre-Teen Telethon for Pre-Teen World!” The Recess Monkeys hit the chorus of Chilliwack’s “My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone)” and the cameras focus on our guy.
He needs to deliver just one line but as soon as the attention turns to him, adolescent terror washes over. This is not going to be easy. In the end, Candy tries, but the pressure leads him to choke-swallow a chunk of his delivery.
It’s a small moment, certainly nothing on the level of Del Griffith’s orgasmic sock removal in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” or Uncle Buck rolling up to poor Tia’s high school in the smoking Mercury Marquis. But it’s a perfect example of Candy’s gift. Whether he was in a goofy skit with his pals or stuck in one of Hollywood’s awful ideas (anybody remember “Armed and Dangerous”?), Candy always delivered.
Now he’s the subject of a new book by Paul Myers, writer and host of “The Record Store Day Podcast.” (He’s also comedian Mike Myers’s brother.) Myers is what I call an “apprecianist,” a documenter of the semi-forgotten or undervalued with previous books on “The Kids in the Hall” and British blues musician Long John Baldry. His writing tends to be straightforward and simple, meant to root the material in the extensive interviews he uses to make his case.
In “John Candy: A Life in Comedy,” that allows us to immerse ourselves in a comic actor who has been largely forgotten since his death, at just 43, in 1994.
If you were of viewing age in the 1980s, you knew Candy. He made $3 million a movie and could carry a film (“Uncle Buck,” “Only the Lonely”) or just show up (“Stripes,” “JFK,” “National Lampoon’s Vacation”) to steal a scene.
He was a big guy, a high school football player until suffering a knee injury, and weighed somewhere north of 325 pounds most of his adult life. And that size gave him the curse/blessing of the easy laugh, a tool also employed by John Belushi and later Chris Farley and Kevin James. But Candy’s true gift was his range. As Ben Stiller tells Myers, Candy’s specialty was to deliver a performance that was “vulnerable and real within some very unreal situations.” So we get the famous shutdown scene in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” in which Candy, in his salesman mustache and gloriously tacky pajamas, delivers a speech that turns Steve Martin’s raging advertising executive into rubble.
“You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better,” he starts before delivering the lines that could be his epitaph. “You think what you want about me. I’m not changing. I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. Cuz I’m the real article. What you see is what you get.”
Myers makes a solid case that Candy’s gravitas was rooted in how much the real man shared with his characters. He was defined by family, both lost and rebuilt. His father, Sidney, died of a heart attack at just 35, when Candy was not yet in first grade. As a young comedian, he went out on a blind date with Rosemary Hobor, an art student in Ontario, and fell in love. They married in 1979 and had two kids, Jennifer and Christopher. Candy’s professional drive left him constantly struggling to balance work (the rented house in Los Angeles) and home (the 10-acre farm north of Toronto). The public manifestation of his inner conflicts seemed to center on food, a constant theme of the book, as Candy bounces between the fashionable, low-fat Pritikin diet to the pizza and candy bars stocked in his trailer. The smoking and drinking didn’t help.
“I think he had this little broken heart inside of him,” Steve Martin tells Myers.
In his charming foreword, Dan Aykroyd notes that Candy was a Kleenex salesman and was driving a Royal Mail truck when they met, “so we were both just honest working men with a shared love of comedy greats, movies, music, and laughter.”
The fact that Candy existed in the pre-TMZ era gives Myers ample space to maneuver this material tastefully. He also spoke to nearly everyone in Candy’s orbit — his children, old friends and collaborators, as well as A-list icons he worked with, including Levy, Moranis, Martin, Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Catherine O’Hara, Tom Hanks and Mel Brooks. We get details about his generosity, whether demanding that producers get the Irish screen legend Maureen O’Hara a bigger trailer when they were filming 1991’s “Only the Lonely” or having turkeys delivered to the 200 cast and crew members working on the film.
Myers also does an excellent job showing the symbiotic nature of Candy’s relationship with John Hughes, a professional pairing that allowed “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles” writer/director to explore more adult themes. That led to “Planes,” and “Uncle Buck” as well as Candy’s small but memorable part in “Home Alone” as “Polka King of the Midwest” Gus Polinski.
What would have come next? We’re left wondering whether Candy, as he entered middle age, might have finally been able to tackle his dream role — Ignatius J. Reilly in “A Confederacy of Dunces” — or develop a second act sparked by one of the auteurs (Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson?) who were growing up during his rise.
What “A Life in Comedy” does best, though, is give us an excuse to luxuriate in YouTube clips and easily streamable films. (There’s also a new documentary, “John Candy: I Like Me,” if it’s more backstory you want.) These works serve as reminders of the happiness John Candy spread, the “little confections that remain with us for years and years,” as Mike Myers tells his brother near the end of the book. “You are happy to see him the second he appears on the screen.”