At A Glance
Born:
Johnny Wayne (John Louis Weingarten) on May 28th, 1918
Frank Shuster on September 5th, 1916
Where: Toronto, ON
First Big Break:
Their First Show was “Wife Preserves”, on CFRB in Toronto, in 1941
"founding fathers of English Canadian television comedy"
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Wayne and Shuster are widely acknowledged as the founding fathers of English
Canadian television comedy. Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster met at Harbord
Collegiate Institute in Toronto. They both studied at the University of
Toronto where they wrote and performed for the theatre there, and in 1941,
they began their first radio show for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
They enlisted in the Canadian army during World War II, and performed for
the troops in Europe. In fact, they wrote and starred in "The Invasion
Review," the first show to hit the beaches of Normandy after D-Day. They
returned to Canada to create the Wayne and Shuster Show on CBC Radio in
1946.
In 1958, they got their real big break when they appeared for the first time
on the Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan’s ratings had been slipping and it is
widely believed that the injection of Wayne and Shuster's intellectual
slapstick saved the show. They were given a one-year contract, which was
renewed repeatedly, allowing them complete freedom for their sketch writing.
They set a record there by appearing 67 times over the next 11 years. In
1962 and 1963, "Motion Picture Daily" and "Television Today" ranked the duo
as the best comedy team in America.
They performed "literate" comedy that was peppered with slapstick. They
often used classical or Shakespearean settings and characters; on their
first Ed Sullivan appearance, for example, they performed a modern murder
investigation using Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in a sketch called "Rinse
the Blood off My Toga." Many fans can still recite the lines from that
skit, in which a rubber-faced Johnny played the toga-ed detective to
Shuster's handsomely devious Brutus. Throughout the skit, Caesar's widow
Calphurnia cries out: "I told him, Julie, don't go, but he wouldn't listen."
They always came back to Toronto and produced their own television specials
for the CBC. "The Wayne and Shuster Show" was a perpetual favourite with
Canadian viewers from 1954 to 1989. Frank Shuster played the perfect
straight man to Johnny Wayne's manic man. While their humour started feeling
dated by the 80s, they were still an influence on future Canadian comedians
like Lorne Michaels (Shuster's son-in-law) and The Kids in the Hall. The
syndication of their shows around the world remains today the largest
grossing profit from programming sales for CBC.
Johnny Wayne died in 1990. Frank Shuster, who passed away in 2002, was
appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 1997 and lived to see his
star on Canada's Walk of Fame in 1999.
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Inductees
