SEE HIM AFTER CLASS
Eric Volmers talks to comedian Gerry Dee about life after Mr. D
It’s hardly surprising that Gerry Dee uses a sports metaphor when comparing the two streams of his career.
Those would be standup comedy, which brings him to Edmonton’s Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium on April 24 and Calgary’s Jubilee on April 27, and his longrunning sitcom Mr. D, which is about to enter its eighth and final season and is based, albeit loosely, on Dee’s own experiences teaching sports and fitness to high school students for 10 years.
Unlike a lot of comedians who make the transition to television, Dee is not one to proclaim standup as his true or first love.
“It’s a tie for first,” he says. “I get asked that a lot. I’d really be lying if I chose one. I love the mix. Standup is solo — I call it my individual sport. Mr. D is my team sport. I grew up in sports and I always had both. I’d miss one if I didn’t have it.”
That said, Dee announced last month that Mr. D would come to an end next year, suggesting it felt like the right time to move on from Gerry Duncan, the blissfully clueless teacher he has played since 2012.
It’s hard to imagine the Canuck airwaves without Mr. D and also hard to imagine Gerry Dee’s comedy without references to his teaching past. He has been out of the classroom for more than a decade, but even some of the new material he’ll test drive in Alberta next week will deal with his time helping form young minds. It has been the driving force for him ever since he began moonlighting on the standup stage while teaching in Toronto. His classroom experiences made it into his standup, which seemed ready-made to make the jump to the small screen.
And, not unlike many comedians who parlay a standup routine into a sitcom, it’s often assumed the experiences of the staggeringly under-qualified Gerry Duncan teaching at the prestigious Xavier Academy weren’t all that different from Gerry Dee’s real-life approach to teaching. Luckily for his real students, that wasn’t the case, he says.
Still, while Duncan may often have been a disaster as a teacher, he obviously proved endearing to TV audiences.
“I think it’s that he doesn’t realize he’s an idiot,” Dee says. “I think there’s a difference between being an idiot on purpose and not trying to be. I think that’s why he gets away with it and why it works.
“He speaks his mind. He doesn’t hide anything. Most people don’t do that. He has no filter, but it doesn’t come from a bad place. He’s just a bit of a buffoon, and that’s why people accept it.”
It’s entirely possible Dee won’t miss sitcom life for long after Mr. D ends. As early as 2015, when Mr. D was entering its fifth season, Dee was talking about life after the Xavier Academy. At the time, he was developing a new CBC sitcom, which was tentatively called My Scottish Family.
That particular idea has been put on the back burner in favour of another sitcom that the comedian is developing for the Mother Corp.
He didn’t want to reveal too much about the premise, except to say the character he would be playing “is a much nicer character” than Gerry Duncan.
“I’m hopeful it will become the next sitcom you see on television starring me and some other great people,” he says. “You’re constantly developing and trying to work with the networks to see what the next show is.”
Maybe it’s because he entered comedy from the comfort of a relatively stable profession, but Dee has always seemed unusually pragmatic when it comes to the often erratic world of show business. He’s friendly but efficient during press interviews, and has never been the sort of comedian to waste a good joke on a journalist. He often credits his business smarts as the real secret to his success pushing his brand.
After some urging from friends, he began attending open mikes in Ontario in the 1990s. He eventually began performing on latenight television, including appearances for Mike Bullard and Craig Kilborn. In 2007, Dee made his first big splash in the U.S. when he placed third on the reality series Last Comic Standing.
But since then he has found most of his success in the Great White North, a fact that doesn’t seem to trouble him. He never dreamed his standup career would have him moving from the clubs to soft-seat theatres, which certainly makes him one of Canada’s most consistently successful standup acts.
“We’ve got some great talent here that I wish was more supported by our own,” Dee says. “(Canadians) will go see an American comedian who may be an actor from a sitcom but is about half as funny as the real comedian down the street at Yuk Yuk’s.”
Still, that doesn’t mean he won’t try to get U.S. interest in whatever TV project he gets off the ground next.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he says. “They are bigger. I don’t think they are better, but they are bigger and there are more opportunities sometimes. There’s no question — I’ve accepted if you get your show on in America, it’s going to do a lot for you worldwide. But I have a great relationship here with all the networks.
“I’m quite proud to be here. If it works, it works. I’m just not moving there and shipping out with my family for the American dream. That doesn’t interest me at my age.”