Super Dave team remembers laughs
Actor and writer Bob Einstein was best known for his character Super Dave Osborne.
While playing daredevil Super Dave Osborne was supposed to be a gag, the character’s co-creator and star, Bob Einstein, often veered outside the safety zone of comedy, \his costars say.
Einstein was so committed to his parody of an Evel Knievelesque stuntman that he would get into actual mishaps on set, said Don Lake, a Toronto-born actor who worked for decades with the late comedian, who died on Jan. 2 at 76.
Lake remembers Einstein’s dedication to Super Dave, a role that made him a staple of 1990s Canadian TV. His show followed the accident-prone character’s ambitious stunts — each one failing miserably with some kind of simulated, spectacular injury.
Many times, Einstein narrowly dodged real accidents, Lake said — once, he barely missed being trampled by a horse — but some of those were hilarious experiences for the production crew, he insisted.
“You would kind of go, ‘Oh wow, that was close.’ And the second you said that, you’d start laughing,” Lake said.
While Einstein wasn’t Canadian, “he loved spending the summers in Toronto” during production, Lake said. “His daughter would be out of school and join him, so it was kind of a fun summer camp.”
Einstein’s Winnipeg-born comedy writing partner, Allan Blye, recalls one singer who Einstein was determined to get on his show — k.d. lang.
“I recall he was adamant,” Blye said. “Come hell or high water, k.d. lang was going to appear on the Super Dave show, which she did.”