Back to school with Gerry Dee
Canadian standup comic bringing the stories of his life to town
When I was in Grade 11, I had a gym teacher who — despite what I’m sure was a complete lack of training — was assigned to teach history every Tuesday and Thursday. In he would sprint, huffing and puffing with a basketball under one arm, to write “Greece” on the blackboard (while still holding the basketball) and fire off questions based on the reading assignment from the night before. “What was the basis for the Grecian economy — Sheldon? Tell me about the League of Corinth — Marla? What started the Peloponnesian War — Joel?” Other than a few goody goodies who loved to show off (and had no friends), few of us had read the assigned chapters. Which meant most teacher-pupil interactions quickly descended into petty standoffs over why the hell did we not do our homework, what were we doing instead — specifically — and why were we wasting Mr. Cheeseman’s valuable time? It wasn’t until years later that I realized this hairy, sweat-stained insult comic — who spent 90 per cent of the class calling out laggards and grilling them on their incompetence — was just as guilty as we were. Come on, who shows up to history class with a basketball and giant sweat blotches under his armpits? Who writes “Greece” on the blackboard in tiny capital letters, underlines it twice, then grills every student in the class like criminal suspects in a grand jury court case? Gerry Dee — who plays a similarly cocky (and inept) educator in the hit CBC series “Mr. D” — knows exactly what I’m talking about. “There’s a lot of great teachers out there, but there’s a lot like that,” notes the celebrated Canadian standup, recalling his own student (and later teaching) experiences at a private Toronto Catholic school. “I used to play euchre in my Grade 11 U.S. history class — with a priest. And I was on the hockey team, so I got an 80. I don’t even know if I wrote a test.” As a teacher, he proved equally unreliable, though he doesn’t place himself in the “stinker” category.
Well, not exactly. “There’s things I did teaching we have done on the show,” he says of his character’s notorious tendency to slack off. “But I was actually a very strict teacher, by the book with rules and stuff.
Having said this, “I really didn’t know my subject matter when I taught history/geography and I did try to cut corners and I did hate marking and I did hate a lot of stuff that I did.”
When he finally quit after 10 years, he says, he was less embittered than plain bored.
“You’re like ‘What’s my challenge today?’ It gets very monotonous, especially in Phys. Ed.
“It’s not like ‘I’m gonna make this kid the best basketball player in the world!’ It doesn’t work that way.”
As a storyteller with an eye for the absurd, he naturally gravitated to standup, landed a Comedy Network special and, after quitting teaching in 2003, placed third in season five of “Last Comic Standing.”
By the time “Mr. D” debuted in 2012, it was as if he’d come full circle.
“I wasn’t going into class doing standup,” he points out, lest anyone confuse the real Gerry Donoghue (Dee for short) with his TV namesake.
“But I was always that guy who could tell stories and gain attention, whether it was at a campfire or dressing room or a party.”
Because his humour focuses largely on his teaching career, and more recently, his three young children, most of Dee’s material is extracted from his daily life.
“I’ve always got my phone with me,” he says of his quest for comic gold.
“And I write down notes and work them out. I’m really a storyteller, so it’s just a bunch of stories about my day, my weekend, my routine and my kids.
“The other night I went to a Leaf game with my 7-year-old and it cost a lot of money and we didn’t even get to stay.
“You don’t account for her getting tired. You don’t plan on that when you go with your buddy. You just say ‘You go, I’m staying.’ But when you got a sevenyear-old with you, you gotta take her home.”
He pauses. “So you get stories outta stuff.”
The thing is, you never know when inspiration will strike — like Keith Richards waking up at 4 a.m. with the riff for The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” in his head.
“It’s happened to me where you’ll just lie in bed and this (comedy) bit will come to you,” laughs the 48-year-old Scarborough native.
“Before I had a phone, I had to jump up and write it down, because you’ll wake up and — as much as you think you’ll remember — you’ll forget.
“That happens all the time.
“You’ll write down ‘tablecloth didn’t come off ’ and you’re like ‘what the hell does that mean — tablecloth? And you’ll ask your wife, ‘Do you remember me writing down something about the tablecloth not coming off ? Why that was funny?’”
He had the same experience with cantaloupes.
“I tell my wife, just remember ‘cantaloupes in the freezer’,” he recalls of the punchline that got away.
“And it wasn’t specific enough and when I wake up she’s like ‘You said something about cantaloupes.’ What else did I say? ‘I don’t remember — you said cantaloupes.’”
He sighs heavily. “You don’t have a joke right now. You’re like ‘Dammit.’”