Comics band together to honour Sean Keane
Tribute show means standout standup finally will get his due
This city has produced more than its share of impressive comics over the years. If they have got their due, it’s because they are constantly out there, working the town and country — often for precious little.
Sean Keane, on the other hand, kept about as low a profile as anyone in the business. Consequently, Keane, who died nine months ago at 52, never got his due. Keane was, however, in the minds of fellow standups one of the sharpest and wittiest and most innovative of any comic in the land.
Sporting his trademark suit and shades — his tribute to the Rat Pack — Keane had an old-school swagger on stage. His final performance was at the Winnipeg Comedy Festival last year. It was his first live performance in almost eight years. But while he stopped performing regularly, he kept writing comedy at a feverish pitch.
Keane died as a result of a massive heart attack, but the irony there was that he was easily among the fittest of comics, or anyone else in his age bracket. He ran and swam daily. He lifted weights. Fact was he preferred working out at his favourite gym in the city to doing a gig on the road.
Even if he had been reluctant about being in the limelight, Keane’s many friends are now intent on seeing that he finally gets his due. They are organizing “a night of comedy and memories,” Oct. 10 at the Comedyworks. On the bill will be Terence Bowman, Winston Spear, Mike Paterson, Peter Radomski, E.J. Brulé, Kevin MacDonald and Keane’s oldest comedy crony, Carolyn Bennett. And handling matters technical on the other side of the mic will be Keane’s brother Denis, who has been a mainstay at the Comedyworks for years.
“Sean had the gift,” Bennett said at the time of his death. “His stuff was brilliant, but he had an anxiety problem about performing live. At his funeral, it was asked why Sean never made the big leagues. The answer was that Sean wasn’t predatorial enough. He was too kind, too nice a guy. This is a nasty, cutthroat business, and to get ahead you have to be nasty and cutthroat. He wasn’t.”
Walter Perry, one of Keane’s closest friends and co-organizer of the tribute, concurs: “Sean really didn’t like being on the road. He didn’t like travel at all — it exhausted him. He also had his rituals at home, which were more important to him, be it working out or taking care of stray dogs and cats.”
He had known the comic for 40 years, but really bonded with him while Perry, a writer, was volunteering at the Westmount YMCA, where Keane would show up religiously every day for his workouts. Keane would also walk to and from the Y, regardless of the weather, from his
“Sean was truly an original, yet he was just so self-effacing and so modest.”
WALTER PERRY
home in western N.D.G. — a good five-kilometre trek each way.
“He was really a caring character, with such a kind heart,” recalls Perry, whose wife is a physician/geneticist at the MCH. “When my oldest child died of (a juvenile form of) Lou Gehrig’s disease, I couldn’t speak, and Sean would come over regularly to try to make me laugh. He was just so supportive, a true friend.”
Proceeds from the evening will benefit the Montreal Children’s Hospital cardiology department. It turns out Keane had congenital heart issues all his life. When he was 13, he underwent a heart operation performed by the MCH’s Dr. Tony Dobell.
“It was actually his brother who had the heart problem when his mother took him to be checked. But she asked the doctor if he could listen to Sean’s heart, too. And so this defect in Sean’s heart was found, and they operated. But he lived nearly 40 years more than he probably would have without the surgery.”
Perry would often collaborate with Keane in the comedy-writing process. “He sweated blood over every word. He had such genius ideas,” he relates, referring to one wild bit, Apart-Mart, wherein a financial scoundrel, under house arrest, operates a dépanneur out of his apartment and still scams folks. Then he had this other brainwave sketch about a pilot who gets tossed out of his home and is forced to live in a trailer at the end of an airport runway. Unfortunately, he presented this idea the week of 9/11, which wasn’t the best timing for airline-pilot comedies.”
Keane was renowned for being a huge fan of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and that whole Vegas pack.
“There was this apocryphal story that he once told me,” Perry notes. “But I like to think it’s true that he wore (JFK’s brother-in-law and Rat Packer) Peter Lawford’s suits, which his widow turfed out when he died. Sean said he saw them in a Beverly Hills thrift shop and bought them. And that’s what he wore on stage, along with slicked hair, wraparound sunglasses and white shirts with French cuffs.
“Sean was truly an original, yet he was just so self-effacing and so modest. There was no real hostility. There was no gratuitous vulgarity. He was just looking at the absurdity of life. He was so cerebral, a comic’s comic, which meant he never enjoyed the popularity he should have.
“Hopefully, this tribute will help to change that.” A tribute to Sean Keane takes place Oct. 10 at 8:30 p.m. at the Comedyworks, 1238 Bishop St. Performing will be Terence Bowman, Winston Spear, Mike Paterson, Peter Radomski, E.J. Brulé, Kevin MacDonald and Carolyn Bennett. Tickets are $30, with proceeds going to the Montreal Children’s Hospital cardiology department. For i nformation and reservations, call 514-398-9661 or 514-588-2282, or email Walter Perry at justus93ca@yahoo.ca.