EXPATRIATE PATRIOT LOVE
Mike Myers writes affectionate book about being Canadian
Canada Mike Myers Doubleday Canada
There is an anecdote in Mike Myers’ new book, Canada, about the perils of fame.
It was 2002 and Myers was easily one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.
He had just watched the Rangers beat the Maple Leafs at Madison Square Garden.
Having spent most of the evening gorging on MSG-filled concession foods, he found himself in desperate need of a washroom while on the cab ride home.
He quickly located a restaurant with a tiny restroom but as he was going about his business is met by someone he refers to as the “Effusive Fan.”
This fan was a determined and oblivious young man with little regard for personal space.
Without getting into the gory details, the story continues with Myers meekly responding in a “diarrhea quiver voice” to the fan’s persistent questions outside the stall as the tiny washroom filled with “fetid fog.”
It’s a great story: funny, more than a little gross and decidedly self-deprecating. It ends with Myers, who hasn’t lived in Canada for decades, coming to a very Canadian conclusion about what being famous feels like.
“Hours of shame sprinkled with moments of unexpected and unexplainable validation,” he writes.
Not that he’s complaining, of course.
“As I say in the book, when people complain, it really does sound like someone saying ‘Why do they pay me in gold bars? Gold bars are heavy,’ ” says Myers, in a telephone interview with Postmedia. “It’s just that it’s not nothing. It’s happening. And when you grow up in Scarborough, where your dad sells encyclopedias and your mom works in the office of a factory, and you grow up in a country that is not famous to the rest of the world, you are not prepared for it.”
Myers opens his colourful new book by discussing fame and our country’s peculiar take on it. One of the early conclusions he comes to is “there is something in our character that distrusts fame.”
That Myers sees this as an admirable quality may seem strange on the surface. He is, after all, one of many Canadians who had to leave the country to find showbiz success. He remains one of our most famous exports.
But from his years as a breakout player on Saturday Night Live, to his movie stardom in massive Hollywood franchises such as Austin Powers, Wayne’s World and Shrek, his career has been exclusively based in the U.S.
But, as he says in the opening paragraph of the book, “no description of me is complete without saying that I’m a Canadian.”
So when he received a call from Canadian publishers asking him to write a book to help celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, he quickly warmed to the idea.
“I thought, in my head I’ve kind of been spending the last 53 years writing a book about Canada,” says Myers, who began a cross-country book tour Friday in Toronto and spends the next week stopping in Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax and Calgary. “I had never really written a book before, only the Wayne’s World and Austin Powers books which are just little companions, but not a hopefully cohesive, longform piece that tries to encapsulate my 53-year relationship with Canada.”
While the aforementioned toilet story may be typical of the sort of raucous, irreverent humour Myers perfected with Austin Powers and Wayne’s World, it’s a bit of an anomaly in the book. Canada (286 pages, Doubleday Canada) can be very funny, of course, but it’s also thoughtful, heartwarming, occasionally sad and at times surprisingly political.
Perhaps it was Canadian modesty that prevented Myers from writing a straight-ahead autobiography. Canada is a memoir that doubles as a celebration of the country, chock full of personal and cultural pictures and artifacts. It begins by chronicling our “Next Great Nation” period from 1967 to 1976, a decade that coincided with Myers’ own formative years growing up poor but happy in Scarborough with a thrifty Liverpudlian father who loved comedy and being “silly.”
There are stories about Myers’ comedy career. The book briefly covers his early days as a Canadian child actor and a period in the mid1980s where he lived and performed in England.
There’s a strange story about a near dust-up with a U.S. Second City comedian in Chicago and one about him finally convincing Lorne Michaels to give his Wayne’s World sketch a chance on Saturday Night Live.
But many of these stories end up going back to the book’s central theme: Myers’ stubborn, unyielding Canadianness.
“There is no one more Canadian than a Canadian who no longer lives in Canada,” Myers says. “I also say in the book, only because it’s true, that I’ve often been accused of enjoying being Canadian. And I do enjoy being Canadian. Are you supposed to not enjoy it? It’s a great country. It’s sane, it’s civilized and, as I say in the book, what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding? “While the American tradition is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Canada is peace, order and good government. If you look around the world right now, that good government thing is looking sexy.”
For Canadians of a certain age, part of the appeal of the book will be the cultural touchstones Myers covers. They include relatively well-known phenomena, such as the “Cinema Bleak” of David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, to Mr. Dressup, the Friendly Giant and (the first) Trudeaumania.
But he also unearths some wonderful obscurities. There are pics of NHL hockey-card checklists, souvenir CN Tower whisky bottles and even three of Myers’ old Toronto Transit Commission passes. The fact that many of these pieces come from Myers’ own collection suggests one of the ways he maintains his Canadianness is by never throwing out anything Canadian.
“I have subway transfers as well, by the way,” he says with a laugh.
But as fun as the book often is, it has a political side as well.
A few weeks before our last federal election, Myers appeared on British comedian’s John Oliver’s HBO show Last Week Tonight for a segment about Canadian politics and then-prime minister Stephen Harper. Myers dressed as a Mountie, sat on a snowplow and encouraged Canadians to reject Harper.
It was a funny bit that made headlines across the country. But it also reflects some of the more serious political issues that Myers would go on to address in his book. For a comedian and actor whose material has never been overly political, he admits it was new terrain for his public persona.
“I feel more comfortable now talking about my particular political bent, hopefully not in a polemic way but in an exclusive, level-playing-field way,” he said.
“I am a progressive capitalist. I’m an artist-industrialist. If you think about it, it’s not terribly controversial.
“What I was hearing about Harper was nativism, scaling back on some of the social programs, veiled dogwhistle Islamophobic things. That didn’t strike me as particularly Canadian.
“When John Oliver called me to be on his show, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I thought ‘No, I have to speak up.’ I don’t know what it did in terms of this, that or the other, but it felt like this election was a turning point for Canada to return to its more progressive ideals.”