Canadian Humour - Radio

Radio

Many of Canada's comedy acts and performers have started out on radio, primarily on the national Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) network.

While individual comedy show and segments have been around almost as long as the network, the focus has tended be more on specific shows featuring particular groups of comedians. The real beginnings of Canadian radio comedy began in the late 1930s with the debut of The Happy Gang, a long-running weekly variety show that was regularly sprinkled with corny jokes in between tunes. It debuted in 1938 and ran until 1959. The Wayne & Shuster show debuted on CBC radio in 1946, their more literate and classy humour regularly appearing on the airwaves well into the early 1960s. Max Ferguson's long-running shows After Breakfast Breakdown and the Max Ferguson Show featured short satirical skits based on current events, with a variety of characters voiced by Ferguson.

The Royal Canadian Air Farce started as a radio show debuting in 1973 featuring mainly political and some character-based comedy sketches. It ran for 24 years before making a permanent transition to television. It started a tradition of topical and politically satirical radio shows that inspired such programs as Double Exposure, The Muckraker and What a Week.

A zanier, more surreal brand of radio comedy was unveiled in the early 1980s with the debut of The Frantics' Frantic Times radio show, which ran from 1981 to 1986. Its smart and surreal style fostered a new take on Canadian radio comedy that was followed by the likes of successor shows as The Norm and Radio Free Vestibule.

By the 1990s the satirical and zany elements merged into two of the more notable CBC radio comedy shows of the 1990s: The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour, a show that offered bitingly satirical pieces from a First Nations perspective mixed in with general silliness; and Great Eastern, a show set in a fictitious Newfoundland "national" radio station featuring improbable news stories, fictitious archival recordings and unlikely archeological findings played straight.

CBC Radio continues to play an important part in developing comedy performers on radio. Madly Off In All Directions became a weekly national forum for regional sketch and stand-up comics, a practice that continues in the more recent series The Debaters.

Laugh Attack, a channel programmed by XM Radio Canada and broadcast by XM Satellite Radio to Canada and the United States, features predominantly Canadian comedy.