Joe Flaherty, Comedy Great on ‘SCTV’ and ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ Dead at 82
Joe Flaherty, a constant comic presence in film and TV, best known for his work on the sketch show SCTV and Freaks and Geeks, has died. He was 82.
Flaherty’s daughter, Gudrun, confirmed his death in a statement shared with the New York Times. No exact cause was given, but Gudrun said her father died on Monday, April 1, after “a brief illness.”
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She continued: “Since then, I’ve been struggling to come to terms with this immense loss. Dad was an extraordinary man, known for his boundless heart and an unwavering passion for movies from the ’40s and ’50s. His insights into the golden age of cinema didn’t just shape his professional life; they were also a source of endless fascination for me. In these last few months, as he faced his health challenges, we had the precious opportunity to watch many of those classic movies together — moments I will forever hold dear.”
Back in February, Flaherty’s former SCTV castmate, Martin Short, shared a note saying the actor was “very ill” and “aware of the gravity of his failing health.” As such, Short asked fans to donate what they could in an effort to cover care costs so Flaherty could “spend whatever time he has left at home rather than in a facility.”
“We are writing to our friends because we believe SCTV meant something to you, and that would not be the case if it were not for Joe Flaherty,” Short said at the time. “He was a mentor, a director, and an inspiring improviser who gave us many of the tools we are still using in the careers he helped kickstart. And he made us all laugh!”
After the news of his death, Short paid tribute to his friend in a statement to Rolling Stone, calling him “simply the funniest man in the room.”
“In over 50 years of our friendship, there were very few people as wise or hilarious when it came to comedy, teaching improvisation and the art of character work as Joe,” Short said. “In SCTV we called him the anchor. In life, he was simply the funniest man in the room. I just adored him.”
Flaherty was part of the original SCTV cast and remained on the show throughout its six-season run as both a writer and performer. Though somewhat overshadowed by Saturday Night Live — which poached several SCTV cast members over the years — the series attracted a devoted audience and became a comedy classic. Like Flaherty, the performers all came from the Toronto branch of the Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe, and many went on to be future stars, including Short, Rick Moranis, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, and Harold Ramis.
“We never wanted to be contemporary on the show, we never wanted to do jokes about who was president any of that stuff,” Flaherty said of SCTV’s approach to comedy during an interview on The Best Show With Tom Scharpling, last year. “We just did stuff that we thought was funny. And it was great, because we had a great group of people. I can’t believe how, pretty much accidentally, we got that group together. Boy, were they good.”
During his time on the show, Flaherty minted numerous classic characters who populated the airwaves of the fictional SCTV station, around which the show was based. He played news anchor Floyd Robertson, the respectable, well-paid (albeit alcoholic) straight man to Levy’s dimwitted Earl Camembert; and Robertson even had his own character of a kind, Count Floyd, host of a late-night movie program who dressed like a vampire, howled like a werewolf, and showed not-scary movies he’d never seen. (Flaherty later played Count Floyd in a video intro used by Rush during their 1984 tour.)
Flaherty and Candy also teamed up for the “Farm Film Report” as Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, two hicks with a penchant for blowing up the celebrities they interview. And he portrayed Guy Caballero, the sleazy, penny-pinching owner of SCTV, who could walk but used a wheelchair to garner undeserved sympathy.
Flaherty was such a crucial part of SCTV, and he was enlisted to give the acceptance speech when the show won its first of two Emmys, Outstanding Writing in a Variety or Music Program, in 1982. That led to a famous moment where, after cracking a joke about the size of the crowd on stage and eliciting a sardonic “That’s funny” from presenter Milton Berle, Flaherty quickly retorted, “Sorry, Uncle Miltie… go to sleep” — a parody of Berle’s old Texaco Star Theater sign-off, “Listen to your Uncle Miltie and go to bed.” (In a future SCTV sketch, Flaherty even beat up a Berle look alike, declaring, “You’ll never ruin another acceptance speech, Uncle Miltie!”)
After SCTV, Flaherty worked regularly as a reliable comic character actor. Levy cast him on his sitcom, Maniac Mansion, which ran on Canadian TV for three seasons in the early Nineties, and he picked up guest roles on shows like Married… with Children, Ellen, and Dinosaurs. In 1989, he had a small but memorable part as the Western Union Man at the end of Back to the Future Part II, while in 1996, he played the crazed “fan” in Happy Gilmore who tries to throw off Adam Sandler’s golf swing and, when that doesn’t work, run him over with his car.
But outside SCTV, Flaherty was probably best known for his turn on Freaks and Geeks as Harold Weir, father of Lindsay (Linda Cardellini) and Sam (John Francis Daley). Harold was an easy favorite supporting character on the show — his cantankerous, stern attitude was often undercut by his genuine Midwest kindness and outlandish stories about “friends” who met gruesome deaths because they misbehaved.
In Vanity Fair’s oral history of Freaks and Geeks, Daley and Jason Segel spoke about looking up to and learning from Flaherty on the series. “The way Sam is so amused by his dad was totally because I thought Joe Flaherty was the funniest guy in the world,” Daley said, while Segel recalled: “I just watched and learned, doing scenes with him. He’s so fast. There’s a lot of improv on all the stuff we do with Judd [Apatow]. When you’re young, you kind of think, I don’t know if the old man can keep up. And then you’re like, Oh, shit — this is the guy who created this style.”
For Flaherty, though, there was something about Freaks and Geeks that was reminiscent of SCTV — a piece of television brilliance that just wasn’t catching on in the ratings. “I never got my hopes up,” he said. “I’d gone through something similar with SCTV. My daughter had a poster of the front page of the Soho Weekly News with a sketch of me that said, ‘Is SCTV too good for TV?,’ and once again I thought, I’m living on shows that are too good for TV.”
After Freaks and Geeks, Flaherty continued to act and do voice-over work, appearing on shows like Frasier, Family Guy, and The King of Queens. He went on to serve on the advisory board of the Harold Ramis Film School at Second City, as well as an artist-in-residence at Humber College in Toronto, where he taught comedy writing.
In a tribute to Flaherty on Tuesday, Samm Levine, who played Neal Schweiber on Freaks and Geeks, shared a tribute to his co-star, calling him a “comedic legend.”
“Most actors aren’t very interested in rehashing their previous roles. Especially not with their current co-stars. But that wasn’t Joe,” Levine wrote in an Instagram post. “He was ALWAYS happy to talk about old SCTV sketches, Stripes, and his million other credits. Even more, if you asked about something he remembered well, he’d jump right back into character and do the lines with you. A genuine rarity, and absolute heaven for this comedy nerd. He loved being on set, and we all loved being around him.”
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