One late night during the spring of 1977, when my family lived in a large house in the Montreal suburb of Ville St. Laurent, my brother Andy—whom I shared a room with at the time—arrived home and, as he got ready for bed, put on the turntable a record that he had gotten hours before.
MacLean & MacLean
I was half asleep. And what I heard coming from the stereo speakers was a kind of comedy that literally assaulted my ears. It contained routines by two brothers — one with a deep voice and the other with a pinched, nasal-sounding voice — in which they spewed an endless stream of profanities. And to top it off, they tackled subject matters that would shock your parents — like defecation, pubic hair, sex, dirty jokes, and satirical songs laced with all sorts of coarse language — and would have resulted in having your mouth washed out with soap if you had the guts to utter them in public.
I had to hide my face in my pillow, I was laughing so hard!
And how did this impressionable 14-year-old react to this not-your-average stand-up comedy record? I had to hide my face in my pillow, because I was laughing so hard.
The album was called Bitter Reality, and it marked my first exposure to the Canadian comedy duo of brothers Blair and Gary MacLean, aka MacLean & MacLean.
The brothers, who were born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia but resided in Winnipeg at the time, were Canada’s answer to Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. For nearly 30 years, they toured coast to coast across Canada and recorded seven albums of controversial original material that crossed many lines and shattered many taboos. And like Bruce and Carlin, they faced their share of legal troubles because of their material. They became cause celebres and championed free speech and expression through their comedy. As a result, they gained a huge following and an enduring fan base.
Both legendary Canadian comedians have passed away
Sadly, Gary died in 2001, followed by Blair in 2008; however, before he passed away, Blair decided to put together a memoir of their life and times — plus their raucous career — in a no-holds-barred book called Was It Something We Said?
The book was posthumously published in 2014; however, I first heard about it this past Christmas. I was having dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Andy and his oldest son, Aidan, and we were discussing comedy. Andy knew Gary and Blair during his time as President and CEO of the Just For Laughs festival, when the duo did three appearances there during the late 80s. He knew them to be very nice people offstage and a far cry from their raunchy onstage personas. He told me about Blair’s book and said it was filled with bizarre and hilarious stories about their formative years in Glace Bay and their professional lives on the road. My curiosity was piqued and I immediately decided to purchase the book.
Gary MacLean (left) and Blair MacLean (right) with longtime friend Burton Cummings of The Guess Who fame.
A hidden gem when it comes to comedy memoirs
After reading Was It Something We Said?, I realized Andy was right, and it is a hidden gem when it comes to the comedy memoir genre. In fact, it’s in the same league as Lenny Bruce’s classic 1963 memoir How To Talk Dirty and Influence People.
Blair fearlessly tells the complete story of MacLean & MacLean and leaves nothing out. He covers every aspect with a great deal of brutal honesty, attitude, non-stop hysterics … and no shortage of salty language (he even tallied the number of f%§#s that were included in the text, which was just over 100 of them).
Glace Bay, Nova Scotia
He touches upon his upbringing in the coal mining town of Glace Bay, where a wide assortment of characters inhabited the town that would have perfectly fit in a Fellini movie (including his father, who toiled in the mines, punctuated every sentence with “Jesus”, and had a habit of wandering around the family home stark naked); the multitude of road stories that ranged from hostile audiences, sold out audiences, cheapskate club owners and playing in towns as distant as Hayes River, NWT; celebrity encounters with Jim Carrey, Bobby Hull, Gordie Howe, Keith Richards, Johnny Cash, Anne Murray and Wayne Gretzky (well, almost encounters with the latter two); a track-by-track examination of their seven albums (which were mostly done in an alcohol and marijuana-fueled party atmosphere, with a little help from Canadian rock legend and close friend Burton Cummings of The Guess Who fame); and the comedians who made them laugh (Monty Python, Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, the cast of SCTV, Don Rickles, to name a few) and those they found as totally unfunny (Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Phyllis Diller and Wayner & Shuster, to name a very few).
Fighting obscenity charges in court
And the MacLean & MacLean story would not be complete without touching on the three occasions when their controversial and profanity-laced material landed them in court on obscenity charges and made them symbols of the cause of free speech and expression (especially their 1974 case against the Liquor Licensing Board of Ontario, which had the audacity to judge them as obscene after an inspector saw one of their shows in London, and threatened any related establishment with the revoking of their liquor license if they hired the duo). Blair uses actual trial transcripts and legal decisions to tell the story of their eight years of court battles, which are peppered with his acerbic commentary to liven up the dry content of those documents.
The most surprising aspect about the MacLean brothers that is revealed in the book is how their onstage and offstage personas were so unlike, and for the better. Gary was a loving family man, and when he decided to leave the act, he built a second career as a broadcaster and host for a Winnipeg oldies radio station. Blair was also a family man, and spent his offstage time teaching children how to play guitar, created pictures that used different types of grain which gained him international recognition, and appreciated classic works of art, especially paintings from the French Impressionist era (which was exemplified when he visited the house where painter Claude Monet lived in Giverny, just outside of Paris).
Was It Something We Said? is a book that can be regarded as the complete, unabridged, unexpurgated story of MacLean & MacLean, Canada’s unsung heroes of comedy. It effectively touches a lot of nerves and relentlessly tickles the funny bone of every reader who gets the chance to crack its spine and see what lies behind all that edgy comedy and salty language. It’s two lives in the difficult world of the profession of making people laugh, that’s certainly worth exploring … f— ya’s and all.
Was It Something We Said? is available for purchase at amazon.ca.
by Stuart Nulman
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