In 1987, when I was 14, my father took me to see a performance at Toronto’s Second City called Not Based on Anything, by Stephen King. Being in these hallowed halls—where Gilda and Aykroyd and Marty Short rocked their youth—was a huge deal to me. I had read everything about Saturday Night Live and all that fed into it. I was a comedy nerd. Mike Myers was in the cast of Second City, and I, just a kid, was sure he’d be a star. I asked him if Lorne Michaels had seen him yet. “Not yet” was the answer.
This could have been an opening move for me as a writer on comedy, but I arrived too soon. In 1987, there were music critics and film critics, but there was not a Pauline Kael of comedy. That was a job that did not exist, not yet. Music, books, theater, film—these are the genres that merited attention in the culture. It has been speculated that part of Aristotle’s Poetics was lost. The part that survived is on tragedy. The part that did not was on comedy.
