PLUME: What was your focus going into college?
MORANIS: Honestly, my focus going into college was what was going on at the radio station. And so college was a necessary inconvenience, which is why I wound up having a less than great experience there and a fairly checkered academic experience.
PLUME: What would you say was the trigger point when you realized that some form of broadcasting or entertainment was kind of the direction you were still being pulled in?
MORANIS: A couple years later I was working part time at a different radio station. It was way up on the AM dial. They were a rock station that carried the hockey games and the Blue Jay games and I did I think three evening shifts a week. I was getting $5.00 an hour. I was working… I was finishing – or close to finishing, I think at that time – my general arts degree at York University. And I took the job… I got the job because, having been an operator for so long, I was willing to not only do the first and last hour on air on nights that there was a hockey or baseball game, but I was also willing to sit there and insert commercials during the broadcast of the game. Which most announcers would not want to do. But it didn’t matter to me because I knew how to do it and I knew I could get homework and reading done while it was going on. And at that time another friend of mine – a very good friend of mine at the time who I had gone to summer camp with and done some amateur performing and sketch writing at camp with, and whose father had been a professional broadcaster in Toronto, an announcer for the CBC, and who had always wanted to go into that because his father had been in it and he felt that he would be good at it – he was out of town at his first radio job. Way up in northern Manitoba in an oil rig town called Fort MacMurray. Paying his dues at a small station up there. An opening became available at the station I was at, at CKFH in Toronto, and I was able to somehow get him into that job. He moved back to Toronto, and got the job. We were hanging out together, and one day – this is 1975 – we were watching TV, some local television station, and we saw another guy that we’d gone to camp with doing stand-up comedy. Now at that time stand-up comedy had a huge resurgence. Steve Martin was just starting to come onto the scene… Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, George Carlin. And the stand-up stage was attracting a lot of comics because it seemed to be a ticket to getting a sitcom – Freddie Prinze, Jimmy Walker – and so anybody and everybody was doing stand-up. And we put on the TV and there was this guy that we’d gone to camp with, Larry Horowitz, doing stand-up. And he was pretty funny. And we looked at each other, and we said, “Well, we can do that!” And we sat down and wrote an act, and we got up on stage. In Toronto at the Toronto version at the time of whatever improv or comedy club they had. And they only had one and I think it was once a week. And we killed. We were so tight. Dave Thomas later told me when I met him that he had seen us perform one night and thought it looked like South American Television, it was moving so fast.
PLUME: What was the act?
MORANIS: It was a series of sketches. But we didn’t know anything about how to put it together, so we just threw everything in, and it moved like lightening, and we just wanted to make each other and everybody laugh. So we did anything and everything we could. We had about 30 minutes of material. We started almost immediately getting offers to do television appearances and radio appearances – and between that and the deejay job I had, I just started making a lot of money. For me, at that time. And that’s what made me realize that… I might be able to do this professionally. Not that I had ever wanted to or ever needed to. I just fell into it. It was fun. I thought we were pretty good at it. And we were making money.
PLUME: At what point did you break it to your parents?
MORANIS: Um, at dinner one night. I told them that Cowan, Rob Cowan, I told them that Cowan and I were going to go on the stage. My father almost fell into his soup. But I think ultimately they were happy with the decision.
PLUME: When you say ultimately, was it am idea that they had to come around to?
MORANIS: Well, you know everybody… I have children now, and I keep telling them they can do whatever they want to do. One is 19 and in college and the other is 17 and on his way to college. And I really believe that. I want them to do whatever they want to do. Because I think doing what you want to do, as opposed to what you have to do, could be – in some cases – the difference between happiness and fulfillment and… and not. But I think that they had their own personal aspirations for their idea of what might be my success. And they were afraid for my well-being. Naturally. It didn’t take me too long to look back and understand what their concern might have been.
PLUME: As a parent, do you now feel those same feelings? Maybe not to the limiting extent that they might have had, but in your own way?
MORANIS: Well, as it relates to the choices of career that my kids might make, it’s a little early for me to be concerned because they’re only beginning college. I worry about the stuff that I have to worry about on the day. And today I don’t feel like I have to worry about that. (laughs) Maybe in the future I will.
PLUME: You talked about performing as something that you could either take or leave. That you were enjoying it, but you could have walked away from it at any point if your interest led elsewhere.
MORANIS: Well, I think right from the start performance was always second to writing, and always a means for executing the writing. I even remember back to when Rob Cowan and I were performing, that when I was on stage getting laughs, the laughs only served as a meter for timing. And yet when I was off stage and Rob was getting laughs, I heard the laughs for what they were. I heard the audience appreciating our writing. So I never felt… as a performer I never felt the connection to the audience that I did as a writer. And I remember when I got to the CBC years later and I was writing sketches and inserts for various shows, variety shows, whatever, with my dear friend to this day Paul Perlove. When they would go and cast the local sketch players to do our sketches, there was something lost in the translation when they would articulate our material. For us, there was something lost in the translation. For them, I’m sure they all thought they were doing great because, you know, you try your best when you’re a performer. But we knew that what we had written, the voices we heard, the antics we were trying to create, were somehow being affected by having somebody else bring them to life. And that’s what led me to performing, was trying to get the material articulated the closest possible way to the way it was intended in the writing. Which is why I never thought of myself as an actor. And I’m not an actor. I don’t… I don’t do stage work. I don’t… I don’t miss acting. I never wanted to act. I just wanted to create material, and that led to performing. And I had a good time performing and various things, but towards the end of the run of movies that I did where I was no longer writing my material and just hitting the marks and saying the lines in other people’s big budget Hollywood movies… it was lucrative and I knew how to enjoy it, and how to enjoy my fellow cast members, how to enjoy my time away from home. Living the life of, (laughs) of a film actor, but creatively it was very unfulfilling.
PLUME: Is that the kind of unfulfilling that tends to eat away at you? Where you feel you’re in a creative rut, or lack-of-creative rut?
MORANIS: I’m not the kind of person that would let something like that eat away at me. I would balance it. Through it all, I found other ways to be creative. I remember on… for example, on the Honey I Shrunk the Kids movies, in between the takes, Marcia Strassman and I were in hysterics all the time because we just were making each other laugh. So there was this other reality going on in this wonderful straight family movie, but in between takes, we had our own little late night guerilla world going on. So I never felt bored in how I was spending my time. Just when it came to the actual work, the actual product that I was creating, I felt much closer to work that I was responsible for the writing of, going back to the early sketches and SCTV and even in the films Ghostbusters and Space Balls, where I wrote my own material.
PLUME: Would you say that a happy medium between the two was the SCTV experience?
MORANIS: I didn’t see that as a… I saw it as happy but not a medium. It was complete and total fulfillment because there was, for me – as well as for those actors and for many people who do that kind of material – a deep joy in the performance of varied characters like that. Especially in an ensemble situation. Very exciting. Lot of fun. Lot of room to explore.
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