National Post (National Edition)
From ‘Hart and Lorne’ hour to life in the law
Fresh out of law school in the 1960s, Hart Pomerantz was repping young people on minor drug charges, but still aspiring to a career in comedy, when he got one of those phone calls, the kind with the potential to cleave a life into before and after.
It was from a man called Lorne Lipowitz, who was a bit younger, a casual acquaintance from the Toronto amateur standup scene, in which Pomerantz already had a reputation for clever jokes, such as his racy skit about God and Moses trying to sell the Ten Commandments like Madison Avenue ad execs.
“I want to go into show business, do you want to be my partner?” Lipowitz told him.
That is quite a proposition to put to a young lawyer, to gamble away a steady income for the longshot chance of writing and telling jokes for money. And it was no less risky then because of how it turned out later for Lipowitz, whom Pomerantz helped to legally change his name to Lorne Michaels, under which he went on to become perhaps the most powerful figure in 20th-century comedy, as creator and producer of Saturday Night Live.
Pomerantz, 75, who has worked for five decades as an employment lawyer in Toronto, haggling with humourless employers over severance pay for his clients, recalled this fateful phone call recently in an interview in his suburban Toronto living room.
“Maybe this is what I’m meant to do,” he remembered thinking. “I was born funny. Feet first, I think. It’s just natural for me to speak in a humorous way. I see humour in everything. That gets me in trouble, for not seeing things as seriously as I should.”
In high school, for example, put on the spot by a teacher who asked him to comment on the death of a politician he had never heard of, he deadpanned: “I didn’t even know he was sick.”
Michaels’ proposition had come as a surprise. They knew each other from the University of Toronto, where they had both run the annual UC Follies variety show a few years apart. Pomerantz had even gone down to New York for a couple of open mic nights at The Bitter End, a famous club in Greenwich Village, until he realized the effort and sacrifice it would take to truly make it.
Nevertheless, he agreed to give the partnership a shot, first by writing skits for The Russ Thompson Show on CBC. Then the pair struck out for Los Angeles, working there for a year or so, writing for the Laugh-In and Phyllis Diller TV shows, until Michaels convinced CBC to give them a show of their own, and they moved back to Toronto.
The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour — they insisted on the personal branding — was a Sunday night variety show, in which Pomerantz played the zany one to Michaels’ straight man. His most popular character was a beaver who would complain about Americans.
Sketch comedy was the focus, but they would also book musical acts as they passed through town for concerts, including James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Lighthouse.
After a few years, it ran its course. So they split up, and Pomerantz went back to law, doing pretty much everything for a while until he settled on employment disputes.
“It was just one of those things that came to an end,” Pomerantz said. It was 1971.
A few months later, NBC decided it wanted something to replace the Johnny Carson reruns it had been airing on Saturday nights. Michaels still runs SNL, which has kick-started the careers of leading comedians, many of them Canadian, from Dan Aykroyd to Mike Myers.
“It was not my kind of comedy what they were doing,” Pomerantz said. SNL was edgy, anti-establishment, “meaner.”
Michaels is an iconoclast. Pomerantz is a traditionalist.
“I don’t make up things,” he said.
“I tell true things with a little embellishment.”
Michaels would do things like a mockumentary about the invasive “Dutch Puck Disease,” which was devastating the crop of Canada’s hockey puck farmers — a version of the BBC’s original “spaghetti farmers” gag.
But Pomerantz was more of a slapstick performer, emulating the fading Vaudevillian ideal he remembered from his childhood.
“I was sort of the end of a generation of comedy.”
Pomerantz’s television career did not end with the Terrific Hour. He did several years as a panellist on This Is The Law, a lighthearted quiz show about legal judgments, and a couple of others. But employment law was what paid the bills.
“I never stopped doing law because I like being in the real world,” he said. But he did manage to find humour in the courtroom, which is ripe for it, he said.
He was once praised by a judge, for example, for an “ingenious and able” argument, which the judge rejected all the same.
He said his experiences taught him that Canada appreciates comedic talent, but doesn’t love its performers like Americans do.
“Americans just love stars. They worship them. We don’t worship people here, we’re more practical and realistic,” he said. Americans appreciate neurotics and psychotics, whereas Canadians like their comedy to be “businesslike, welldressed, and on time.”
So, even though he arrived on the comedy scene at the end of an era, aspiring to an obsolete ideal of humour as if he were the last of the old timey comedians, Pomerantz still managed to pull it off, have fun, and get away clean into suburban Canadian respectability.
“I’m ahead of my time, but I’m a procrastinator, so it evens out,” he said.