The Canadian Caperers

Cynics have long contended that Variety-Showman Ed Sullivan is superfluous on CBS-TV's Ed Sullivan Show. Last week Sullivan was off at the Brussels Fair, and his substitute M.C., back in the U.S., had two heads and was called Wayne and Shuster. They came close to proving the cynics' point.

As hilarious as Sullivan is lugubrious, and as sparkling as Ed is post-effervescent, Canadian Comics Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster are everything that "The Great Stone Face" is not. Well aware of their talents, Impresario Sullivan has signed them up for at least 20 intermittent appearances over the next year.

Acrobatic Garnish. Neither is a secondhand gagster, and both would run at the drop of a joke book. Their humor is literate, and draws more heavily on the glories of the past than the gags of the present.

They seem to share a capacity not only for poking fun at folly but also for turning passing sorrow inside out. Standing in for Sullivan, Wayne and Shuster skittered nimbly through a confused-identity routine, belted out a metrically sound skit about a Shakespearean baseball team. Shrilled Catcher Wayne to a myopic umpire: "So fair a foul I have not seen. Accursed knave with heart as black as coat you wear upon your back! Now, for the bum thou art, stand'st thou revealed! Thy head is emptier than Ebbets Field!"

Sullivan gave the Canadian caperers a wide measure of autonomy. They may, and do, write their own classically zany material, hire their own supporting casts, ignore all advice except Sullivan's infrequent suggestions.

Unbalanced Accountants. Pals since their boyhood and through the Canadian army, irrepressible Shuster, 41, and volatile Wayne, 39, are solid family men and neighbors in Toronto. They attended Toronto University together, kicked off professionally in 1940 with a radio show, now work out their inspired foolishness in "the joke factory," a tiny upstairs den at Shuster's house lined with learned tomes, as befits two scholars holding bachelor's degrees in English literature. Says Shuster: "In a Julius Caesar scene, we try to do it so no classics professor would quarrel with it." They have also spoofed Mother Goose, Robin Hood, Les Miserables, and kidded the stirrups off "adult" westerns in a skit titled: "The Frontier Psychiatrist . . . dedicated to the brave men who brought mental health to the West!"

Ranging through all times and cultures for their humor, erudite Clowns Wayne and Shuster neither flaunt their learning nor talk down to their audience. Says Wayne: "There is an undercurrent of fairly competent acting in what we do. But we mostly look like a couple of accountants who can't get the same balance."

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