Monday, January 15, 2007

I'm gonna burn your Manhattan playhouse down.

Over Christmas my dad read me a short profile on Eugene Levy in the New Yorker. (Yeah, my daddy still reads to me. I dress him, so it's a fair trade.) One detail that immediately stood out was this one:

He doesn’t do appearances in character, except for a turn, with John Candy, as the Shmenge Brothers on Letterman ten years ago....

What? Ten years ago? John Candy died in 1994! I thought you had the best fact checkers in the business, New Yorker. I guess not. I'm going to enjoy lording this over you. Of course, the newspaper I work for, the Chicago Reader, recently ran an article in which June 1968 was listed as the month that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, even though he was murdered two months earlier. I never got to proofread that article, but if I had, I hope I would've noticed that error. To make up for this fact-checking blunder, all of us at the Reader are here at work on MLK Day.

Eugene Levy and John Candy appeared on Late Night With David Letterman as SCTV's Shmenge brothers (their attempt at "breakout" characters a la Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas's McKenzie brothers) on February 26, 1985, according to Wikipedia. No, Wikipedia isn't the definitive source for this kind of information, but right now I trust them more than the New Yorker. Hurts, don't it, New Yorker?

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