Mike O’Brien was born in Victoria on Dec. 29, 1963, and raised there and in Inuvik, NWT. It was in Regina where he began acting in film and television. Starting with commercials, he worked his way up to movies.Robin Summerfield/The Canadian Press
Hours before 51-year-old Mike O'Brien died of cancer on May 24 at a Winnipeg hospital, he couldn't resist going for the laugh as he grappled with the eternal death-bed issue of religious faith.
"I am a secular humanist," that day's entry began on his popular blog, which chronicled his four years with cancer.
"I believe we can achieve ethical, kind co-habitation, based on science, not superstition," he wrote. "It incorporates some of the teachings of prophets like Christ, Buddha and Muhammad (image not available)."
It was classic Mike O'Brien: thumbing his nose at death to the very end, using dark humour and irreverence to blunt pain.
Of course, he acknowledged, he might have been wrong.
"I often am," he allowed. "Fortunately, if God really exists, I'm confident he'll look at my overall record and let me slide on the faith/skeptic issue. It just sounds like the kind of decent thing he'd do."
A journalist, radio producer and CBC comedy writer, Mr. O'Brien may be best remembered as the actor who played the recurring character of Wes Humboldt, the liquor store owner/insurance salesman on CTV's Corner Gas. That improbable job combination, like much of his humour, was rooted in real life.
The sitcom, which aired from 2004 to 2009, was filmed in Rouleau, Sask., where the crew noticed a liquor store and insurance office under one roof. "There was one guy who worked there," recalled Corner Gas executive producer Virginia Thompson. "And we just thought that was hilarious."
So the role of the laconic Wes Humboldt, known for his deadpan one-liners, went to the funniest guy they could find.
"Comedy is a lot like music," Ms. Thompson observed. "There's a rhythm to it. The person who delivers the one-liners is the person who's going to get the laugh," Ms. Thompson said. "You have to deliver it spot-on. And Mike did it perfectly every time. He was so funny."
Series star Brent Butt told MSN.com last week that a good part of Wes's charm was his sincerity. Mr. O'Brien "just made Wes very real and very believable and, as a result, very funny. He made it so much funnier than it was on paper."
But is terminal cancer funny? Turns out it can be, in the right hands.
A lump in Mr. O'Brien's thigh was diagnosed as synovial sarcoma in the summer of 2011. It was already at stage IV ("What happened to stage II and III?" he quipped to a reporter) and had spread to his lungs. He and his wife had long, deep cries. They found a doctor's frosty advice that "it was best not to get emotional about these things" appalling, but quickly turned it into a jokey catch-phrase around the house.
He began an aggressive regimen of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Encouraged to write about his plight, he started his blog in March, 2014, dubbing it The Big Diseasey, "because all the good titles were taken." It was a heartfelt, blunt (describing various bodily secretions in gruesome detail) and laugh-out-loud funny account of what was happening to him. his body, mind and life.
"The main thing I learned from researching my disease on the Internet was to stay off the Internet," went an early entry.
Fast forward to three weeks before his death, when he posted an imagined conversation with a doctor about the worst way to learn one has cancer:
Doctor: So here's the diagnosis, straight and to the point. Mike, do you ever worry you haven't saved enough money for retirement?
Mike: Not really.
Doctor: Worry no more. Because I can say, without doubt, you have enough money for the rest of your life.
Mike: I have about 800 bucks.
Doctor: You have enough money for the rest of your life.
Mr. O'Brien was careful, he stressed, never to be silly for the sake of it. He wrung humour from hours spent in waiting rooms and writhing in pain – "the things that are real," including little things, such as losing nose hair, which, it turns out, we need.
"He found the 'funny' in the crappiest of circumstances," his wife, Robin Summerfield, said. "The act of writing was his therapy."
He was born in Victoria on Dec. 29, 1963, and raised there and in Inuvik, NWT, where his single mother had gone to teach. While studying creative writing and history at the University of Victoria, he worked at five weekly newspapers throughout British Columbia.
He had a troubled relationship with his father, Denis, a Victoria longshoreman who'd been in and out of prison and had split with his wife when their son was two years old. "Mike never, ever spoke poorly of his dad," Ms. Summerfield said. "He had a tremendous amount of sympathy for him."
At age 21, Mr. O'Brien finally reconnected with his father in Victoria and made plans to meet again. Soon after, Denis O'Brien died of a heart attack.
A two-year stint at the Medicine Hat News was followed by a move to Regina and 14 years as a reporter at the Leader-Post, where he covered crime, education, health and city hall, and reported from Bosnia and East Africa. He was proudest, Ms. Summerfield said, of helping unionize the newsroom in the mid-1990s.
He later joined CBC Saskatchewan as a radio producer. "He believed the CBC was a ribbon that tied the country together from one end to the other," his wife said, "and he hoped it will stay that way."
It was in Regina where he began acting in film and television. Starting with commercials, he worked his way up to movies (his specialty, noted Ms. Summerfield, was "straight to DVD"). In addition to the Corner Gas gig, he played the part of Lorne on HBO Canada's Less Than Kind.
In 2005, he found his dream job in Winnipeg as a comedy writer for CBC Radio. His sketches and weekly columns appeared on shows across the country.
Mr. O'Brien's friend Michelle Lang, a Calgary Herald reporter, arranged a blind date to introduce him to Ms. Summerfield, with whom she worked at the Herald. Ms. Summerfield quit her job and moved to Winnipeg to be with Mr. O'Brien. They married in August, 2008.
When Ms. Summerfield gave birth to a son in August, 2010, the couple named him Will Lang in honour of their friend Ms. Lang, who had been killed on assignment months earlier in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
In 2011, Mr. O'Brien hosted his own national summer radio show, Strange Animal, a series about human behaviour. Ten episodes had been ordered, but his illness allowed him to produce only five.
His love of the Prairies was reflected in his 1999 book, Calling the Prairies Home, a paean that combined local lore with history and character sketches. In it, one could almost hear echoes of Stephen Leacock.
His final role was playing a judge in an episode of The Pinkertons, a TV series based on the real cases of Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. It aired in February.
Mr. O'Brien's talent "could have taken him far beyond Manitoba and Saskatchewan," said his agent of 12 years, Lisa Marie Schwartz. "But he loved where he was, and was kind-hearted and well liked. He took that everywhere."
What irked him? Reading about people who "lost a battle" against cancer.
"As soon as you say it's a battle, then what? Cancer won?" he pondered in a Postmedia profile a month ago. "I don't ever want to be beaten by cancer. I have cancer, it's going to kill me, but that doesn't mean it beats me. Because it certainly hasn't stopped me having wonderful experiences for four years and a really great life."
He and his wife coped with honesty, laughter and gallows humour. "We found funny in the darkest and most inappropriate circumstances," she said. "Cancer takes so much from people; we didn't let it take away all our happiness. It took away our future. We were determined not to let it take our present."
Mr. O'Brien leaves his wife; mother, Sheila O'Brien; and four-year-old son, Will Lang.
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Last fall, Mike O'Brien decided to regain some control over his life by writing his own obituary. Here is what he wrote:
A nation is grieving today as Michael James O'Brien has died. We are all poorer for his passing, as he owed many of us money. He is survived by a family who worshipped him, and his wife, Robin.
As a journalist, he knew the difference between truth and deception, and rarely let that bother him. As an actor, he made you feel like he was standing right where the director told him to stand, a skill he shared with Olivier, Brando and many puppets. As a radio producer, he boosted television ratings. As a comedy writer, he was tall.
His entire life, Mike's followed his personal motto was: "That one's mine, get your own."
His hobbies included reading the television listings, translating books that were already in English, and cheering for his beloved Expos. Last year, he finally visited Montreal to watch his team in action, and returned with many tales of driving around in taxis.
He enjoyed weekends alone at the cabin, and was always saddened when the cabin owners returned. unannounced. He met many new people that way.
After lengthy struggles with cancer, diabetes and a fear of escalators, Mike finally succumbed to a shotgun blast from a jealous husband. He was 92.
This has been edited and condensed.