Robin Duke is a cornerstone of Canadian comedy history

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If you’re Robin Duke, and the person sitting next to you in Grade 9 homeroom at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke, Ont., is Catherine O’Hara, you have no choice: You’re going into comedy.

“All of a sudden there was someone like me, who laughed at the same things,” Duke said in a recent phone interview, in a voice as pleasantly raspy as a backscratcher. “We’d sit at the back of class, and Catherine would be doing impressions of Paul Lynde, James Mason and Moms Mabley. Who was this 14-year-old?”

Both women went on to write and perform in a quartet of comedy greatness: The Second City stage show, SCTV, Saturday Night Live and Schitt’s Creek (Duke played dress-shop owner Wendy Kurtz). “Catherine, Eugene Levy, Martin Short – they were fantastic,” Duke says about her Second City castmates. “But how can I put this? It was normal to me that they were that remarkable. I felt like a witness to all of it.”

While O’Hara, Levy and Short established themselves as solo stars, Duke, 69, revelled in being part of an ensemble: “I’ve tried doing stand-up solo and it’s just too lonely!” she says. “I love the camaraderie, making people laugh, people making me laugh. I’m not funny when I’m sitting by myself.

“My friend Deb Divine, Eugene Levy’s wife, always says, ‘Go where the laughs are.’ That’s what I try to do.”

That pursuit landed her in hilarious places, including the surreal FXX series Man Seeking Woman, where she played Jay Baruchel’s mom; the Harold Ramis/Robin Williams vacation-hell comedy, Club Paradise; and in the diner scenes in Groundhog Day.

Currently, Duke is finding her laughs on the CTV sitcom, Shelved. Like Abbot Elementary, it’s about a sweet protagonist, Wendy (Lyndie Greenwood), trying to keep afloat a public good: a cash-strapped library in Toronto’s gritty Parkdale neighbourhood, where patrons and staff from different backgrounds mix it up. Duke plays Unhoused Wendy, a library regular.

“It’s a love letter to the library system,” she says. “The diversity of the people, and how they share experiences – it’s a microcosm of the city. Of the country. How we can find ways to be with one another.”

It’s a tricky responsibility to play an unhoused character for laughs. To prepare, Duke spent time talking to women at the Parkdale Community Centre about their lives, hopes and addictions, and what led to their becoming unhoused.

“My Wendy is in this in-between place,” Duke says. “She’s coming to terms with what her life was before she got sober, and moving toward a new life. She’s getting herself together in the library, where she’s accepted and no one is judging her. But she’s also hiding, because she’s afraid of going back out there.”

Duke, who’s been sober “for a long time now,” battled addictions of her own, which she prefers not to delve into. “But when I look at Wendy, I can see how I could have landed there. I was lucky to get sober.”

During her SNL years, 1981 to 1984, she definitely was not. The night Johnny Cash appeared with Elton John, “I was hammered,” Duke says frankly. “Every Saturday they’d put a gift basket with wine in our dressing rooms, and that’s what got me through that Johnny Cash episode. Not that I remember it. But when I watch it, oh dear God there I am.”

She does remember being instantly smitten with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who came to SNL in 1982 at the age of 21. “Did she have confidence!” Duke says. “I loved it. She was like a tomboy in her jeans and little T-shirts, and she had that F-you attitude I never had. Nothing phased her. I admired her so much.” Duke wrote a song for Louis-Dreyfus and herself to sing to Jeff Bridges, Guy Crazy, the night he appeared with his brother Beau.

Duke’s favourite SNL memories revolve around Eddie Murphy, “who was always joyous. He made me laugh from my gut. I would be doubled over, just from our conversations. There was nothing better than getting him to laugh that great laugh of his.”

After SNL, she lived the life of a working actor: marriage, motherhood, smallish film roles, TV guest appearances and voice work on animated series including George and Martha. When her son was in elementary school, she’d meet with a group of moms once a week for coffee, and they’d trade funny stories about their lives. “There must be an audience out there of women my age who want to laugh,” she remembers thinking.

In the 1980s, Duke, O’Hara, Andrea Martin and others had done a two-week show at Second City where they changed archival sketches to all-female. “It was heaven,” Duke says. “Catherine rewrote lyrics to sixties songs.” She begins to croon, “You’ve got to do it, do it, do the dirty thing girl, do it to get a ring girl.” (When I marvel at her recall, she tells me that at a get-together just last week, she and Short were singing Second City songs.)

Duke vowed to recreate that eighties gig with a group of middle-agers like herself, so in 2004 she pulled together Jayne Eastwood, Kathryn Greenwood, Debra McGrath and Teresa Pavlinek – “smart, funny women who inspire me” – and created a troupe, Women Fully Clothed, that toured Canada and the U.S.

“Every night someone from the audience would ask, ‘Have you been in my home?’” Duke says now. “We were relatable, and they could feel our joy at working with one another. The men laughed as hard as the women, and that was great – for me, a laugh is a laugh.”

That same year, she became full-time faculty in the comedy program at Humber College, teaching everything from improv, sketch and physical comedy to radio production and the business of comedy. Her successful alumni include the writer/director Rebecca Addelman (Paper Year); Nathan Macintosh, who’s appeared on Fallon, Colbert and Conan; Ashley Comeau (Ms. Bader on Degrassi: Next Class); Mark Edwards, the guy who comes out of the wall in The Source commercials; and Vance Banzo and Tim Blair, whose troupe, TallBoyz, had a sketch series on the CBC. “I taught them everything they know,” Duke says mock-solemnly.

She’s retiring after this semester, having just graded her last midterms: “It’s so time for me to leave,” she says, cackling. “My references are so old! I say a name and their faces are just blank.”

But Duke’s not retiring from seeking laughs: “I’ve never been ambitious,” she says. “I just want to perform.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the sitcom Shelved is on CBC, when it is in fact on CTV.

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