{"id":2019683,"date":"2025-09-13T17:52:59","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T17:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2019683"},"modified":"2025-09-13T17:52:59","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T17:52:59","slug":"you-had-to-be-there-how-the-toronto-godspell-ignited-the-comedy-revolution-review-an-exuberant-and-essential-doc-for-comedy-heads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/you-had-to-be-there-how-the-toronto-godspell-ignited-the-comedy-revolution-review-an-exuberant-and-essential-doc-for-comedy-heads\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution\u2026\u2019 Review: An Exuberant and Essential Doc for Comedy Heads"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

The comedy revolution referred to by the title of Nick Davis<\/a>\u2019s sharp and effusive documentary \u201cYou Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution\u2026\u201d is the one that took place on television in the \u201970s: the creation of \u201cSaturday Night Live<\/a>\u201d and \u201cSctv<\/a>\u201d and everything that grew out of them. \u201cYou Had to Be There\u201d makes the case that the Petri dish from which the DNA of those shows was sprung was the 1972 Toronto production of \u201cGodspell<\/a>,\u201d the Jesus-and-his-followers-as-hippie-clowns musical that had rocked the world when it premiered on Broadway the year before. The Toronto production featured a young Martin Short<\/a>, Eugene Levy<\/a>, Andrea Martin<\/a>, Dave Thomas<\/a> (all Canadian), and, from across the river, Detroit\u2019s own Gilda Radner<\/a> \u2014 who was the very first performer to be cast on \u201cSaturday Night,\u201d a show created by Lorne Michaels<\/a>, who was also Canadian.<\/p>\n

You might say: Okay,…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.imdb.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The comedy revolution referred to by the title of Nick Davis\u2019s sharp and effusive documentary \u201cYou Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution\u2026\u201d is the one that took place on television in the \u201970s: the creation of \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d and \u201cSctv\u201d and everything that grew out of them. \u201cYou […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2019684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[25538,31714,21751,22556,21993,22860,21912,21738,24141,22205,21913],"class_list":["post-2019683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-actors","tag-actresses","tag-celebrities","tag-directors","tag-films","tag-hollywood","tag-movies","tag-news","tag-stars","tag-television","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\u2018You-Had-to-Be-There-How-the-Toronto-Godspell-Ignited.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2019683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2019683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2019683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2019684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2019683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2019683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2019683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}