First on LateNighter: Paul Myers, the author behind last year’s well-received John Candy: A Life in Comedy, is turning his attention to another Canadian comedy great: Catherine O’Hara.
Myers tells LateNighter that House of Anansi has signed him to write a biography of O’Hara, the legendary Second City, SCTV, Home Alone, Beetlejuice, and Schitt’s Creek star who died earlier this year at 71.
The project follows Myers’ Candy biography, which topped Vulture’s list of the best comedy books of 2025 and is set for paperback release October 7. Myers says that book’s strong reception helped open the door to another comedy biography.
O’Hara, Myers says, was the natural choice.
“Catherine was so very deeply connected to Candy,” he says. “He gave her a chance at the Second City Stage when she was a 19-year-old rookie, and then later, they were founding writer performers on SCTV. And Candy even has a memorable back and forth with O’Hara in her mainstream breakout film, Home Alone.”
Myers interviewed O’Hara in 2021 for the Candy book. He says he came away from that conversation convinced that if he ever wrote a follow-up, O’Hara should be the subject.
“We were just putting together the contract details when we got the terrible news that she had died suddenly,” Myers says. “I was stunned and saddened, but also realized that I would need some space to sit with her loss before I could go on. But after a month, I began to feel that I have a chance to really put together a testament to her as both a comedy genius and gifted actor, but as a uniquely kind and intelligent person. So I am proceeding on that path with a full heart.”
Myers is the author of The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy, as well as biographies of Todd Rundgren, Barenaked Ladies, and Long John Baldry. He describes the O’Hara book as the third in what he sees as a trilogy of Toronto-born comedy books—following his Kids in the Hall and John Candy biographies—calling them “love letters” to the Canadian comedy figures who shaped his early life.
His connection to O’Hara was not especially personal, he says, but it was not distant either. Myers is the brother of Second City Stage alumnus Mike Myers, and says he grew up in Toronto steeped in the same comedy world that produced O’Hara.
“As kids, my two brothers and I worshipped SCTV, and Saturday Night Live,” Myers says. “We’d always swoon when Catherine and her sister, the singer Mary Margaret O’Hara, would be seen walking down Queen Street West, sometimes with Robin Duke, or we’d spot them at their brother Marcus’s pool hall, The Squeeze Club, in Toronto.”
Myers says the book is still taking shape, but he expects it to place O’Hara’s career in the broader context of the Toronto comedy world that shaped her.
“I always like to include a bit of background about the home life of my subjects,” he explains. “The things that may have incubated a comic mind, their breakthrough period, their biggest achievements, and legacy, plus any other humanizing facts that help paint a three-dimensional portrait of the person behind the legend.”
Naturally, that means SCTV, where O’Hara became one of sketch comedy’s great shape-shifters. But Myers says he is also eager to cover her work in Home Alone, Beetlejuice, After Hours, Schitt’s Creek, and The Studio, among other lesser-known moments.
Another area Myers expects to explore is O’Hara’s writing. While she was widely celebrated as a performer, Myers says her work as a comedy writer remains underappreciated.
“Even on SCTV, her first writer’s room ever, she was capable of coming up with whole scenes and not just her own character. The Schitt’s Creek writers frequently deferred to her last-minute script punch ups and genuinely thanked her for them.”
He also wants to make the case for O’Hara as more than a comic performer.
“As with so many great comedy performers, I don’t think there’s a widespread understanding that she was just a great all-around actor, period,” Myers says.
The O’Hara book is still in its early stages. Myers says there is not yet a title or publication date, and he expects the reporting and writing process to take roughly two years.
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