Actor · Writer · Director · Certified McKenzie Brother
Six decades of comedy that shaped a country — sketch, film, and television, and the two McKenzie hosers who started it all.
The short version
Dave Thomas has spent a career making people laugh and making it look easy — an Emmy-winning writer, a director, and a performer who knows exactly where the joke lives. From SCTV and Bob & Doug McKenzie to Grace Under Fire, Coneheads, and Rat Race, he's written, directed, produced, or starred in nearly every kind of television except the news.
Selected work
The Emmy-winning sketch show born out of Toronto's Second City — and Dave was there from the very first recruiting stop. Across five seasons he wrote and played some of the series' most unforgettable characters, and helped launch John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Andrea Martin, Martin Short, Harold Ramis, and Rick Moranis.
Books
For me, a good story opens a window in a comfortable room, revealing the twinkling lights of some unknown place in the night beyond — and a voice says, “Why don't we go out there?”
— Dave Thomas
A quantum thriller · with Max Allan Collins
Co-written with Road to Perdition creator Max Allan Collins, a small-time Boston thief stumbles into a quantum experiment — and a bullet — and is thrown down every path his life might have taken. Published by NeoText.
Buy on Amazon→
The definitive history · by Dave Thomas
Dave's first-hand account of the show that launched John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Andrea Martin, Martin Short, and Rick Moranis — profiles, every sketch, and stories only an insider could tell.
Buy on Amazon→About
Dave came up through Toronto's Second City and SCTV, where he and Rick Moranis turned two toque-wearing, back-bacon-loving hosers into a national institution — the McKenzie Brothers, a million-selling comedy album, and the cult film Strange Brew.
Behind the camera he's written, produced, and directed across television and film — from Spies Like Us with Dan Aykroyd to the writers' rooms of Bones and The Blacklist. In front of it, he's never really stopped performing.
Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, Dave was appointed to the Order of Canada — the country's highest civilian honor — and holds an honorary doctorate from McMaster University.
