For his rare return to Chicago, Mike Myers got the weather he deserved Saturday — a temperate fall evening with none of the extremes he endured during his eight months of life here in the late ‘80s.
“I’ve never been more hot in my life, I’ve never been more cold or wet in my life, than in Chicago,” he said on a red carpet at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts.
In a homecoming to the city that was briefly his home, the “Wayne’s World” and “Austin Powers” star arrived to accept a career achievement award from the Chicago International Film Festival. Co-presenting the trophy was The Second City, which had employed the then-unknown Myers in its Toronto theater and then brought him to Chicago to star in the 1988 review “Kuwait Until Dark.”
Pithy as it was, the stint in the city gave Myers all the insight he needed to play a Bears fan in the “Saturday Night Live” Superfans sketches, as well as form a lifelong appreciation of the city’s theater crowds.
“In England [another former Myers habitat], there’s a very wide variety of subjects that they find funny. In Canada, it’s a little more narrow. America tends to be narrower still,” he said Saturday. “But in Chicago it’s a very wide and sophisticated comedy audience.”
Before accepting the award, Myers sat for a lengthy conversation before an audience that, fortuitously, got to watch in real time as the actor experienced what he called “the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
It came from the night’s moderator, Dave Foley, a member of the revered sketch comedy group Kids in the Hall known for his starring roles in TV’s “Newsradio” and the animated movie “A Bug’s Life.”
Handpicked by Myers for the gig, the fellow Canadian Foley proved a shrewd choice. He’s known Myers since they met at 19 at Second City Toronto, and he shared top-tier anecdotes as well as witty asides from his longtime friend.
The convulsions followed a discussion of Christopher Walken’s role in “Wayne’s World 2.” Foley mentioned that he, too, had worked with Walken, on a 1999 movie called “Blast From the Past.”
“I’m pretty sure he didn’t remember my name,” he told the crowd, “because he always called me ‘Senator.’”
Delighted by that bit of Walken weirdness, Myers doubled over and needed a few moments to recover, adding, “I haven’t laughed so hard since my dad’s funeral.” Of course, Foley was called “Senator” for the rest of the night.
The conversation took the form of a career overview, with the latitude for digressions about such things as Alice Cooper’s facility with German dialect and Brenda Fricker’s beat-up Oscar statuette.
On his starmaking 1989-95 stint on “Saturday Night Live,” Myers confessed that before show creator Lorne Michaels expressed interest in hiring him, “I actually hadn’t seen the show.” On Saturday nights, Myers’ VCR had been busy taping the games of his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs.
To “SNL” he brought the character Wayne Campbell, a heavy metal-loving, catchphrase-spouting perpetual adolescent who had originated on obscure Canadian teen TV shows. “It was everyone I knew growing up in Scarborough, Ontario,” Myers explained.
When “SNL” audiences embraced Wayne, Myers was asked to bring the character to the big screen and co-wrote a movie dense with his distinctive, off-kilter humor. “I didn’t think they were gonna release it,” he said, his right foot jiggling with anxiety.
But it became a smash. He didn’t fully understand the movie’s reach until he was in a huge Las Vegas casino gambling floor where Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was playing as background music and watched as “something like 4,000 people” copied the film’s trademark head bob at the key moment.
After “Wayne,” Myers launched the Austin Powers franchise. The story of a lecherous spy frozen in the 1960s and thawed out in the ‘90s — propelled by Myers’ amusement over films that presented ugly, middle-aged British men as sex symbols — seemed made for the tiniest of niche audiences.
“I didn’t think they were gonna release it,” he said, again.
And again, he was very wrong. Audiences loved the film’s homages to London’s swinger culture of the ‘60s and its sniggering humor, typified by the subtle audacity of naming a character Alotta Fagina.
“A hack would have said, ‘Alotta VA-gina,’ ” Foley said.
Myers replied, “I don’t get it.”
Two sequels ensued, one of which co-starred Beyoncé in her big-screen debut. Michael Caine, playing Austin’s father, “could never get her name right,” Myers said. “He’d just go, ‘Hey, Be-YONTS.’ ”
In yet another blockbuster film series, Myers provides the voice of Shrek, and he detailed the grueling process of experimenting with different dialects for the ogre, eventually settling on Scottish as a working-class counterpart to the story’s British royals.
(A fifth Shrek film is scheduled for a 2026 release, and on the red carpet, Myers confirmed he’s working on it, but beyond that “I can’t tell you anything about it.”)
The evening ended with the award presentation, and Myers invoked Wayne’s bow to Alice Cooper as he accepted the trophy: “Thank you. You’re very worthy. Thank you.”
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