Gerry Dee: teacher, comic, writer

By Walter J. Lyng, October 10th, 2012

Think back to your school days. You probably had at least one funny teacher who made you laugh regularly, right? Gerry Dee used to be that funny teacher. He was so funny, in fact, that he soon dropped the teaching altogether and pursued the funny business exclusively.
The star of CBC Television's Mr. D, Dee has formed a successful stand-up career based largely on his experience as a teacher at De La Salle College in Toronto.
Having recently completed the shooting of the show’s second season, Dee is also in the midst of promoting his new book, Teaching: It's Harder Than it Looks, as well as performing in various cities as part of a new tour. When he comes to town on October 13 to play at the Olympia, however, he says he won't necessarily be playing a character on stage.
“It's not me as Mr. D but, because I am Mr. Dee, there's a lot of crossovers,” he says. “I tend to draw a lot of teachers to my show so I have a lot of stories about teaching.”
Prior to landing his own show, Dee notably finished in third place on the fifth season of Last Comic Standing.
“I was trying to figure out what to do next,” he says. “I was starting to make it somewhat successfully as a comedian and I think every comedian's dream is to be in a sitcom, right?”
His book, meanwhile, balances humour with some of the real lessons he took from his time as a teacher.
“My real name is Gerry Donoghue and that's who I am in that book,” he says. “It's what the kids knew me as, it's what the staff knew me as. There's a little Gerry Dee style in there but for the most part, that's what I really taught like.”
And although his Mr. D persona has now come to be well established, he says he has no desire to step back inside a classroom any time soon.
“I think I'm out of that career now, especially because I've shown how I was as a teacher,” he says. “I don't know too many schools that would want to hire me.”
In many ways, Dee has come to act as the mouthpiece for educators who just don't have the same kind of forum to exercise their own humour.
“We have to go into the staff room to rag on the kids and talk about how much we don't like them but the kids do it right in front of us in the class room,” he says. 
“It's kind of a double standard. I think that's where a lot of teacher can relate because I'm speaking for them in a lot of ways.”
For more information, visit www.gerrydee.com