The Great White North is a Canadian comedy album by the fictional television characters Bob and Doug McKenzie (portrayed by actors Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas), released in 1981 by Anthem Records (ANR-1-1036) and distributed in the United States by Mercury Records (SRM-1-4034).

The title is a nickname for Canada, also used as the title of a Second City Television (SCTV) sketch featuring Bob and Doug. This album’s release tied in with SCTV at the height of the characters’ popularity, and a still from the show is on its cover. In its sleeve is a newspaper parody called The Daily Hoser.

At least one million copies of the album were sold in North America, 350,000 of these in Canada alone, which earned a triple-platinum certification from the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

The Great White North entered the RPM Canadian album charts at #3 on 12 December 1981 and rose to the #1 position the following week where it remained until 23 January 1982. Overall, RPM ranked the album #40 of albums released in Canada during 1981.[7] It peaked at number 8 on the American Billboard 200 album chart in 1982.

The song “Take Off” (identified on the album as “the hit single section”), features guest vocalist Geddy Lee of Rush, an elementary schoolmate of Moranis. In it he utters the line, “Yeah, um, I, you know, ten bucks is ten bucks”, after a reminder of his deal with the brothers’ lawyer. It was a hit, peaking at number 16 on the Billboard 100 singles chart in March 1982, five spots higher than Rush’s then-most popular U.S. song, “New World Man”, had. It reached #14 on the Cash Box chart and #5 on WLS-AM in Chicago

Awards
In 1982, this album received the Juno Award for Comedy Album of the Year.

In 1983, it was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album, but lost to Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip.

Frederick Allan Moranis was born in 1953 in Toronto. Raised in a Jewish family, Moranis got work as a DJ in the mid-70s. In 1977 he began to appear in the CBC comedy show 90 Minutes Live. Moranis got invited to join Second City Television (SCTV) in 1980. He was teamed up with Dave Thomas. William David Thomas was born in 1949 in St. Catharines, Ontario. Out of high school, Thomas got work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. He ended up being in charge of the Coca-Cola ads by 1975. Thomas was cast in a Toronto production of Godspell alongside Eugene Levy, Victor Garber, Martin Short, Gilda Radner and Andrea Martin. The troupe formed the first wave of comedians in Second City Theatre and Second City Television. Others who Dave Thomas worked with included John Candy and Catherine O’Hara.

In 1980, after Moranis and Thomas were teamed up on SCTV, they were challenged to fill two additional minutes with “identifiable Canadian content.” They came up with an improv sketch called The Great White North featuring the two brothers named Bob and Doug McKenzie. In the comedy sketches Bob and Doug drank lots of beer, wore puffy winter plaid jackets, jeans, boots, touques and earmuffs. They called each other “hosers,” a slang term they invented referring to someone who is either a loser, a drunk, or both.

The album also featured a “song” with vocals by Geddy Lee from the Canadian band Rush. Most the song consisted of spoken dialogue sandwiched in between the sung chorus. The sketch’s “Coo loo coo coo, coo coo coo coo” theme was incorporated into the track. The song was titled “Take Off”. The sketch’s “Coo roo coo coo, coo coo coo coo” intro, according to Dave Thomas in an interview on CBC, is an exaggeration of the flute music used in 60-second Canadian television nature vignettes on Hinterland Who’s Who.

In the longer version of the song on the album the McKenzie brothers tell their audience “this is the hit single section of the album.” They thank Geddy Lee from Rush for helping them with the chorus and instrumentals. They explain a photographer will soon be taking pictures of them “to prove that you were here doing, uh, the record.” Next they start to argue over whose idea it was to do the record. Later they tell listeners “our topic today is music… ’cause my brother and I are now experts in the field. (Yeah, right, ’cause we’re a band now). Except for him, I’m a band.” They argue some more and then one tells the other to “take off.”

“Take Off” peaked at #1 in Vancouver (BC), Regina, Winnipeg, Windsor (ON), Kitchener (ON), Toronto, #2 in Hamilton (ON) and Cleveland (OH), #3 in Presque Isle, Maine, #4 in Edmonton (AB) and Ottawa, #5 on WLS in Chicago and #8 in Dallas.

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