Comedy Now!: Bowser and Blue — Two Nuts Roasting on an Open Fire

Montreal musical comedy duo George Bowser and Rick Blue bring their acoustic guitars and localized satire to a 1997 holiday television broadcast. Two Nuts Roasting on an Open Fire relies on the pair’s standard approach: trading jokes between folk songs, lightly tweaking Canadian culture, and performing precise comedic music. They skip big theatrical staging, opting instead for a conversational atmosphere where their harmonies and wordplay are the main draw.

Produced for CTV, the hour earned a Gemini Award nomination for Best Performance in a Variety Program. By this point, the two had been playing together for nearly twenty years, having met in the Montreal music scene in 1978. They built a steady career out of defending English-speaking Quebecers and writing hyper-specific songs about Canadian daily life, snowbirds, and politics. Following their television success in the late nineties, the duo regularly took their act to the Centaur Theatre and the Just For Laughs festival.