A BoB short:
A last blog post by Joe Bodolai has gone viral today after the L.A. Police ruled the well-loved comedy writer’s death a suicide. Bodolai, who worked on both “Saturday Night Live” and the “Kids in the Hall” before helping to launch Canada’s Comedy Channel, apparently intended the post as a combination suicide note and impromptu memoir.
Titled “IF THIS WERE Y0UR LAST DAY ALIVE WHAT WOULD YOU DO?”, the long farewell includes Bodolai’s list of “Things I Regret”:
Later he writes: “I wanted a channel. I felt the huge failure of comedy, such as sitcoms, on Canadian television, could only be successful if showrunners were comedy writers, not Telefilm form fillers. This is one of the proudest accomplishments I have seen come true. Mark Farrell, Brent Butt, so many more of you….”
Butt confirmed as much on his twitter feed. (See The Globe‘s complete round-up of social media tributes to Bodolai here.)
Bodolai, who was US-born, had apparently lost a TV job recently and, according to his own Twitter feed, undergone surgery. Over Christmas he volunteered at an L.A. Homeless shelter. “[It] may be my new home,” he writes. “I call it ‘Shawshank Summer Camp.’ 65 men on cots in one big space where sleep is victimhood.”
Bodolai opens his post with a list of “Things I Think Will Happen Next Year,” in which he mixes gags (“Sales of Mayan Calendars up for 2012, drop for 2013,” “World Supply of Band Names will run out”) with more serious prophecies: “Martial Law in the USA, first probably in Louisiana”; “Americans will go along with this, but resisters will be FEMA camped.”
Unfortunately we think a lot of his readers won’t realize he’s not joking about that last bit.
Joe Bodolai would probably like it if you visted his youtube channel.
– Zeff Davies