Frank Shuster

Frank Shuster, OC (5 September 1916 – 13 January 2002) was a Canadian comedian best known as a member of the comedy duo Wayne and Shuster, alongside Johnny Wayne.

Life and career

Shuster was born to a Jewish immigrant family in Toronto, Ontario, and spent part of his childhood in Niagara Falls. His family returned to Toronto in time for Shuster to attend high school at Toronto's Harbord Collegiate Institute, where he met Johnny Wayne in 1930. The two would soon be performing sketches and routines at school talent shows, continuing to do the same when they both attended the University of Toronto.

By the early 1940s Wayne and Shuster began appearing on local radio station CFRB, and during WWII they joined the Canadian Army as performers, entertaining Canadian troops, and performed on the CBC Radio series The Army Show. After the war, the duo appeared on CBC radio and television, becoming a network fixture with regular appearances from the 1940s through the 1980s. They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show over 66 times. The duo would remain a comedy team for 60 years, until Wayne's death in 1990.

Wayne and Shuster

Wayne and Shuster were a Canadian comedy duo formed by Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster. They were active professionally from the early 1940s until the late 1980s.

Wayne (born Louis Weingarten, May 28, 1918 – July 18, 1990) and Shuster (September 5, 1916 – January 13, 2002) were well known in Canada, and were Ed Sullivan's most frequently recurring guests, appearing a record 67 times on his show.

Beginnings

Wayne and Shuster met as high school students at Harbord Collegiate Institute in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1930. They both studied at the University of Toronto, where they wrote and performed for the theatre there, and in 1941 they made their radio debut on CFRB in their own show, The Wife Preservers in which they dispensed household hints in a humorous fashion. This exposure resulted in the pair being given their own comedy show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Trans-Canada Network as Shuster & Wayne.

They enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1942, and performed for the troops in Europe during World War II as part of the Army Show (they would also later perform for the army in the Korean War). They returned to Canada to create the Wayne and Shuster Show for CBC Radio in 1946. They first performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States in 1958, and set a record there by appearing 58 times over the next 11 years.