40 years of Air Farce: Read an excerpt!

Iconic comedy troupe The Royal Canadian Air Farce has been making radio and television audiences laugh for decades with their political satire.

Farce founder Roger Abbott passed away in March after battling leukemia. But he and co-founder Don Ferguson have put together a candid memoir, which is only now hitting bookstores. It's filled with behind-the-scenes anecdotes, photographs, scripts and contributions from cast members and collaborators, including Dave Broadfoot and Luba Goy.

Don Ferguson was on hand to help launch Air Farce: 40 Years of Flying by the Seat of Our Pants at the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto Monday, telling CBC's Jelena Adzic that the group never got together with the intention of becoming famous.

"We just did it because it was fun. We figured we're going to do this for as long as we can 'cause it ain't going to last...Here we are 40 years later."

Although the Air Farce line-up has changed over the years, the original core members lasted longer together than many marriages these days. Ferguson said the secret to their success was chemistry.

"As a group we just kind of understood each other and we forgave each others' faults and were just a good fit," he explained. "Sometimes a good team is not made up of the best players, it just becomes a really good team ...and in some ways that's what Air Farce was. We were very lucky...I've never stop being thankful for the good fortune that brought the group of us together and allowed us to do this for as long as we did."

You can watch Ferguson's interview in the clip below. You can also read an excerpt from the new book.

Air Farce: 40 Years of Flying by the Seat of Our Pants

by Don Ferguson/Roger Abbott

Buy this book at:

From the publisher:

"A staple of CBC television for fifteen years, with diehard fans numbering in the millions, Canada's Royal Canadian Air Farce exemplifies brilliant comedic mayhem. Written by the founding members of Air Farce-Roger Abbott and Don Ferguson-this candid memoir, full of anecdotes, photographs, scripts, and other memorabilia from the authors'' private collection describes every aspect of their hard-scrabble early life in 1970 as an onstage comedy troupe, their historic run on radio, and their spectacular success on prime-time television."

Read more at John Wiley & Sons.