OPEN POST: The Sunday Roast with The Shmenge Brothers!

Hello Peckers, and welcome to the second weekly Sunday Roast. Today our esteemed guests are those globe-trotting celebrities and heartbreakers, The Shmenge Brothers!

Here's their Fan Page on Facebook! And here they are leading a jaded NYC audience in their big hit, "Cabbage Rolls and Coffee"!

I'm sure you're sophisticated enough to recognize them, and probably shared a cocktail hour or two on the Riviera with these two international men of mystique and musique. For those who are not, the Shmenge Brothers are Stan Shmenge (John Candy) and Yosh/Josh Shmenge (Eugene Levy), polka sensations from the historic and glamorous nation of Leutonia. While Canada (specifically the Kitchener/Waterloo area of Southern Ontario) may be their legal residence, where they live in their mom's split level, their hearts are in Leutonia, and in the music which brings together the sophisticated and glamorous world of polka enthusiasts around the world. 

Before there was Jack Black playing Jan Lewan in Polka King, the two SCTV legends were gently mocking but also celebrating polka culture, which is HUGE in parts of Ontario, even if most of the crazed fans are popcorn-headed retirees in capris. Canadian tv carried polka shows for decades, and they did pretty well ratings-wise. It's an expression of nostalgia for a perfect era, and a perfect old country, that never were, but also an expression of community and life itself; it doesn't end at retirement! 

Candy and Levy's Shmenge Brothers and their band the Happy Wanderers were supposed to be superstars on the global polka scene, stretching from Kitchener to Waterloo, and even up to Wilno. Somehow, as big as they got, they still lived with their mama. They were, yes, heavily patterned on Lewan, but unlike him never dipped into felonious actions; they were Bambi to his Jaws. Po-faced naivete was their whole brand, along with the kind of pointless but earnest enthusiasm for literally everything that makes that one coworker of yours so annoying.

Sadly, we can't have nice things, at least not forever. After making actual live performances across Canada, the Happy Wanderers called it quits, a tragic loss for music and for Leutonian culture globally documented in the film The Last Polka, which is presented below in its entirety. 

Let's shed a tear and raise cabbage rolls and coffee to the memory of the world's first Leutonian-Canadian superstars!

Photo Credits: Getty Images, SCTV/Global Television Network