[4] After a number of personnel changes, the group became known as the "Royal Canadian Air Farce" in 1973; they were given their own show, taped in front of a live audience at the Curtain Club in Richmond Hill, Ontario.
As the troupe became more popular, they frequently travelled throughout the country to record their weekly radio broadcasts, which featured a mixture of political and cultural satire strongly influenced by the style of Wayne and Shuster.
In the late 1970s during a trip to Los Angeles, Abbott and Ferguson were offered jobs writing for the new television sitcom Taxi, but opted to remain with Air Farce instead.
Renfrew of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Broadfoot), and socialite Amy De La Pompa (Morgan), along with political figures such as Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark, and Pierre Trudeau.
Another recurring character, making vacant-minded political comments, was the Honourable David J. Broadfoot, Member of Parliament for Kicking Horse Pass and leader of the New Apathetic Party.
Broadfoot had been performing as this character for years, and had appeared on Canadian and American television as "The Honourable Member" as early as the 1950s, long before his tenure with Air Farce.
The fifth episode of Krazy House was written entirely by Morgan, and featured Air Farce cast member Luba Goy along with Billy Van, Harvey Atkin, and others.
Despite the decent ratings for the initial special, staging the radio sketches in such a way did not translate well on television, and the Air Farce faded from CBC TV by 1983.
When The Journal debuted on CBC in 1982, Air Farce spoofed the program's repeated use of the "sounder", and the use of satellite to connect people to talk to one another (including husband in living room to wife in the kitchen), as well as the seeming similarity between original hosts Barbara Frum and Mary Lou Finlay.
[citation needed] In the early 1980s, Air Farce's summer radio hiatus periods were filled by another comedy troupe, the Frantics, who later moved on to their own TV series, Four on the Floor.
[citation needed] Broadfoot retired from the troupe in 1989, although he continued to make guest appearances with Air Farce for many years afterward, on both radio and TV.
Notable re-occurring figures included Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (Abbott), who could barely speak a single sentence of English without committing at least a dozen outlandish pronunciation and grammatical errors; the nasally voiced Preston Manning (Ferguson) who loved to shout "REFOOOOOOORM!
"; a screaming, bitchy Sheila Copps (Goy); the tyrannical Lucien Bouchard; the dopey and overly image conscious Stockwell Day; the strutting, clucking, pompous Joe Clark; and the power-hungry Paul Martin (all Ferguson).
Morgan retired from Air Farce in 2001, and the remaining three members carried on with a rotating stable of guest stars until Jessica Holmes joined the show in 2003.
Holmes added celebrity figures such as Paris Hilton and Liza Minnelli, and Canadian politicians such as Belinda Stronach, to the troupe's roster of characters.
Later, in 2005, after a lockout at CBC, Air Farce gained two new cast members, who had previously appeared on the show as recurring guest stars: Alan Park and Craig Lauzon.
Park initially only signed on to do rant-like segments, saying in interviews that he'd never play a character, but ended up taking on roles including Barack Obama.
Lauzon regularly portrayed Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, taking his stiff public persona and creating a generally robotic character.
Abbott, Morgan, Goy, Ferguson, and Broadfoot had cameo appearances in The Red Green Show's movie spinoff Duct Tape Forever.