Canadian humour
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Humour is an integral part of the
The primary characteristics of Canadian humour are irony, parody, and satire.
As with other countries, humour at the expense of regional and ethnic stereotypes can be found in Canada. Examples are 'Newfie' jokes (with 'Newfie' being a colloquial term for a person from the island of Newfoundland) and jokes revolving around English-speaking Canadians' stereotype of French Canadians,[4] and vice versa.
Literature
According to author Stephen Scobie, Canadian humorous writing has tended more towards prose than poetry.[5] An early work of Canadian humour, Thomas McCulloch's Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (1821–23) appeared in the Halifax weekly Acadian Recorder. Northrop Frye described McCulloch's satirical letters as "quiet, observant, deeply conservative in a human sense"; he asserted that McCulloch's persona, the "conventional, old-fashioned, homespun" farmer, was an extension of a centuries-old satiric tradition, and that the letters set the tone for later comedic writing in Canada.[6]
Compared to McCulloch's dry and understated style,
Authors responded with folk humour and satire to the domination of 19th-century
Light comedy that mocked local customs was typical of 19th-century theatre in Quebec. Examples include Joseph Quesnel's L'Anglomanie, ou le dîner à l'angloise (1803), which criticized the imitation of English customs,[9] and Pierre Petitclair's Une partie de campagne (1865). More serious dramas attacked specific targets: the anonymous Les Comédies du status quo (1834) ridiculed local politics, and Le Défricheteur de langue (1859) by Isodore Mesplats, (pseudonym of Joseph LaRue and Joseph-Charles Taché), mocked Parisian manners. Other examples of theatrical satire were Félix-Gabriel Marchand's comedy, Les faux brillants (1885) and Louvigny de Montigny's Les Boules de neige (1903), which took aim at Montreal's bourgeoisie.[8] Humorous magazines in French included La Guêpe, "journal qui pique", published in Montreal 1857–1861.
By the early 20th century, the satirical tradition was well developed in
Following the
Humorous fiction in French Canada draws from the oral tradition of
The plain talking alter-ego as an instrument of satire continued with
Humour is also central to the work of Canadian children's writers such as Gordon Korman, Dennis Lee and Robert Munsch.
Music
Particularly in recent years, Canada has produced a number of musical groups who have been described as "comedy rock". Bands such as
Nancy White is a noted Canadian musical satirist, whose comedic folk songs about Canadian culture and politics have regularly appeared on CBC Radio programs.[16]
In addition to more serious material on his primary albums, folk musician
Don Ast, a stand-up comedian who performed in character as befuddled Ukrainian immigrant
Another noted Canadian musical comedian is Mary Lou Fallis, an opera singer who performs both in classical opera roles and as the comedic character "Primadonna", a touring stage show in which she parodies popular stereotypes of opera divas.
Canadian heavy metal frontman
Radio
Many of Canada's comedy acts and performers have started out on radio, primarily on the national Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) network.
While individual comedy show and segments have been around almost as long as the network, the focus has tended be more on specific shows featuring particular groups of comedians. The real beginnings of Canadian radio comedy began in the late 1930s with the debut of
The Royal Canadian Air Farce started as a radio show debuting in 1973 featuring mainly political and some character-based comedy sketches. It ran for 24 years before making a permanent transition to television. It started a tradition of topical and politically satirical radio shows that inspired such programs as Double Exposure, The Muckraker and What a Week.
A zanier, more surreal brand of radio comedy was unveiled in the early 1980s with the debut of
Another enduring radio comedy program is The Vinyl Cafe, hosted by Stuart McLean. The show is centred around McLean's Dave and Morley stories, a series of narrated short stories about a Toronto family and their friends and neighbours; many of the stories have been compiled in book form, and the books have often won or been nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
By the 1990s the satirical and zany elements merged into two of the more notable CBC radio comedy shows of the 1990s:
CBC Radio continues to play an important part in developing comedy performers on radio.
Television
CBC Television's first Canadian-produced television series was
Original Canadian television comedy begins with Wayne and Shuster, a sketch comedy duo who performed as a comedy team during the Second World War, and moved their act to radio in 1946 before moving on to television. They became one of Canada's most enduring comedy teams on Canadian television and in the United States as well: they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show 67 times, a record for any performer. Their Julius Caesar sketch, Rinse the Blood off My Toga, with its legendary catchphrase, "I told him, Julie, don't go!", was particularly noted.
Wayne and Shuster continued to appear on CBC Television until the late 1980s, with specials that mixed new sketches with their classic material.
La famille Plouffe, the first regularly scheduled television drama in Canada, was produced in 1953 by Radio-Canada, in French. The program was broadcast on both English and French networks of CBC TV from 1954 to 1959, (in English as The Plouffe Family). It was a mix of drama, humour and social commentary about a working-class Quebec family in the post-World War II era. Another of the CBC's earliest productions was Sunshine Sketches, a television adaptation of one of the enduring classics of Canadian humour writing, Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.
Another pioneer in Canadian television comedy was, oddly, a news series.
Canadian born
Many Canadian comedy shows, while not directly about politics per se, have made profound political statements by satirizing society and pop culture. This includes shows such as SCTV, Buzz and CODCO. CODCO, in particular, was intensely controversial at times for its use of comedy in tackling sensitive subjects; founding member Andy Jones quit CODCO in protest after the CBC refused to air a sketch that made a very explicit political statement about the Mount Cashel Orphanage child abuse scandal. The series History Bites was ostensibly a show presenting history in a sketch comedy, but frequently used the historic setting to satirize current political events and social trends.
Other shows, such as
Other notable sketch series have included
Although several notable Canadian sitcoms have been produced, such as Excuse My French, King of Kensington, Hangin' In, Corner Gas, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Mr. D, Kim's Convenience, and Schitt's Creek, many other sitcoms, including Material World, Mosquito Lake, Snow Job, Check it Out!, The Trouble with Tracy, Rideau Hall and Not My Department, have often fared poorly with critics and audiences.[19] Critic Geoff Pevere has pointed out, however, that American television has produced a lot of bad sitcoms as well. The difference, according to Pevere, is that the economics of television production in Canada mean that whereas an unpopular American sitcom may be cancelled and largely forgotten after just a few weeks, Canadian television networks can rarely afford to lose their investment — meaning that a Canadian sitcom almost always airs every episode that was produced, regardless of its performance in the ratings.
According to television critic Bill Brioux, there are a number of structural reasons for this: the shorter seasons, typical of Canadian television production, make it harder for audiences to connect with a program before its season has concluded, and put even successful shows at risk of losing their audience between seasons because of the longer waiting time before a show returns with new episodes; the more limited marketing budgets available to Canadian television networks mean that audiences are less likely to be aware that the show exists in the first place; and the shows tend to resemble American sitcoms, in the hope of securing a lucrative sale to an American television network, even though by and large the Canadian sitcoms that have been successful have been ones, such as Corner Gas or King of Kensington, that had a more distinctively Canadian flavour.[19]
On the other hand, Canadian television comedy fares much better when it breaks the sitcom form, especially with
Canada has a national television channel,
Rick Mercer began his career in 1990 with a touring one-man show, Show Me the Button, I'll Push It, about Canadian life in the immediate aftermath of the failed Meech Lake Accord. That show was a sellout success; in 1993, he made his television debut as one of the writers and performers on This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Mercer's "rants", short op-ed pieces on Canadian politics and culture, quickly became the show's signature segment. When he published a collection of rants in 1998 as Streeters, the book quickly became a bestseller. Mercer left 22 Minutes in 2000 to devote more time to his other series, Made in Canada. When that series ended its run, he launched the new Rick Mercer Report.
Another famous comedic export in the same era was Tom Green, whose surreal and sometimes grotesque humour on The Tom Green Show began as a community cable show in Ottawa before becoming a hit on MTV.
As with many other genres, Canadian television comedy also frequently plays with the topic of
Another notable show, the sitcom An American in Canada, reversed that formula, finding comedy in the culture shock of an American television reporter taking a job with a Canadian TV station. Tom Green once played with this staple of Canadian comedy as well, during a controversial segment in which he burned a Canadian flag.
Film
Film critic Barry Hertz created a list of the 23 best Canadian comedy films ever made for The Globe and Mail in 2023, although he included two films that had Canadian themes, settings and creative participants but were not Canadian productions:[20]
- BlackBerry — Matt Johnson
- Coopers' Camera — Warren P. Sonoda
- Crime Wave — John Paizs
- The Decline of the American Empire (Le Déclin de l'empire américain) — Denys Arcand
- The Exchange — Dan Mazer
- The F Word — Michael Dowse
- FUBAR — Michael Dowse
- Goon — Michael Dowse
- Hobo with a Shotgun — Jason Eisener
- I Like Movies — Chandler Levack
- Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy — Kelly Makin
- Maps to the Stars — David Cronenberg
- Meatballs — Ivan Reitman
- My Internship in Canada (Guibord s'en va-t-en guerre) — Philippe Falardeau
- PG: Psycho Goreman — Steven Kostanski
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World — Edgar Wright
- Seducing Doctor Lewis (La Grande séduction) — Jean-François Pouliot
- Ken Scott
- Strange Brew — Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas
- Turning Red — Domee Shi
- The Twentieth Century — Matthew Rankin
- Waydowntown — Gary Burns
- The Wrong Guy — David Steinberg
In addition to Hertz's own selections, sidebars asking other notable figures in Canadian comedy to identify their own choices singled out the films Rare Birds as a choice of Mercer and You're Sleeping Nicole as a favourite of Levack, while Mark Critch reiterated Hertz's choice of Seducing Doctor Lewis.[20]
Web
In the same vein as Air Farce and 22 Minutes, a number of notable web sites have emerged to publish articles that either satirize real events or wholly invent stories that lampoon aspects of Canadian culture. Frank magazine, which originated as a printed publication, has been joined in recent years by The Beaverton, The Daily Bonnet, and Walking Eagle News each broadly modelled after The Onion.
Comedy clubs
Notable Canadian comedy clubs and showcases include The Second City branch in Toronto (originally housed at The Old Fire Hall), the Yuk Yuk's chain, and The ALTdot COMedy Lounge. The top clubs in Canada are Rumor's Comedy Club in Winnipeg, The Comic Strip in Edmonton, The Laugh Shop in Calgary, and Absolute Comedy in Ottawa.
Awards
The Canadian Comedy Awards were founded by Tim Progosh and Higher Ground Productions in 1999, and present awards for achievements in Canadian comedy across a variety of domains, including live performance, radio, film, television, and Internet media.[21]
The Canadian Screen Awards present a number of awards for television comedy, including Best Comedy Series and awards for performance, writing and direction in comedy series.
Just for Laughs and
The annual Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour is presented to works of comedic literature, across both fiction and non-fiction genres.
Personalities
See also
- List of Quebec comedians
- British humour
- Canadian comics
- American humor
- Canadian clowning
Notes
- ISBN 978-1-77123-342-2. p.57
- ISBN 978-0-7735-0652-7.
- ISBN 978-0-7735-9685-6.
- ^ "Canadian Joles". The Toque. Archived from the original on 2009-12-14. Retrieved 2009-01-03.
- ^ a b c d Scobie, Stephen "Humorous Writing in English". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved on: March 24, 2008.
- ISBN 978-0-8020-3710-7.
- ISBN 978-0-8020-8943-4.
- ^ a b c d Lacombe, Michelle "Humorous Writing in French". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved on: March 24, 2008.
- ISBN 978-2-7621-1905-3.
- ISBN 978-1-57113-127-0.
- ISBN 9780969739098.
- ISBN 978-0-7864-5540-9.
- ISBN 978-2-7606-3279-0.
- ISBN 978-1-4426-5895-0.
- ISBN 978-1-77070-374-2.
- ^ "Nancy White". The Canadian Encyclopedia, July 29, 2007.
- ^ "Nestor Pistor, Winestoned Plowboy". Ontario Library Review, Volumes 62-63 (1978). p. 51
- ^ "RPM Country Playlist". RPM, February 12, 1977.
- ^ canada.com, March 21, 2014.
- ^ a b Barry Hertz, "The 23 best Canadian comedies ever made". The Globe and Mail, June 28, 2023.
- ^ Spevack, Leatrice (6 April 2002). "The Beaver goes to ... a pretty funny show". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 23 May 2018.
Further reading
- Charney, Maurice (August 2005). Comedy: a geographic and historical guide. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 200–. ISBN 978-0-313-32714-8. Retrieved 6 November 2011.
External links
- Media related to Canadian humour at Wikimedia Commons