Canadian Humour - Television

Television

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 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. This Hour Has Seven Days, which debuted in 1964, was primarily meant as a newsmagazine, but its segments included political satire as well as serious news reports. Later series such as Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Rick Mercer Report have all drawn on the tradition of political satire established by Seven Days, and have been among Canadian television's most popular comedy series in recent years.

Canadian born Lorne Michaels, who had moved from Toronto to Los Angeles in 1968 to work on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, launched the NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live in 1975. Over the years, several Canadians were part of the SNL cast, including Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, and Mike Myers. Michaels also produced The Kids in the Hall for Canadian TV in the 1980s.

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 The Kids in the Hall, 4 on the Floor, Bizarre and Puppets Who Kill, revelled in absurdist humour, making household names out of characters such as Chicken Lady, Mr. Canoehead and Super Dave Osborne.

Other notable sketch series have included Zut!, The Gavin Crawford Show and The Holmes Show. Canadian television also frequently showcases stand-up comedians. The popular series Comics, based around one comedian each week, has been the first national television exposure for many of Canada's current comedy stars. Another series, Just for Laughs, has for many years presented comedians appearing at the Montreal International Comedy Festival. That series has also spawned the more recent Just For Laughs Gags, a practical joke show similar to Candid Camera.

Although several notable Canadian sitcoms have been produced, such as King of Kensington, Hangin' In, Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie, many other sitcoms, including Material World, Mosquito Lake, Snow Job, Check it Out!, The Trouble with Tracy, Rideau Hall, Excuse My French and Not My Department, have generally fared poorly with critics and audiences. 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.

On the other hand, Canadian television comedy fares much better when it breaks the sitcom form, especially with dramedy. Unconventional comedy series such as The Beachcombers, Due South, Made in Canada, Chilly Beach, The Newsroom, Primetime Glick, The Red Green Show, La Petite Vie, Seeing Things, Trailer Park Boys, Supertown Challenge, Les Bougon and Twitch City have been much more successful than most of Canada's conventional sitcoms, both in Canada and as international exports.

Canada has a national television channel, The Comedy Network, devoted to comedy. Its programming includes some of the classic Canadian comedy series noted above, repeats of several hit American and British series such as The Simpsons, South Park and Absolutely Fabulous, and original series such as Kevin Spencer, Odd Job Jack, The Devil's Advocates, Improv Heaven and Hell and Puppets Who Kill.

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.

Tom Green, whose surreal and sometimes grotesque humour on The Tom Green Show began as a community cable show in Ottawa before becoming a momentary hit on MTV in the same era.

As with many other genres, Canadian television comedy also frequently plays with the topic of Canada's relationship with the United States. Mercer turned another 22 Minutes segment, Talking to Americans, into a 2001 television special, which was a ratings smash. In Talking to Americans, Mercer, in his 22 Minutes guise as reporter "J.B. Dixon", visited American cities to ask people on the street for their opinion on a Canadian news story — the joke for Canadians was that the news story was always fabricated, and either inherently ridiculous (e.g. a border dispute between Quebec and Chechnya or an annual Toronto polar bear hunt) or blatantly out of context (e.g. wishing Canadians a "Happy Stockwell Day".)

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.