Two public school teachers hesitantly talk about the difficulties of sharing experiences with a student body whose cultural background ranges from all over the world. “They’re in Canada. Why can’t they just be Canadian?” one of them blurts. But in trying to answer this, they come up with another question: what does it even mean to be Canadian?
It’s this sketch that has gotten the most critical attention from The Second City’s latest revue, This Party’s a Riot. In the show you’ll find the metrosexuals from Woodbridge who douse themselves in department store cologne for a night of fist pumping on the Toronto club scene; the family of divorced parents, divorced step-parents, and grandparents who are taking time apart to try playing for “the other team”; and the white-collar workers who cannot cope with the minute inconveniences of white-collar life (like the Tupperware lunch). All the wonderfully familiar caricatures of modern life are drawn to their fullest; but the schoolyard scene plucks at the nerve which Canadian Comedy plucks at best: Canadian identity.
When I was 12 I watched hundreds of Canadians apologize as they were violently knocked down by Americans in Canadian Bacon. I didn’t get it. Eventually it was explained to me: “It’s funny because it’s true. Canadians are too polite.” I took a few years to observe. “Yeah,” I thought. “We do apologize. We apologize a lot!” It was my first encounter with a Canadian stereotype, and regardless of the actual truth of the matter, it has wholly shaped the way I have thought of Canada since.
Trying to grasp the Canadian identity has provided endless fodder for Canadian comics, but as the schoolyard sketch in This Party’s A Riot proposes, it’s a definition that has not always come easy.
In a sketch from one of the first shows that hit Toronto’s Second City stage, John Candy yells, “I hate hockey!” “What are you talking about?!” Joe Flaherty exclaims. The audience chuckles. “I’ve always hated hockey, but you couldn’t see that. Well I’m not listening to you anymore and I’m not going back to that hockey camp!”
So there’s hockey. There are the cultural stereotypes, the politeness and the “eh”s. There are Bob and Doug. “Kooloookoookookoo kookookooo, Koolookoookookoo kookookooo,” The Great White North: a triumphant landmark in the history of Canadian comedy and Canadian icons. Yet the two-minute series, which became two major motion pictures, which became the phrase that any Canadian was certain to have sung to them if they stepped south across the border, was created in mocking response to the very question “Can’t you just be Canadian?”
When SCTV was picked up by the CBC they had two extra minutes of airtime to fill on Canadian airwaves. The network executives requested that they fill these two minutes with “Canadian content.” Being a Canadian show, with an almost entirely Canadian cast, the crew were, needless to say, puzzled, if not a little offended. What does that even mean? In a sarcastic reply, Dave Thomas asked if they were suggesting two minutes of tuques, hockey jerseys, and beer. The answer was yes.
The irony is that SCTV, the show that came to define Canada’s close relationship with comedy, was created because of the States. With the creation of Saturday Night Live, Toronto’s Second City saw their major talent being drained away to New York, and in a desperate effort to hold on to their comic actors, SCTV was formed. In many ways, that response-relationship with the U.S. itself is a large part of being Canadian.
It’s an interesting relationship that comedy has with the world it mocks. In trying to grasp the Canadian identity, it has, in turn, come to define so much of it.
The Second City, and much of modern Canadian comedy, has covered the multi-cultural identity of our nation before. Shut Up… and Show Us Your Tweets, the Second City revue from a few years back, had “There goes the neighbourhood!” a skit in which cultural stereotypes were played up to their full extent.
“Is that racist? I don’t want to be racist,” Cawley whispers with a panic stricken face. The schoolyard scene in the end proposes that perhaps Canada is just a “bunch of people that come from all over the world, and then bitch about feeling isolated.” However, the scene does more than touch on the growing multicultural identity of Canada, and the daily taboos that come along side it. It poses the question “What is it to be Canadian?” A question that, in itself, is entirely Canadian.
