Source: The London Prat | Region: Canada (nationwide) | Period: c.1867 to present
Canadian humour is the comedy of a nation that has spent 158 years being geographically enormous, climatically inhospitable, and politically overshadowed by the largest and loudest country on earth, and that has responded to these circumstances with a degree of self-deprecating wit so refined it has become its primary cultural export. Canada has, with characteristic modesty, given more to American comedy than almost any other single source — and has then declined to make a fuss about it, which is itself the most Canadian possible response.
The defining characteristics of Canadian humour are self-deprecation, irony, a gentle absurdism, and a sophisticated understanding of the comedy of proximity to greatness without quite being it. Canada is not America. Canada is not Britain. Canada is, as the comedian Mike Myers once described it, "like a really nice apartment over a meth lab" — a description so precisely right that it has been cited in discussions of Canadian national identity with an earnestness that is itself very Canadian.
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The most remarkable fact about Canadian comedy is the sheer volume of its export. To enumerate the major figures in American comedy history who are Canadian is to produce a list that makes the claim of American exceptionalism somewhat difficult to sustain:
Lorne Michaels (born Lorne Lipowitz, Toronto, 1944), creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live since 1975, is arguably the single most influential individual in the history of American television comedy. Mike Myers (Scarborough, Ontario, 1963) — Wayne's World, the Austin Powers franchise, So I Married an Axe Murderer — brought the Canadian suburban sensibility to global audiences. Jim Carrey (Newmarket, Ontario, 1962) brought a physical comedy so extreme it qualified as a kind of performance athleticism. Martin Short (Hamilton, Ontario, 1950), John Candy (Newmarket, Ontario, 1950-94), Eugene Levy (Hamilton, Ontario, 1946), Catherine O'Hara (Toronto, 1954), Andrea Martin (Portland, Maine, raised Halifax), and Joe Flaherty (Pittsburgh, raised Toronto) all came through Second City Toronto before exporting themselves southward. Dan Aykroyd (Ottawa, 1952), Martin Short, and John Candy are three of the most beloved figures in the history of Saturday Night Live and American film comedy respectively.
More recently: Seth Rogen (Vancouver, 1982), Ryan Reynolds (Vancouver, 1976), Norm Macdonald (Quebec City, 1959-2021), Russell Peters (Brampton, Ontario, 1969), Howie Mandel (Toronto, 1955), Tommy Chong (Edmonton, 1938), and Bret McKenzie (Wellington — wait, that is New Zealand; a common error, and instructive). The pattern is consistent: Canadian comedians develop their craft in Canada, cross the 49th parallel, and are then credited as American, a dynamic that Canadians regard with resigned amusement rather than the outrage it might strictly deserve.
SCTV (Second City Television, 1976-84) is the most underrated comedy programme in the history of North American television, a designation that would have pleased its creators enormously as it is both a genuine critical judgement and a very Canadian position to occupy. Produced in Edmonton and then Toronto, broadcast first on Canadian regional television and later on NBC and Cinemax, it featured the ensemble of Second City Toronto alumni — John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Joe Flaherty, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis, Martin Short, and Harold Ramis — playing characters embedded in a fictional television station so incompetently run that it could only survive on Canadian public funding.
The show's great innovation was the character-within-character comedy: performers playing performers playing characters, with the layers of performance visible and exploited for comedy. The sketch "Great White North" — in which Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis played Bob and Doug McKenzie, two hosers in toques drinking beer and saying "eh" — began as a satirical response to a Canadian broadcasting regulation requiring "identifiably Canadian content," became a global comedy phenomenon, spawned a feature film (Strange Brew, 1983), and produced the catchphrase "Take off, eh, hoser" which entered international usage as a shorthand for Canadian identity. That a sketch created to mock Canadian content regulations became the most recognisably Canadian content ever produced is a joke so good the country appears not yet to have fully appreciated it.
The Toronto comedy scene also produced The Kids in the Hall (1988-95, 2022-23; Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson), whose sketch comedy combined American energy with British surrealism and a specifically Canadian willingness to be genuinely strange in public. Their willingness to perform in drag, to play characters of different races and genders, and to pursue a sketch to its logical conclusion regardless of how uncomfortable that conclusion was, made them one of the most formally adventurous sketch programmes of their era.
A significant strand of Canadian comedy is defined by what Canada is not — most specifically, is not America — and the comedy this produces is among the most sophisticated political humour in North America. The Royal Canadian Air Farce (CBC Radio 1973-97; CBC Television 1993-2008) and This Hour Has 22 Minutes (CBC Television, 1993-present) have provided sustained weekly political satire for Canadian audiences since the early 1990s, operating in a tradition that traces back to the CBC's foundational commitment to using comedy as a democratic tool.
Rick Mercer (St. John's, Newfoundland, b. 1969), whose This Hour Has 22 Minutes character "Talking to Americans" — in which he presented absurd propositions to American citizens who invariably agreed with them, not understanding he was Canadian — became a documentary of gentle cross-border comedy. His later solo Rick Mercer Report (CBC, 2004-18) ran the Canadian political establishment through 14 years of the kind of informed, irreverent, genuinely funny scrutiny that political comedy requires and that many countries, including those that consider themselves more sophisticated, rarely achieve.
Norm Macdonald (Quebec City, 1959-2021) is the Canadian comedian most beloved by other comedians, a distinction he earned by being the only person in late-night television history willing to tell jokes that were not actually designed to make the audience laugh in the conventional sense. His five-year tenure as anchor of Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live (1994-98) was terminated by NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer, who reportedly "did not find him funny" — a judgement that has aged as well as most executive decisions in the entertainment industry. Macdonald's anti-comedy approach — the joke that is extended past the point of comfort, the punchline replaced by more setup, the audience's laughter replaced by a different, stranger kind of recognition — influenced more stand-ups than almost any other technique of the past 30 years.
Canadian humour differs from American humour in several structurally significant ways. It is less confrontational: where the American comedian often establishes comic authority through aggression, the Canadian typically establishes it through apparent self-deprecation that conceals considerable precision. It is more ironic: the gap between what is said and what is meant is wider and more consistently exploited. It is less certain of its own importance: Canadian comedy rarely shouts; it murmurs and then lets you work it out, which requires more of the audience and rewards the effort generously.
The Canadian relationship with politeness as comic material is particularly fruitful. Canadian politeness — the sincere, reflexive, occasionally maddening social generosity of a people who will apologise for being hit by your car — is both genuine and productive of comedy, because politeness deployed at sufficient scale and in sufficient inappropriate contexts becomes absurdist. The SCTV hosers, the Lake Wobegon Lutherans, the Portlandia artisans — all are variants of the same comic type: the person so committed to social nicety that they have lost the ability to say what they actually think, and whose suppressed thoughts are consequently visible from space.
Canada's bilingualism also provides a specific comic resource that no other country shares in quite the same proportion: the comedy of the translation gap, most brilliantly exploited in Quebec (see: Quebec Humour entry), where the French and English traditions have been colliding, misunderstanding each other, and producing comedy from the friction for 400 years.
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Source: The London Prat | Cross-references: Canada — Atlantic; Canada — Quebec; Canada — Ontario; Canada — British Columbia; US Midwest Humour.