Keep Laughing Bitches

Enjoy it while it lasts. When this global warming thing goes sideways and we are plunged into another ice age you are gonna wonder why your feet are cold and how to warm up those frozen chicken nuggets. We can handle the jokes though. We are the funniest people on the planet and if you aren't careful we will tease you until you cry. What are you gonna do when your supply of maple syrup dries up? Have you seen someone having syrup withdrawl? Its not a pretty sight.

"In comedy, timing is everything. Which explains, at least in part, the overreaction to Greg Gutfeld's unfunny comments about the Canadian military last week on his late-late-late-night Fox show Red Eye.There was something more than a little pathetic about Peter MacKay demanding an apology from a talk show host. Then again, who can blame him? He was on his way back from a funeral for four boys who died in a war which - let's face it - we're fighting for the sake of our friendship with America. Gutfeld's jokes, while unique in their boneheaded clumsiness, weren't that atypical however: Canada has recently become common comic fodder on U.S. television. Gutfeld was being derivative as well as offensive.

It began with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, which has recently run a couple of Canadian items, some of them long. That never used to happen. 30 Rock had that great line about Toronto: "It's New York without the stuff." And on the show How I Met Your Mother, one of the central characters, Robin Scherbatsky, is a Canadian expat trying to make it in New York; Canada is a running joke of the show. Unfortunately, none of the Canadian comedy is that funny or accurate. The jokes mostly involve maple syrup, the cold and/or the pronunciation of the word "about," which 97% of us don't actually mispronounce. The Great White North casts a long, ludicrous shadow - Canada in the American comic imagination corresponds roughly (very roughly) with the region of the country that stretches from Northern Ontario to Alberta and does not include cities, or the Maritimes, or the West Coast. The only other gag Americans seem to get is how polite Canadians are. ("How do you get 10 Canadians out of a swimming pool?" "Say, ‘Hey guys, can you get out of the pool?' ") Even this joke, complimentary to us, isn't mildly true. Canadians are one of the rudest peoples on Earth. Outsiders simply don't understand that "sorry" means "go screw yourself."

What explains this resurgence of Canada jokes on U.S. television? There are two possibilities. We are the last group that can be made fun of without risk. Political correctness has made almost every other ethnicity off-limits. Americans can't even make fun of the French anymore. The "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," as The Simpsons once called them, have turned out to be right in nearly every disagreement with their American cousins. It's quite easy to make fun of Canadians because Americans can't really distinguish us from themselves. So it's innocent. They're more or less making fun of people who are like them.

The other possible explanation is a rising insecurity. I don't mean about our health care system, or our banks, or the other envious aspects of our comfy little society we might feel smug about. Americans feel insecure about their comedy when compared with Canada's. If you took the Canadians out of American comedy, it would be like taking African-Americans out of the NBA: still the same game but you wouldn't recognize it and you wouldn't want to watch it. I mean, just to take the most obvious cases, remove Lorne Michaels, Jim Carrey, Mike Myers and Seth Rogen from American screens and I'm not sure what you have left to laugh at over the past 30 years. I guess you have Seinfeld. And Chris Rock.

Competition from Canadian comics, who would all have to be way funnier than Greg Gutfeld (who isn't?), might explain some of his hostility. Our exhausted army, he said, makes now "the perfect time to invade this ridiculous country." That is pure fantasy. The Americans can't handle Vietnam or Iraq but he thinks they can handle us? America is just not that good at invading places, and Gutfeld can't deal with it. Not that we should waste time insulting Greg Gutfeld. The man runs a show on Fox at 3 a.m. - is there any worse insult you can make about a person? The show is named Red Eye not just because of its time slot in the middle of the night but as an anatomically evocative description of its host.

Doug Benson, one of the panellists involved in the show's anti-Canada segment, has experienced repercussions from his nasty comments. He had an appearance at the Comic Strip in West Edmonton Mall cancelled; I can't tell if that's a punishment or a reward. Benson, however, made one of the show's more trenchant remarks about Canada: "I thought that's where you go if you don't want to fight." There, he was actually getting somewhere, and it was almost funny. In the end though, the comment was more revealing of his own sad little excuse for a personality: He thought describing us as peace-loving was an insult."