Schitt's Creek

 

Having been through the entire original run of Corner Gas, I’m now binge-watching Schitt’s Creek. After a couple of decades abroad, it is a good reorientation to Canadian culture.

Both follow the Canadian tradition of focusing on small town life; like Sunshine Sketches, Anne of Green Gables, or Alice Munro. But they are very different in tone. Corner Gas relies on a more distinctly Canadian sort of comedy: nobody is allowed to take themselves too seriously. Nobody is better than anybody else. There is no fourth wall. And it is laugh-out-loud funny.

Schitt’s Creek is more like an American comedy in having both straight men and clowns. You are supposed to laugh at some characters, not others. Some are serious. The overall tone is more serious; people can get hurt. And I have only been moved to laugh out loud once in the first season.

One element, however, besides the occasional place references, makes Schitt’s Creek feel Canadian. Formulaically in comedy, since the ancient Greeks, characters we are supposed to laugh at are from the lower class, and most often rural: “clown” originally meant a hayseed. 

Compare Green Acres, an old American sitcom built on a premise similar to Schitt’s Creek. We were expected to see it all from the point of view of the city people; the rurals were exotics. Or Beverley Hillbillies, a reverse of the Schitt’s Creek premise: the rurals were sympathetic characters, but odd and foolish.

Now look at Schitt’s Creek. The rurals are the straight men; we are to laugh at the odd and foolish upper class people from the city. The locals are more sensible, and always outsmart them.

This strikes me as an expression of the Canadian character. Culturally, we are profoundly democratic, and an essentially rural people.