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.

Laughing out of Both Sides of the 49th Parallel

 

I have been “binge watching” the Canadian sitcom “Corner Gas” in a moderate way: one episode each evening. At the same time, for some reason, episodes of the old American sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati” have been popping up in my YouTube feed. I remember it as pretty good, so I’ve watched a few of those recently as well.

I think comparing the two illustrates the difference between American and Canadian humour.

WKRP, American, has a mix of sympathetic and unsympathetic characters. Some are there to be laughed at, but disliked, and some are straight, unfunny, and likeable. Herb and Les are unlikeable clowns. Andy or Bailey or Venus Flytrap never put a foot wrong. 

In Corner Gas, all the characters are sometimes sympathetic, sometimes unsympathetic. All have flaws and sometimes look foolish; all are fundamentally likeable. Even Oscar, who comes closest to being a villain. He is too much like a bratty child to dislike. Nobody is above getting ribbed, including the show itself, which often breaks the “fourth wall.” 

This is consistent in Canadian humour. There are no heroes or villains in Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches either. 

I think it is an expression of a religious difference between Canada and the USA. The USA was founded largely on Calvinist principles: the Reformed tradition of the Puritans in the north, the Baptists in the South, the Dutch Reformed in the Mid-Atlantic. Calvinists see people as either damned or elect; all good or all evil.

Canada was founded largely by Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists. Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists believe that all of us are sinners, but that all of us are capable of redemption at any moment.

And that pretty much accounts for the difference between the American and Canadian character overall.

Corner Gas

 

Being out of the country for many years, I have just discovered “Corner Gas,” a longtime runaway hit on Canadian TV. I believe it is the most popular Canadian scripted show of all time. Launched in 2004, it is still running as an animated series.

Brent Butt, creator and star, says he does not know why it was and is so popular. What is it about this particular troupe of eight characters? Butt is a brilliant writer, and has done several other projects, but none have approached the success of Corner Gas. What was the magic formula?

I think it is obvious; but a thing long forgotten. Comedies work best in a rural setting. This was something the ancient Greeks knew already. Comic characters, for them, were formulaically rural folk; the word “clown” literally means “rustic.” 

The reason, I believe, is that comedy works by releasing tensions; the punch line is a spring abruptly unsprung. More broadly it works by allowing us escape from our worries. A rural life implies that: a simple life away from our troubles. Most Shakespearean comedies involve retreat into a forest or wilderness, a “green world,” as Northrop Fry noted, which somehow resolves the problems of the protagonist.

For a time, American television conformed, perhaps by accident, to the old formula, and had a run of huge comedic hits based on rural life: Beverley Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction. Then the marketing mavens realized with alarm that they were not appealing to the most desirable market. Most Americans lived in cities, after all. Especially most Americans with money to spend. So the geniuses, in lock step, cancelled all the hillbilly opreys, though still the most popular shows, to reflect the real lives of their desired audience. The replacement sitcoms were all set relentlessly in suburbs or the city. Mary Tyler Moore was going to make it after all. 

They did fine; some were great. But they ran against no rural competition. If there was a thirst in the audience for such an escape from their dreary daily lives, it was not satisfied.

One notable exception: Gilligan’s Island. A show with a puerile premise and without good writing. Nevertheless, the escapist setting alone seems to have gained it, in the absence of any other non-urban competition, cultural immortality.

Overall, nobody in Hollywood seems to understand how comedy works. At least, nobody with money to fund a TV show. But here in Canada, Corner Gas hit upon that same ancient formula. Everyone in Toronto wanted to imagine themselves living in Dog River.

It is also the old Canadian formula. Dog River is a colony of Mariposa. Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town is, along with Anne of Green Gables and Songs of a Sourdough, one of the three founding documents of English Canadian literature. All three are about people living in isolated communities. It is the shared Canadian literary experience. Largely as a result, the soul of Canada is in its small towns. Largely as a result, the soul of Canada is comic, so that Canada keeps generating brilliant comics and comic writers like Brent Butt.