LEFTISTS IMPORTING U.S. CULTURE WAR IRONIC
You’ve probably never heard of The Sketchersons, a Toronto-based comedy sketch troupe that’s been around since 2004. But obscure though the topic may seem, please indulge me as I step you through the group’s recent meltdown, for it offers an unusually fine case study in the social panic afflicting Canada’s creative class.
In June, and then again last month, The Sketchersons released statements confessing their complicity in “a system that was built upon white supremacy,” and a “sketch-comedy community rigged to support the success of white people.” The Sketchersons also announced that they’re suspending their comedy shows “for the foreseeable future,” until such time as they’ve reconstituted “with a specific focus on Black voices.” They’ve also said they’re donating recent earnings to Black Lives Matter, and that they “urge our audience to do the same.”
As I’ve described in recent columns for Quillette and the National Post, similar internal melodramas have played out at Canadian theatre troupes, museums, art galleries, academic departments and literary magazines over the last year. But the Sketchersons case seems worse to me — because these are people who purport to be *comedians* — professional jesters whom one might ordinarily expect to thumb their noses at everyone else’s hollow pieties.
If you want *real* comedy, check out the scathing comments under the Sketchersons’ January 25 Facebook post (this being the second apology, in which they apologize for the “harm” done by their first apology). My favourite is from Vancouver-based comedian Jessica Joelle Pigeau, who scrutinized the Sketchersons’ guilty disclosure that, of their 86 past and present cast members, “only 10 of them have been members short. Meanwhile, 25 per cent of Toronto is Asian, meaning you are missing at least 17. Better get started.”
What Joelle Pigeau offers here is more than a (delightfully) snarky put-down. Her fact-check gets to the broader trend by which Canadian progressives now go hook, line, and sinker for American identity politics without bothering to consider how (or if ) these imported dogmas relate to our own society. Over the whole seven-month span between the Sketchersons’ two apologies, it apparently didn’t occur to any of them to do the middle-school math on local demographics. (As it happens, Joelle Pigeau actually lowballed the Asian figure, which, even when 2016 census figures were released, was already at about 35 per cent).
Is the Toronto “sketch comedy community” really a “white supremacist” enclave, where, as in that famous “Behind the Laughter” Simpsons episode, onstage hilarity masks malevolent intrigues? It’s possible. But a more banal explanation for the Sketchersons’ recruiting woes is that sketch comedy, being close to a zero-income business model, is always going to disproportionately attract people from privileged families. And surely one of the cruelest things you could do to a black Canadian is put him in a sketch-writing workshop with a bunch of guilt-addled white wokesters pleading for moral absolution.
This progressive co-option of America’s culture war is something I wrote about a few weeks back, when Toronto Star pundits were insisting that the storming of the Capitol was somehow a symptom of widespread white supremacy here in Canada. But the same trend can be seen everywhere you look. Last week, Justin Trudeau’s government moved to repeal mandatory minimum penalties for certain low-level crimes. While these are perfectly sensible reforms in their own right, Trudeau’s Justice Minister still felt compelled to package them as blows against “systemic racism” — just as Chrystia Freeland tried to convince us that her latest budget was “feminist and intersectional.” In the space of just a few years, this cultish jargon has gone from grad-seminar vernacular to the pages of Hansard.
If you’re a Canadian who’s come of age in the social-media era, our wholesale adoption of American social-justice memes is probably something you just take for granted. But if your political memory extends back to, oh, say, the Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin eras, you’ll remember that Canadian progressivism was then defined by a reflexive hostility to American “cultural imperialism.” In the NDP and Liberal Party, not to mention Canadian academia, journalism, and literature, whole careers were dedicated to the idea that our unique and precious Canadian values must be protected from free trade and American cultural influences. Just two decades ago, the biggest cultural hot-button issue in Canada was — and I am not making this up — split-run U.S. magazines that swapped out a few pages of Canadian news in otherwise American products. At one point, Canada was even set to fight a trade war over the issue.
This is all ancient history, of course: The same Canadian leftists who once warned us about the imperialist yanqui cultural juggernaut now spend their days binge-watching Netflix, listening to The Daily, and retweeting AOC. During the Trump presidency, a few old-school progressives slammed the CBC’S news producers for shortchanging Canadian stories in favour of wall-to-wall American outrage porn. But who can blame them? Among the CBC’S dwindling fan base, the real competition for ears and eyeballs isn’t Lisa Laflamme and Sandie Rinaldo. It’s Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes.
When it comes to observing Anglo-canada’s woke meltdown on race, I’m a Montrealer at heart.
I will never fully internalize the faddish customs of Toronto’s cultural scene, which is why those Sketchersons confessions read to me like they were written in some weird alien language. One of the benefits of Canadian bilingualism, I’d argue, is that Québécois culture supplies a needed reality check on American-inspired manias that now routinely metastasize throughout the Anglosphere.
In a speech earlier this month, French president Emmanuel Macron referred obliquely to “certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States.” A few days later,
Quebec Premier François Legault was more explicit about “radical activists … trying to censor some words and works. We see a movement coming from the United States and frankly, I don’t think it’s like us.” It speaks to the spirit of intellectual conformity now afflicting us that the only Canadian premier willing to call out our imported forms of race obsession is the one guy who speaks English as a second language.
Raging against political correctness is as old as political correctness itself, of course. But what’s (relatively) new is the realization that, for all its universalistic anti-colonial pretensions, social-justice ideology is very much a product of America’s particularly tragic historical relationship with race — from slavery and civil war, through to Jim Crow, “separate but equal,” the Civil Rights era, and explicitly post-liberal movements such as Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, and Black Lives Matter.
I went to law school in the United States many moons ago, and was shocked by the extent to which the question of skin colour dominates intellectual life, from constitutional jurisprudence and political nominations, right down to everyday social discourse — a pattern of thought that was, and remains, alien to my Canadian world view.
And I would have found it astounding if someone had told the law-student version of me that my own country would go all in on this singularly divisive and toxic aspect of U.S. society.
Canada has its own legacy of racism, of course, especially in regard to the treatment of Indigenous peoples.
But the particular dogmas now being adopted as a totalizing system of public morality by our intellectual class — from Trudeau and Freeland right down to lowly sketch comedians — are about as Canadian as the Dallas Cowboys.
And I applaud Premier Legault for being one of the few prominent Canadians brave enough to point that out.