National Post (National Edition)
How sitcom Letterkenney puts the mythos of the Canadian dirtbag to bed.
HOW LETTERKENNY PUTS THE MYTHOS OF THE CANADIAN DIRTBAG TO BED
Season two of Letterkenny opens with a bit of alphabetic acrobatics as our heroes Wayne (Jared Keeso) and Daryl (Nathan Dales) run down what transpired after the season-one-ending fight that left Wayne on the asphalt. The systematic descriptions of Wayne’s ensuing victory cycle through a thesaurical torrent of choice phrases — “Punched the prick out, played the peasant, pushed proper pugnacity on the pinhead, left him praying for peace while Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” is one of the cleaner vignettes – and amount to a distilled dose of the incredible verbiage that is the absolute best thing about Letterkenny.
The whole piece is currently serving as the show’s promo for season two, and if it is not enough to make you consider signing up for at least a CraveTV trial, you are maybe best sticking to shows where they need to hit an applause button to remind you where the jokes are supposed to be.
Set amongst the hicks, skids, hockey players and assorted other stereotypes of its titular small town, Letterkenny is the latest in the long tradition of celebrating Canada’s dirtbags in all their glory. Dirtbags may be a slightly strong word for some of the residents of Letterkenny. Certainly Wayne, with a moral code and sense of fairness as square and true as his formidable jaw, is something like a rural Canadian folk hero: a fella just as likely to knock out blustering greasers as he is to shovel your Granny’s walk in the dead of a January night, and not even accept so much as a six-pack of Molson Ex for either effort. Wayne is such a paragon of decent Canadian living he could probably sell shirtless calendars at Ag Hall craft fairs to women from ages 8 to 88.
If they are not all side-eyed shitbirds, then, the folks of Letterkenny are at least on the outskirts of modern Canadiana, the type whose idea of a cultured Saturday night is pouring their rye over ice instead of just pulling from the bottle in between darts. This type has always punched above their weight in Canadian cultural representation, more mythologized than actual. Still, it would be fair to list them among our chief cultural exports: pop music and dudes who know their way around a two-four, thems our specialties.
The old term for this would of course be hoser, but outside of Kevin Smith’s mind, the proper understanding of this sort of down-home Canucklehead has evolved considerably from the days of Bob and Doug. There’s still an undeniable sense of dopey decency to them, I guess — they’re going to do right by their pals, if not necessarily by anything else — but the more modern versions have morphed into the likes of the Trailer Park Boys and the Fubar dudes. The basic hallmarks are all there, though: a resolute lack of pretentiousness, reflected most purely in choice of alcoholic beverage; a life in the parts of the country that make neither the nightly news promos nor the sweeping tourism ads; a semi-scrappy sense of just gettin’ by. And, of course, there’s the language. The shared undercurrent of all these true north good ol’ boys is the specificity of their chatter, the way all of them nail something very particular and perfect about how their particular variation on this theme talk. It’s a comic tendency as old as Mark Twain, and for all the “ehs” and “give ’ers,” and their profound importance to the Canadian sense of linguistic self, Letterkenny has topped all of them, or anyway dug fabulously deeper than all of them, to the point where long stretches of the show involve basically nothing but the cast running through their very particular ways of talking, to grand comic effect.
It’s not just the slight down-home twang of Wayne, Daryl, Squirrely Dan and the other jean-clad hay-baling townies, although that’s the most brilliantly realized of the dialects. Letterkenny is meant to be a southwestern Ontario town, but anyone who has spent any time in a place with one bar where a good number of people rely on trucks to earn a living will recognize their delicate blend of downhome casual metaphor and profane wisdom. “Pitter patter, let’s get at ’er” is the catchphrase line, but every reference to hacking a dart or tugging your horn or pumping the brakes or being a collection of spare parts has been panned from around a backyard fire and polished to a glorious shine. They’re deployed so deftly and knowingly that when the Letterkenny gang starts to gin up their talk — I guess whisky up their talk would be more appropriate, actually — you are already so hypnotized into their wavelengths that spitting out a half-dozen different ways of masturbating (or having sex, or drinking, or etc, etc, etc) doesn’t faze you.
This facility with unique language applies equally to the various subgroups, too. Some of the most evocative are the hockey players, whose incessant desire to go “bar-downski” and celebrate their “flow” is so gloriously sampled and remixed it’s a good bet that half of the people who keep their YouTube highlights on a loop have not yet clued into the fact they’re being mocked. The second season has leaned into this even harder, giving prominent spots to a guy who talks like an auctioneer and some very specific back-and-forth between the Ag Board president and his gin-andtonic sipping wife.
Such is this show’s gift of gab, though, that virtually any two characters on this show could sit down and chatter for a solid half-hour, and it would still be among the funniest exchanges on television. As much tradition as evolution, Letterkenny might just put the ol’ Canadian dirtbag mythos to bed, if only because it’s going to be insanely hard to top the crystalline verbosity of Wayne and the boys. When you have to make up games for yourself just to keep it interesting, you’re playing at a very high level.