The Beaverton knows us and mocks us best
I always liked Canada’s satirical newspaper TheBeaverton.com and I will like it when it finally airs as a TV show on Thursday (Comedy Network, 10:30). But it will take a lot of seltzer down my pants to make me laugh about Tuesday — the Ides of November — having crept minute by deadly minute.
I must be honest with readers. Thanks to newspaper deadlines, this column was written before the U.S. election results were out.
You are either reading this while weeping blood (it’s not even red blood, it’s yellow, with stripes) or you are sailing through Wednesday shouting out “Sunny ways, my friends!” At the moment I am as amused as a tombstone looking for its corpse. I am granite. I haven’t laughed since July.
But now I have The Beaverton, a show that mocks Canada relentlessly because it knows us to our core. We are the blandest chocolate in the box.
The Beaverton announces Canada’s latest Heritage Minute, a Kitchener food research scientist eating his lunch at work. He has chips. He has ketchup. “The Invention of the Ketchup Chip, a part of our heritage since 1974. Making Heritage Minutes about our mundane history, a part of our heritage since 1991.” And so on.
What I have been hungry for is news about Canada, drama about Canada and comedy about Canada. Canadian TV has not been obliging me until now, so thank you, Comedy Network.
U.S. TV comedy is a corpse with huge half-moon shark bites taken out of it by the departure of Jon Stewart because he was tired and Stephen Colbert because he was willing to sell out and do comedy for golf pros on CBS.
All I have left is Silicon Valley on HBO and old episodes of Black Books on Netflix.
But I need The Beaverton because I need Canada. What I’m hoping is that it will be savage.
The cast is wonderful. I see traces of wild satire, like the news report on Ottawa creating a brutal “Indian Act” for every racial/religious group in the country to help Canada maintain its reputation for fairness. You’ll get an identity card, your ancestral blood will be tracked and eventually people named “Vinnie” will be driven out of Little Italy and the land will revert to the government for sale to a natural gas company.
I’m not going to describe more TV gags in print — as you can see, they don’t read funny — but I’m interested in the tradition of Beaverton comedy, heir to The Onion as well as SCTV’s Melonville with John Candy as Mayor Tommy Shanks.
As Americans voted Tuesday, I thought of a prophetic 2003 book by Stephen Colbert called Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not about the interestingly damaged people of America’s dying small towns.
The wonderful Rick Mercer does Ottawa as Melonville. His ad for the Miracle Closet Panic Organizer for when your prime minister needs a place to hide — “so easy you’ll forget he’s in there” — was pure Tommy Shanks, although Shanks would have gotten stuck in the fireplace.
Canadians frequently don’t get jokes, or don’t like them after they’re explained. I’m worried The Beaverton will tone itself down to avoid offending the easily offended.
The Beaverton broke a lot of online news stories like “Groundhog sees Jungian shadow, predicts everlasting winter of the soul.” These people can do dire very nicely if they get the chance.
I suspect the writers have read William Littler’s brilliant 2014 book, Discovering Scarfolk, about a dystopian English town. It’s basically Littler remembering his sinister 1970s childhood. “Put old people down at birth,” a public safety poster advised, part of the “Enabling Youth with Youth-enasia” campaign. Then the posters got peculiar. “Whatever you do, DON’T.” “Ever Get That Falling Feeling?”
I like weird. I watch The Beaverton for the look in Beaverton TV co-anchor Emma Hunter’s eyes. They are wild eyes. Hunter does a thing with her eyebrows and she has an extraordinary ability to make her body slidey and rubbery on camera. There is a crazy light in her.
Is Justin Trudeau just not that into us? Canadians are so needy, Hunter says. “We elected him because he’s a hard 10, and what’s Canada, a 7?”
I like The Beaverton’s report that the cigarette butt has been named the official flower of Montreal. Vancouver is considering the syringe. Nicely done. Don’t turn into a soft-boiled egg, Beaverton folk. Boil strong, boil hard.
I need The Beaverton because I need Canada. What I’m hoping is that it will be savage