Why Canadians Excel at Comedy

Mark Breslin, founder of Yuk-Yuk's comedy clubs, sums it up:

"Comedy is the cry of the intelligent and powerless."

You guys are great at parades and cheerleaders and quarterbacks and frats/sororities. We're the invisible geeks on the periphery, and we generally find it HIL-arious.

Canadians are largely responsible for founding National Lampoon when it was SO good(Ted Mann) founding Saturday Night Live (Lorne Michaels, Rosie Shuster <Wayne & Shuster> Dan Aykroyd, Paul Shaffer, Gilda Radner-by-route-of-the Toronto production of Godspell, SCTV-Edmonton and Toronto-Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Andrea Martin, Martin Short, Dave Thomas, John Candy, Catherine O'Hara.

Kids in the Hall-Mark McKinney, Bruce MacDonald, Dave Foley, Scott Thompson

Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Howie Mandel (sorry), Rich Little (sorry), Samantha Bee... please add all those I've overlooked to the thread or correct my spelling if you would.

Then there are all those who write and produce... the 200k Canucks in greater LA and the beavers of Broadway...

U2 and Conan O'Brien discussed the tall-poppy syndrome in Ireland: get too grand, and thou shalt be cut down. It was the first time I'd heard "tall poppy" applied to Ireland; I'd always heard it used to describe Canadians.

In closing, I'll say I find the majority of Kossacks really very Canadian in outlook: intelligent, powerless, shocked and appalled, and funny as hell... and above it all, decent. We kid because we love.

And I just know I shouldn't have posted this, because it's like showing off, and who the hell am I to speak for Canada anyway. But what the hell.