Hail to the Hicks

Comedian Steve Smith remembers the autumn of 1989. At the time he had a couple of series under his belt and was determined to make it on Canadian television. Stuck for ideas and in need of work, he decided to a build a show around a rustic character he had performed a few times in his previous efforts. The result was The Red Green Show, a series set in the mythical Possum Lodge, which lampooned cable fishing shows and revelled in its rural roots. “It was supposed to be a summer job,” he says. “It was the narrowest comedy I’d ever done. I figured that a few people would like it very much and most of the people would not like it at all.”

The opposite turned out to be true.The Red Green Show immediately drew large ratings. Today it is in its fourteenth season and has a fan club that boasts hundreds of thousands of members who relish Red Green gags such as, “This is a belt sander, but don’t sand your belt with it unless you’re really into the celibacy thing,” and parodies such as his poetry reading “Now Is the Winter of Our Discount Tent.” There are Red Green books and in 2002 there was the Red Green movie Duct Tape Forever. The appeal is not limited to Canada. The Red Green Show can be found in syndication on 100 stations in the US. “To be honest,” says Smith, “I’m still a little surprised.”

He shouldn’t be.

While it is not surprising that a country whose national symbol is the beaver and whose one-dollar coin is called a loonie is known for producing comedians, many trendy cappuccino-swilling, Six Feet Under-watching, Quill & Quire-reading metropolitans would be shocked to learn that one of our most fertile comedic fields is not the arena of the urbane wit, but rather the rural everyman typified by Smith’s Red Green. For argument’s sake let’s term the phenomenon comedicus hickus supremus—the reign of the comic hick.

The Red Green Show is not the lone example of the dominance of country comedy. Last year’s sleeper hit, Corner Gas, follows the antics of the citizens of Dog River, a small town in Saskatchewan (population: 450). Airing on ctv, Corner Gas averaged 1.2 million viewers per episode and returned this season with eighteen new shows. It stars Saskatchewan-bred stand-up Brent Butt, 38, and is a throwback to the days of The Beachcombers. The cast, which includes veteran actor Eric Peterson, is solid and the show’s writing clever. One episode, for example, chronicles the town’s effort to attract tourists by constructing “the world’s biggest hoe.” “We strove for realism,” says Brent Haynes, director of programming for The Comedy Network and an executive in charge of Corner Gas. “If any character stood out as too much of a redneck, we changed them to make them as believable as possible.” Adds Butt: “I always go from the perspective that people are more the same than they are different.”

Meanwhile, another slice of Canuck pastoral pie, Showcase’s Trailer Park Boys, is a cult hit both in Canada and in the United States. Both cbc perennials This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Royal Canadian Air Farce have their share of recurring yokels. It’s enough to make even the most citified comedian trade in his or her beret for a straw hat.

Ironically, as the taste for country comedy heats up, Canada is becoming more and more municipal. According to the 2001 census, 79.4 percent of Canadians live in an urban area with a population of over 10,000. In fact, 51 percent of us live in one of our country’s four large centres: Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, greater Montreal, the lower British Columbian mainland, and the Calgary-Edmonton corridor. Canadians cities grew by 7.6 percent between 1991 and 2001. Its rural regions recorded no growth whatsoever.

So why the recent surge of rural comedy?

To best understand the trend, one must recognize that it is not a new occurrence but rather the reappearance of a time-honoured Canadian tradition, one that occasionally lies dormant but always pushes its way up again. The concept of the simple country bumpkin who is too honest to deceive and therefore tells the truth with comic effect can be traced back to Juvenal and the Roman satirists. Stephen Leacock set the Canadian mould with his 1913 book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. His was a gentle but pointed picture of life in rural Ontario.

During the 1930s, the tenor of rural comedy became more skewed. In America, humourist Will Rogers tapped into Depression-era discontent by using pastoral irony to vent the frustrations of what he termed “the big normal majority.” In Canada, Art McGregor and Frank Deaville, a pair of hardware-store clerks from Calgary, echoed Rogers’s homespun wit and became the nation’s first radio comedy hit. In the early Thirties, they created the characters Woodhouse and Hawkins, two grassroots goofs who resided at the fictional Nitwit Court. Initially earning $5 per show, the duo went on to become stars on the cbc. It’s best to think of them as the prototype for Bob and Doug McKenzie, a couple of hosers who haplessly try to make their way through life. Woodhouse and Hawkins remained on the radio until after the Second World War, at which time the pair who created them went into advertising.