The Last Laugh
Rebecca Addelman
pp.34-36
Rebecca Addelman doesn’t have the kindest of words for cbc comedy mainstays like This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Air Farce, and the Rick Mercer Report. Compared to the sharp satire of American shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Canadian television comedy is still in the bush league.
As Addelman explains, Canadian broadcasters cut a deal with the federal parties almost twenty years ago to restrict the use of debate footage to news and current affairs programming. After the 2006 debates, Air Farce’s Alan Park impersonated Gilles Duceppe in a mock debate—to see a clip, clink on the link entitled “What Did They Just Say?” Rick Mercer didn’t use the footage, either, and told the New York Times, “The whole idea of calling it a debate is contemptible. They may as well have just run the parties’ infomercials.” If you really must have a sample of the wall-to-wall hilarity that was last year’s French-language election debate, there’s a transcript available on the CTV website.
Websites like YouTube, and less well-regulated sites like Daily Motion and Metacafe, are a haven for comedy fans. There are dozens of clips online featuring classic comics like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, and the SCTV gang. (Carlin and Bruce, of course, had notable censorship problems of their own, outside of Canada.)
Life on Nut Island
Stephen Williams
pp.38-47
Primed for 60,000 pages of Ipperwash Inquiry documents? The official website is home to a wealth of information, including research papers, exhibits, transcripts, and links to webcasts of the hearings. Impressive in its expanse, the site is also markedly accessible and has an educational resources section designed for use in high school and university classes.
The Harvard Business Review on Culture and Change (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), which was used by the Ontario Provincial Police to train its top Tactical Rescue Unit (tru) officers, includes chapters on “The Nut Island Effect: When Good Teams Go Wrong” (as outlined in Williams’s article) as well as “The Real Reason People Won’t Change” and “Transforming A Conservative Company—One Laugh at a Time.”
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