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.”
