I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

RUE CANAL DE PUSSIES

Disappointing but predictable. Using my Bell ExpressVu satellite TV serivce, I tuned to the NBC station out of Boston on Thursday nigth (early Friday morning) at 3:30 a.m. to see the rebroadcast of last Thursday's Late Night with Conan O'Brien, the one with the infamous (but really funny) Triumph the Insult Comic Dog sketch, but, mysteriously, it wasn't being shown; instead we got a rebroadcast of the same epsiode which aired three hours earlier. (And, to anyone whom knows Bell ExpressVu, no, they didn't replace it themselves with a channel showing the west coast signal... it was about a minute ahead of the west coast signal.) Yep, because pussy separatist politicians and their federalist appeasers overreact to a silly rubber dog puppet, the only place we'll ever be able to see that sketch again (and it's no longer on the CBC ZeD site, so you'll have to try a file-sharing service like WinMX).

By the way, I found this other Montreal-based blog, called "All AgitProp, All the Time" by Paul Jané, which is what my blog would be like if I had more server space and better HTML skills and was more consistent with my posting and more focused and didn't talk about entertainment stuff (of the sort that interests me) as often. And it's one thing for a British-born Anglophone of mixed British, Polish, Jewish and maybe a tiny trace of Mongolian (from the hordes... heh heh, Genghis is my granddaddy!) descent whom, frankly, doesn't speak French as well as he should (though I do shop at Renaud-Bray for French-translated manga... that's got to get me some language brownie points) not to be offended, however, this guy's obviously at least part French-Canadian, and he's more gung ho in defending Triumph than I am!

From his first post:

"

O'Brien's team were also shown replacing street signs in the province with those that read "Quebecqueer Street" and "Rue des Pussies."

*Snort* Well, considering the amount of time that the French have spent replacing English street signs, it seems as though there's a precedent there...

Alexa McDonough, a legislator for the left-leaning New Democrats, described the program as "racist filth" and "utterly vile" and demanded the government seek the return of the C$1 million subsidy.

Well, I happen to think that it's "utterly vile" that there still are suckers out there willing to vote for the Ba'ath Party of Canada NDP, but you don't see me sitting here and complaining about it all the time, now do you?

"There may be those who would say, 'Isn't this interfering with freedom of expression?' It's not interfering to say we will not publicly fund this kind of vile, vicious hatemongering," McDonough told reporters.

Oh yeah, ever since the show aired, there have been massive pogroms of French Canadians, and they have started to be herded off into concentration camps. In fact, I have been so riled by all this "vicious hatemongering" that I plan on going out and taking shots at Quebeckistanis for fun later on today.

[The above is sarcasm; spare me the hate mail. - Ed.]"

From his second post, Fisking Josh Freed's column:

"

The show featured a puppet called Triumph the Insult Dog...

Or, as he likes to be called, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog...

...which wandered around Quebec City's winter carnival, sporting a French beret. It stopped Quebecers in the street and said stuff like: "So you're French and Canadian, yes? So you're obnoxious and dull?"

Also: "You're in North America. ... Learn the language!"

To quote Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now: the horror.

*Rolls eyes*

Thanks for the insults, Conan. Somehow you forgot to step on Quebec's flag or make any frog jokes.

Oh, just you wait until network sweeps season, Josh; then, the real fun begins.

I guess your show's "comedy" writers weren't up to date on their stereotypes.

OK, amuse me: how many of you have seen one of those Triumph sketches and not laughed your arses off at some point? If comedy can't be funny when it's slightly hurtful, we'd better hurry up and declare Don Rickles (Denis Leary, and a whole other bunch of people) persona non grata before the next Just for Laughs festival rolls into town."

In his third entry, about Bill Brownstein's column, he somehow manages to call Jack Todd, "Jack Draft-Dodger Todd":

"

Some of us in these parts are still sporting our facial visors to avoid getting all the excrement in our mugs Conan and his equally barbarian cohorts kicked up during their ill-conceived visit to Quebec City.

I know, our feelings as Quebeckistanis are all so very hurt, in fact, I cried myself to sleep last night because of Don Cherry and Conan O'Brien's hurtful statements.

Does everyone in this province have scary insecurities? Am I living in some sort of kindergarten for the mentally disadvantaged?"

Martin Patriquin in Hour also is making some sense:

"Then again, it's tough to understand why a seemingly levelheaded group of people would get mad at a cigar-chomping rubber puppet, but it happened. The Triumph the Insult Comic Dog sketch took said puppet to Quebec City, and made fun of French Canadians. Something about their stupidity, dullness and their smelly crotches.

It was funny, for the same reason Rick Mercer is (usually) funny, when the sardonic Newfie pokes fun at Americans. In exploiting their victims' ignorance - or, in the case of the French Canadians on Conan's show, their inability to speak English - they are showing how self-important and, yes, ignorant they are themselves.

Nevertheless, the one-two punch, the quick and painful accident of Cherry and Triumph together, has become political fodder. It's a perfect, pop-culture veneer for the recent Auditor-General report - that $100-million Ontario MP Joe Comuzzi has already put down as an example of Quebec's corrupt political culture. The kerfuffle has given instant credibility to the Montreal chapter of the Société St-Jean-Baptiste, itself a casualty of the improved French-English relations in this province. SSJB president Jean Dorion said the following, presumably with a straight face: "It's wrong to spread the worst possible ethnic prejudices about Quebecers, which already exist in Canada."

(Two words, Jean: Elvis Gratton. Two more: Les Bougon. How about these two: Les Boys.)"

Actually, I haven't seen it, and it's one of those shows that would be in such heavy joual (the Quebec street dialect) that I would quite honestly need subtitles to understand it (and I can understand shows from France in French just fine), but, since poverty industry activists are up in arms about Les Bougon presenting cheating welfare leeches as the parasites they are, welfare being a huge sacred cow to Quebec leftists, I can give Les Bougon my full endorsement. (I guess Les Bougon is roughly the French-Canadian equivalent of the English-Canadian adult comedy cartoon series Kevin Spencer, though the father, Percy Spencer, doesn't come up with nearly as creative schemes to rip the government off as the patriarch in Les Bougon comes up with. Hmm... come to think of it, I don't ever remember any dependency-perpetuating poverty industry activists whining about Kevin Spencer, but Kevin Spencer, which is on the Comedy Network, is much more obscure in the English-Canadian market than Les Bougon is in the French-Canadian market.) Elvis Gratton is absolute garbage; pure-separatist propaganda, presenting Federalist French-Canadians as being absolute buffoons, from separatist propaganda-churning (and stomache-churning) director Pierre Falardeau, whom appears at the end of Elvis Gratton II: Miracle à Memphis as himself openly mocking Telefilm Canada for funding his film. (I'm about 5 years late, but, still, hey, Pierre Falardeau, fuck you! And not only should Telefilm Canada not contribute a single penny to your Agit-Prop dreck in the future, the Canadian government should send in the military to take all the money back which they wasted funding you.) The Les Boys films are just non-political hockey comedies, like Slapshot, in French.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 7:50 AM