This summer, John Semley asked the tough questions of our nation: Are we Canadians really a funny people? And, if so, how did we get that way? Each week, for 10 weeks, he explored a new facet of our history in humour. This is the last of the series.
In his 2002 alphabetical index of Canadiana, Souvenir of Canada, Douglas Coupland has great bit about the name "Doug." Coupland tags "Doug" as a sort of quintessential Canadian male name. Like if you're born in Canada and your parents can't come up with anything better, you're Doug, de facto. Just being a Doug is a form of national duty; a silent, dignified shouldering of Canadian identity. To be a Doug is to feel, by the providence of simple naming, connected to some chimerical idea of "Canada."
As Canadians, it's easy to feel disconnected. As I mentioned from the get-go of this series, we tend to lack – or tend to think we lack – the sort of meaty, overloaded signifiers that we presume bind other, realer nations, like the U.S.A. or France. And when these sorts of iconic symbols of nationhood do emerge (the beaver, the Mountie, two crossed-over hockey sticks), they tend to get written off as cliché. (Like has anyone, ever, really seen a beaver? I mean actually?)
I want to end on Souvenir of Canada not only because, across 10 weeks of writing, I've managed to mostly avoid writing about Douglas Coupland – one of the biggest names in CanLit, and a funny enough guy – but because I kind of like its approach to the whole broad, unruly issue of Canadian identity. Instead of the iconography you might find ironed on a tourist-baiting t-shirt in a Chinatown, like a cartoon moose dressed as a Mountie drinking syrup out of a toque made out of a hockey sock, Souvenir of Canada zeroes in on the banal humdrummery that actually constitutes the unique Canadian identity.
If this series has circled back to the looming issue of America – much to the consternation of certain online commenters levelling not-altogether-untrue claims of an anti-American bias – it has been, I hope, with good reason. From its earliest works, since at least the sleazy and presumptive pontifications of the Yankee clockmaker Sam Slick, Canadian humour has been obsessed with the idea of America. And likewise, as we saw with Mavis Gallant, Canadian humourists have often made attempts to totally unshackle themselves from Canada, only to be drawn irrevocably back.
In a way, America's burdening bigness has been a structuring presence of the Canadian sensibility. So the bias isn't quite towards anti-Americanism, like as in "baseball and eagles are dumb and we're more polite and we're above all that" (remember that "smug superiority" complex that Will Ferguson wrote about) as something like nega-Americanism, the axiomatic belief that we are un-American, anything America is not. For someone like Douglas Coupland, Canada's like a negaverse U.S.A., where we prefer the peppery smack of rye to the caramel polish of bourbon; where zee is zed; where we gobble down Capitaine Crounche(which actually feels like a corrective to Cap'n Crunch, the cartoon sea captain's Napoleon-inspired garb lending credence to speculation that he's a Frenchman); where we will put literally anything on top of a plate of fries.
Pained though I am to defer to the wisdom of the Love Guru, Mike Myers, whose beloved SNL man-child Wayne Campbell was essentially a long-haired hoser in suburban American drag, he sort of nailed the sense of structuring lack that defines Canada. He once remarked that, "Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being." Myers also compared Canada to celery, and the analogy fits: we exert so much energy chewing through issues of national identity that we can barely retain any of its meaning. To be Canadian is to run a constant caloric deficit of distinctiveness and personality. The act of considering Canada is the most Canadian thing there is.
So then, the task is this: to hatch an escape from this ponderous feedback loop, to immanently embrace without contemplation. We need to stop being so, "Whither Canada?" about the whole curious project of nationhood. Perhaps it's the sway of Stephen Leacock – "Canada's Mark Twain," his name still adorning a prestigious Canadian humour award – the master conservative contemplator and cataloguer of foibles, that has given such sway to the inherent value of detached, almost disembodied observation in Canadian humour.
The best, most unique voices in Canadian humour writing have found their way outside of this. Mavis Gallant exiled herself to Paris and developed her literary rep in America. The young Will Ferguson raised arms against the sea of "niceness" that lapped against the Canadian conscience. Ivan E. Coyote, whose excellent collection of funny and sad short stories, Missed Her, was regrettably overlooked in this series, wriggles free from just about ever conceivable category: a Yukon-born tomboy whose work both tackles and transcends sex, gender and identity politics to prove that we're free to be however we want.
Like Coyote, Canada is something of a blank slate. There's been much flannel-rending about what Canada is, like we're all suffering through a prolonged existential crisis on a national scale. (See: the recent outcry when essentially Canadian food franchise Tim Hortons was purchased by Burger King.) But in existentialism, doesn't this sort despair emerge out of the anxiety of being? If the essence of Canada is, as Myers put it, that "of not being," then don't we stand outside of this anxiety? Not English. Not American. Not even Canadian.
Perhaps, as I suggested circa Week One, the greatest thing about being Canadian is that we're free to muck about in the gutters and hollows left in the absence of a binding national identity. Our laughter shouldn't be the nervous laughter of national anxiety, but a robust, subversive, smugly superior howling at the abyss. We're free, like Coupland, to imagine our own national iconography: not moose and Mounties but stubby bottles and stamped-out cigs.
As Canadians, as de facto Dougs, we're allowed to enjoy the free play of signifiers and souvenirs, to laugh through the lack. What a wonderful and freeing and totally absurd thing it is to be nothing at all.