TO: Canadians are considered a pretty witty people. Why is so much of our fiction so humourless?
WF: I don’t know really. We have a strange relationship to humour and identity in general in Canada. Take Stephen Leacock. The Americans loved him for his British wit and the British loved him for his Yankee humour. He got that his whole life, being mistaken for a Brit or an American. That strikes me as a typically Canadian thing. We have a British literary tradition and American pop culture roots. We’re inundated with American pop culture, but it’s not our culture. Whenever you get a culture that’s swarmed with another culture, the people from the first culture tend to become observers. We’re outsiders to American pop culture, so we can look at it in a way they can’t, yet it’s not our culture. That outsiderness naturally leads us toward satire but even more toward spoof and parody. Satire is humour with an agenda, with a reason. Spoof is affectionate, it’s humour that plays on the form not the content. Canadians are great at spoof, it’s what we specialize in, doing an affectionate, fake version of something familiar, like the Scary Movie franchise. Those movies aren’t making a comment about the content of horror movies, they’re just playing with the form. I honestly don’t know why that hasn’t made its way into much of our fiction.
