Canada

by Mike Myers

The Beatles sang, “I don’t care too much for money / Money can’t buy me love,” and in economically depressed Liverpool, Scousers often didn’t own anything except their bodies and their sense of humour. My dad wouldn’t let anyone into the house if he thought they didn’t have a sense of humour. He would say, “Michael, your friend Mark is not welcome in this house anymore.” And I would say, “Why not?” He would respond, “ ’Cause he’s not funny. In order to come into this house, you have to have at least one good song, one good story, or one good joke.”

Another strange quirk of Newfoundland, and of all of Atlantic Canada, is the linguistic anomaly known as “ingressive pulmonic speech.” Basically, people in the Maritimes suck air in quickly when they say the word yeah. Try saying yeah while breathing in, instead of breathing out. Supposedly, Swedes do this as well. I thought there was an asthma epidemic the first time I went to Newfoundland.

Here was the coolest show on American TV, created by a Canadian, co-starring Dan Aykroyd. These are the fruits of the dreaded big government. In fact, a case could be made that American big government also played a hand in the creation of Saturday Night Live. SNL owes as much to the CBC as it does to FDR and the WPA. And here’s the link: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, under the New Deal, created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was a make-work project during The Depression. The WPA hired a dramatist, Viola Spolin, to teach immigrant children English through the use of improvisational theatre games. Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought these improv games to Chicago in the 1950s, and he, with David Shepherd, formed the improv sketch troupe the Compass Players. Enter Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Bernie Sahlins, and thus the Second City Theater Company was born. The Second City franchised to Toronto, where a young Lorne Michaels met Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, and, in Chicago, John Belushi and Bill Murray. They formed the nucleus of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players, and Saturday Night Live was born. No FDR? No SNL.

British culture is so impenetrable that, during World War II, even the German spy service, the Abwehr, were unable to successfully infiltrate British society. How, for example, would you make sense of the word Leicester? Would you pronounce it LESS-ter? Or the last name St. John-Stevas? Would you know to pronounce it sin-jin-STEE-vas? The last name Beauchamp is pronounced BEACH-em. Ich gebe auf! (I surrender!) In England, the second you open your mouth, you give away all your private information, rather like Facebook today.