From Triumph to Trump

A primer on jokes about Canada

“The first time Trump mentioned this, well Canada should be the 51st state with Wayne Gretzky as the governor, it was one of his off the cuff jokes.” Canada’s legacy media and establishment politicians “took this as a serious policy of the Trump government,” and that was “complete nonsense.”

That was Preston Manning, founder and former leader of the Canada’s Reform Party, on the “hysteria” about Trump’s joke, an “act of war” according to member of Parliament Charlie Angus. Compare the reactions from 2004, when Conan O’Brien sent Triumph the Insult dog to Quebec.

A couple explains they are French and Canadian, to which the cigar chomping puppet responds, “so you are obnoxious and dull?” And Triumph wonders, “Does your national health care cover personality implants?”

Triumph can tell that one Québécoise is French because “I can smell your crotch from here,” somewhat like the convict Miggs to Clarice Starling (Jody Foster) in Silence of the Lambs. Triumph encounters a gay couple, happy to find “a Canadian mountee and Canadian mounteur.” A rather rotund chap acknowledges he is a separatist, so Triumph counsels, “maybe you should try separating yourself from donuts first.”

Triumph advises a separatist couple to hear “the sound of nobody giving a shit.” His own French is limited to basic expressions like “I surrender.” True to form, the street names include Rue de Pussies, Ice Street, and so on. The crowd loved it but the Canadian authorities were not amused.

“We want to dissociate ourselves from the comments which were broadcast last night,” said government minister Mauril Bélanger in Parliament, and legislator Alexa McDonough called the show “utterly vile” and requested that the government get back the $760,000 it paid to bring O’Brien to Toronto for the week. According to the Toronto Star, the puppet sketch was ”hateful” and ”racist.” O’Brien declined to apologize, and in 2012 Triumph would get an encore in “Taking Down Canada.”

“I’m not here to make fun of Quebec,” Triumph said. “The rest of Canada considers you second-class citizens. You are like the Canada of Canada.” This time, the dog puppet was going “to poop on every province and territory in Canada.”

In British Columbia you can smoke pot, but for punishment, “you have to be in BC.”

Saskatchewan was home to the RCMP training academy, prompting Triumph to wonder “how can you take a cop seriously when he looks like a doorman?” The people of the province were sad because they lost television funding, prompting Triumph to proclaim “Canadian television is shit” and in regions where they can’t get it, “they club seals in their spare time.”

In Alberta a “rodeo clown is a serious career” and the Calgary Stampede is “people trying to leave.” Manitoba is the place to go “when Minnesota gets just too exciting” and Ontario originated Justin Bieber, “Canada’s equivalent of the monkey that started AIDS.”

Nova Scotia “stinks like rotten fish” but it was “just Anne Murray doing aerobics.” In New Brunswick the biggest tourist attraction is the tide coming in, so “you may as well brag about sand and seagull shit.” Locating Prince Edward Island was “like trying to find a clitoris in a sheepdog.” In the frigid Yukon, Triumph laments, “I tried to eat my poop and I chipped my tooth.”

Little if any response from Parliament but some wondered if Triumph had ripped off cigar smoking Ed the Sock, created by Canadian Steve Kerzner in 1987. He sent tapes to O’Brien’s show but head writer Robert Smigel claims he “never saw him until I heard people saying we had stolen from him.”

Ed the Sock was a hit in Canada and according to Justin Trudeau’s team, helped win the election in 2015. As Edward Gibbon said, hereditary ruling arrangements are the most risible.

Justin is a former blackface performer who admires China’s “basic dictatorship.” In the style of John Lennon, imagine if Justin had proclaimed the annexation of the USA as Canada’s eleventh province, to be headed by hockey great Mario Lemieux. It’s hard to imagine Rip Van Winkle communist Bernie Sanders getting bent out of shape.

Alexa McDonough, who passed away in 2022, and Charlie Angus are members of the socialist New Democratic Party, not known as a barrel of laughs. The late CBC commentator Larry Zolf once described the NDP as the “Nude Amok Erratic Party.” For further research see Bill Mann’s The Retarded Giant: Introducing the Definitive Canadian Joke. And like Preston Manning, be sure to take Trump seriously but not literally.