Canadian Prairie Humor

I've got a lot of things to catch up on talking about like The L Word, Puppets Who Kill and Looney Tunes Volume Four, but I've got to start somewhere and I might as well start with a Canadian TV sitcom called Corner Gas.

When you think about SCTV, Jim Carrey and all the people who have come out of Saturday Night Live, you realize a lot of funny people have come out of Canada in the last thirty years. When you watch some Canadian TV comedies though you start to think they've kept the best stuff for themselves. I'm thinking of The Red Green Show, Puppets Who Kill and especially Corner Gas.

The setup for this show is incredibly basic. It's basically about a man who runs a gas station in a small town called Dog River out on the western Canadian prairie and his circle, the woman who works for him at the station, his parents, his best friend, the woman who runs the diner next door and the town's two-man police force. The show is built on simple premises like the arivall of the town's first ATM machine, a lost American tourist, a curling competition and tearing down a barn. Yet this show is very funny. The writers fit the dialogue together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle so that one conversation can forward three plots and still be funny. It's also refreshing to see a comedy that isn't all about fat guys trying to get laid or adult guys trying to act like teenagers. All the characters here are at different levels of dumb or quirky so you don't feel like you're watching the same viewpoint coming out of four or five people's mouths. Also it doesn't hurt that the cast includes one stone cold hottie, Gabrielle Miller, the woman on the left in the picture, who plays Lacey, the owner of the diner.