The Olympics and the end of the great Canadian comedians.
It's Olympics time again. Yawn. I remember the day when we looked forward to the summer and winter Olympic Games, held every four years. Then the television rights became too expensive, so they split them into two-year intervals. Then they added a lot of new "sports," and amateurs became professionals, and the same people you saw competing two weeks ago in their normal circuit were once again competing, with slightly different jerseys. The East-West matchups we waited years to see are now replaced by teammates who simply wear different national jerseys and compete against each other for a couple of weeks.
American Olympians generally do not represent all strata in the United States. Sure, there have been moving stories of poorer Americans who made it to the big time. But most of the American athletes dedicate their entire lives to their sports, and as such, require coaches, facilities, and frequent travel that do not come cheap. While they may not represent every walk of life or economic strata, Olympians of the past had one thing in common: patriotic pride. They were outwardly proud to have USA on their uniforms and were not embarrassed by their country. Sure, there were the Black Power fists in Mexico City and other individual protests of American policy, but remember that the private Olympic program accepted Jimmy Carter's request not to go to Moscow as a protest over the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
In Milan, we have been treated to several pampered American athletes denigrating their country and its policy of removing illegal aliens. They are not ashamed to speak badly of the country they supposedly represent, and one bonehead skier said that his presence in the Olympics has nothing to do with representing the country conveniently named on his clothes. One Chinese star chose to represent the CCP over her birth country, the USA. So while generally wealthy and pampered Olympians do not represent the full picture of America, they do show us the neuroses and pathetic idiocy of the current younger generation. As so many have pointed out, their pleas for illegals rounded up by ICE stand in contrast to their absolute lack of care for Americans murdered by illegal aliens. One-way feelings are the order of the day, as overly indulged and under-intelligent college students feign worry about nonexistent genocide and starvation, but do not shed a single tear for raped and murdered Israeli citizens. When the Olympians take a couple of dozen Mexican families into their massive homes, then I might begin to watch what used to be the marquee sports exhibition. Who could forget Franz Klammer, or Eric Heiden, or the Miracle on Ice? That was a different day.
One of the big competitions in the winter – still – is hockey between the U.S. and Canada. Canada is a beautiful country going down the tubes, as is the wont of Western countries these days. Fellow classmate Mark Carney has to remind himself each morning in which country he is currently living. Am I still at Goldman Sachs? I am still Governor of the Bank of England? Nope, now I am the prime minister of Canada. Justin Trudeau made it his business to close bank accounts of those who supported truckers fighting forced COVID vaccines. There was a time when Canadians were actually intentionally—and successfully—funny. I grew up with the Second City TV (SCTV) programs, and they included the pre-stardom heavy hitters of the 1980s and 1990s. With the recent passing of Catherine O'Hara, that generation of comedians is coming to an end. Who were the stars of SCTV?
- John Candy
- Catherine O'Hara
- Martin Short
- Rick Moranis
- Harold Ramis
- Joe Flaherty
- Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner also performed with the Toronto Second City Group
If one thinks about "Home Alone," "Trains, Planes and Automobiles," "Ghostbusters," "Splash," "Stripes," and any other of dozens of movies from those years, one or more of those stars from the Canadian branch of Second City were there. The U-Haul scene between Candy and O'Hara in "Home Alone" was filmed at 4:30 in the morning after Candy was brought in last minute. The entire scene discussing parenting and forgetting kids was completely ad-libbed. I don't know if there was something in the Toronto water or if it was a product of the wild 1960s, but the stars of those days were hilarious, and many of them moved from the Canadian backwater to the forefront of Hollywood success.
There seem to be periods of intense intellectual success, where one has enough good people to do in a few decades what was not accomplished in hundreds of years. Whether it was the nuclear chemists and physicists of the early 20th Century or the aviation and space scientists of the 1950s and 1960s who got us to Mach 3 and the moon, or a group of crazy Canucks of the early 1980s who revolutionized TV comedy and later film—they all belonged to periods where there was success not seen before and generally not seen since. Most of what is in a chemistry textbook today about the atom was known by the late 1930s. We don't fly commercial at Mach 2 any longer, and we certainly cannot go to the moon right now. And as to comedy, I don't think that we have the quality of actors that we had in the past, whether you want to go back to the days of Groucho Marx and the Three Stooges or focus on the comedies of the 1980s and 1990s. Everyone says that Saturday Night Live stinks, and the title "comedian" is being used quite generously today.
Much of the reason why we don't have the great comedies of the past is politics. First, the movies have to be politically correct with respect to color, gender, and political outlook. The Academy Award actually has requirements regarding victim group representation for consideration for Best Picture. But beyond the demands of the studios, there is simply self-censorship. One of the funniest scenes in the first "Rush Hour" movie has Jackie Chan using the "N-word"; when he does so again, we are treated to one of his comic fight scenes that he perfected during his long career. You can't make that scene today. You can't make the sheriff scene from "Blazing Saddles" today either.
What we have is that we are allowed to laugh at fewer and fewer things. Remember, it was Yale that had an email warning students and staff not to dress up on Halloween in a manner that could be construed as "cultural appropriation"; a professor and his wife were vilified for suggesting to ignore the advice. In the day, we would have thought nothing of putting on a sombrero or a Chinese silk shirt; no more, the empty life social gatekeepers say that such acts are forbidden. So while the jokes in the past were meant exactly as that—jokes—we are not allowed to go there anymore because someone might be offended. White liberals, not Indians, wanted to get rid of the Washington Redskins name.
While a dearth of funny Canadians and too many pampered Olympic know-nothings may seem to have little to do with each other, the reality is that they are both products of the Left taking over the institutions, including sports and film. How popular would a MAGA hat-wearing speed skater be in Colorado Springs? He would be ostracized by his compatriots, even if he was the best skater of the bunch. And how funny can a Canadian be when he can't make fun of anyone other than Jews and white men? Did you hear the one...yeah, we already heard it. Where the Left goes, the brain atrophies.
