And in regards to HIMYM. If their Canada jokes are really on topic so often, is it really true then that Canadians are afraid of the dark? Haha. Just a thought.

Let’s put it this way, Nick — you asking if Cdns have Xmas is funnier than anything 30 Rock came up with (similar to HIMYM’s suggestion that butterscotch is to Cdn women as chocolate is to American women), and I doubt you spent time thinking it up, whereas in theory their writers are thinking these things up with time and assistance, for significant profit. I love the show in many other ways, but their Cdn jokes are about as lazy as taking the car to one’s next door neighbor

I just don’t buy the idea that HIMYM is somehow doing something more right than 30 Rock because it name-drops a hockey team. Thinking about offensive humor in terms of whether or not any given group “gets it” misses the broader discursive frames we use to make sense of such humor.

Ok, it’s xmas eve and I’ve used the “d” word. Better set this aside for a bit. Do they have xmas in Canada? (smiley face)

What makes Robin’s jokes better is that they open themselves up to Canadians, and allow us in on the joke, rather than definitively situating us on the outside. They’re culturally literate in a way that the 30 Rock jokes are culturally illiterate.

I might accept the response about Jenna and Tracy if that was the case, but the show confirms that he doesn’t know sarcasm. And it would be just as easy to make a few jokes with Canadian content that showed some remote form of knowledge of the country, or more clearly situated the knowledge as incorrect or likely to be incorrect. It’s not pedagogic, didactic humor that I want, let me be clear, but it’s hard to make the comic point that someone is ignorant when the writer isn’t showing much more than that him or herself. (and personally, I’m really tired of the peddling of notions of Canada as not multicultural, in cases that seemingly celebrate the wonderful diversity of the US in contrast).

I see quite a clear difference from Cartman, who is so clearly contextualized as vile and odious and wrong, and where carnivalesque inversions are more clearly signaled. Liz and 30 Rock are less obviously so.

And what makes Robin’s joke better than those on 30 Rock, the indication that some HIMYM writer seemingly knows hockey (or had access to the Canucks wikipedia page)? Isn’t it just as lame that Robin is predictably harping on about hockey and not something that doesn’t explicitly mark her as Canadian? Vancouver used to have a semi-relevant NBA team too, you know.

So, for example, Montreal’s large Sephardic population wouldn’t count at all.

But, probably more relevantly, nowhere on earth or than Tel Aviv or maybe Haifa has ‘many Jews’ when compared to New York City. About 1 in 6 of the Jews on Earth live in NYC. There are 6 or 7 New York Jews for every Canadian Jew.

So is Canada the very best example of a place with not many Jews? Not really, no, although other the US and Israel, it’s hard to find a country in which Jewish culture makes a real dent on a national level. There’s a reason all those Canadian Jewish comedians do so well in NYC and LA.

If you go to Toronto, Montreal or even Winnipeg you’ll actually find vibrant, sizable Jewish communities that on the whole are far more traditional than those found in American cities. But they also tend to be a little more isolated and not nearly as present on TV.

As for Canadians as comedic Others, you’re absolutely right. I imagine the defense would probably be that if the Other isn’t a underprivileged minority and has no history of facing discrimination, it’s fair game. Not sure what I think about that, but I’m pretty sure that’s while you’ll never here any real outcry.

Your point about HIMYM is especially interesting, since I’ve long thought they do a great job of making Canadian jokes seem like something dumb Americans make because they don’t know better. You’re right that the jokes are framed & coded as unreliable–great point.