Okay, Lydy, I started watching Letterkenny

[dreamshark]

I watched the first half of the first episode, then turned on closed captions and watched it again. Then I went online and found an alphabetical glossary of Canadian slang, which I studied intently. Today I watched the 2nd episode and liked it better now that I had some idea what they were saying. Do people really talk like that in rural Canada? I had no idea. 

I didn't immediately go crazy for it like you did, but I can see how it could grow on me. 

Comments

[lydy]

I didn't go immediately crazy for it. It took about 5 episodes. But I was, well, entranced is not quite the right word. Fascinated, in the way one is with a car wreck, maybe. As the episodes went along, and I got to know these people better, I fell solidly in love, but the only thing that really caught me was the cleverness of their crude humor. I have often seen crude humor, and very much like clever humor, but the two are very rarely married. Also, the poetics of it caught me. The call-and-response.

"Put on some clothes, would you?"
"That's not my forte."
"Unfortunate."

Of, "That's what I appreciates about you, Katie." "Oh, that's what you appreciate?"

These interactions show up again and again, and create a weird poetic structure which I have never seen in television. If I read poetry, I might have seen more of this, and possibly have been less entranced.

[dreamshark]

It's certainly not what I expected from the ad. Admittedly, the limerick was unusual, but the rest of the commercial just looked like Dukes of Hazard.

Have you ever watched Deadwood? A completely different sort of show, but immediately what I thought of when you started talking about the marriage of poetry and vulgarity.

[lydy]

I saw a little of Deadwood. It was too brutal and too violent for it to be fun. Well done television, but not enjoyable. The people were cruel and I found that very hard to endure. One of the interesting things about Letterkenny is that most of the characters are kind.

[dreamshark]

Absolutely true about Deadwood (and probably Letterkenny too). Brutal and ugly, but the language was incredible. Also, Al Swearingen becomes a surprisingly interesting and complex character as Season 1 goes on, but that might not make it worth your time to watch. It doesn't get any less ugly as it goes on. Halfway through Season 2 the writing went downhill. Suddenly I couldn't take the gratuitous violence any longer and abruptly stopped watching it. But the language is GRAND.

The fact that I grew up watching the sanitized 50's and 60's versions of the old West made me the perfect audience for this. Oh yeah, right. I'll bet those wild west gunslingers DID say "Cocksucker!" a lot more often than "Goldangit!" And the weird combination of explosive vulgarity and convoluted Victorian sentences? It was the 1870's after all. And the Old West housed a remarkably various collection of people ranging from well-educated to illiterate. We really don't know how people talked back then, but this is probably closer than the 1950's version.