Royal Canadian Air Farce

The jokes on Air Farce probably were never funny but if they ever were it was back in World War Two.

They have a chicken cannon. They put garbage in the cannon and then shoot it at pictures of politicians.

It's like watching half an hour of a nightmare where you're stuck in the audience of a community theatre show at an old folks home where nobody is allowed to walk out.

It's just painful.

They do impersonations where they put on a wig and then say for example "Hi I'm Bob Rae" but then they just use their own voice. That's not an impersonation, it's just a confused senior citizen wearing a wacky wig telling jokes that for some reason they think might be funny to somebody else.

What is CBC thinking? The people writing the jokes for CBC must be world war veterans who think that wacky wigs and puns are the peak of comedy, maybe in ten years they'll start writing the latest craziest kind of comedy, knock knock jokes!

Up until John Morgan left, this was one of the funniest shows on Canadian tv. The jokes were mostly political, and poked fun at world leaders. After he left, and there were only 3 original members, they started getting guest appearances, which is ok. Then the jokes started to get more pop-culture based, but were repetitive and weren't as funny. The new episodes are terrible, and they need to take more risks.

One of the worst shows on Canadian television. The jokes are lame, the performers are wooden and untalented. Good political humour (or humour in general) explores unchartered oceans, this one wades in stagnant waste water. I can't believe so many Canadians like this show, it's time to retire it and it's crew.

Royal Canadian Air Farce is one of those comedy shows where you tune in, sit there, waiting to laugh... but you don't. The show never gets into anything story-wise by design, because it's a sketch show, so you're left trying to get a cheap laugh out of the (usually political) premises of the sketches. Problem is, they're not good.

According to Wikipedia, the comedy group started off in 1970 as 'The Jest Society', a play on Pierre Trudeau's goal of a 'Just Society'. Kind of a lame title. This tactic of taking a letter and changing it was repeated when the 'Jest Society' changed their name to the Royal Canadian Air Farce. When the current show started in 1993, the crew had Jean Chretien and multiple other targets of Canadian politics to satirize, and ample material in Canadian culture (like those silly Canadian Tire commercials). But even then, the sketches didn't move past a simple caricature of Chretien's accent, or any other one-dimensional premise.

I specifically remember a sketch about the 'War on Christmas' - and the premise being a guy was reading a Christmas story by a fireplace. What's the joke? Every time the word Christmas should come up, he says 'holiday' instead. And the sketch continues like this for about 7 or 8 minutes. Somewhere along the way, somebody should have said, "Guys - don't you think we should do something more? Make something happen? Have at least some kind of a story, at least?" I guess that didn't ever happen. or maybe it did, and they fired the guy who said it.

Sometimes I have relatives from outside Canada ask me what good Canadian TV shows there are, this show (plus the Mike Bullard show) always comes to mind. It makes me sad that this is such a poorly made show, and yet it's financed and probably shot on HDCAM and viewed by millions (funny considering Canada's population is only 33 million, give or take).

I know it's probably schadenfreudenic (I think that's right) for me to take so much pleasure hating this show. Maybe it wasn't always that bad, but it's just not funny at all. Anyway, to sum up: Don't watch it.

Alright, it's been said but I must say it again. This show got old a LONG time ago. I remember telling some teacher in grade nine that I thought it was awful, tired and unfunny (1997?). I believe she disagreed. I could never stand watching Luba Goy or Abbott as they can NOT act, and are so odd in appearance that all you see in their impersonations is them. The political satire never seems to focus on anything beyond the news headline.

Lots of good shows have come from the CBC. This is not one of them. It's safe, middle-class suburban and DULL. This Hour has 22 Minutes, though suffering at times from cast changes, was always funny. Kids in the Hall was funny. Air Farce has always played to a lower denominator. I find it unwatchable as I find SNL unwatchable. I might have enjoyed it briefly when it first came on TV when I was ten, but that didn't last very long. Though my parents seemed to have enjoyed it on the radio back in the day, the radio has the bonus feature of not having to WATCH who's speaking.

Finally, this show reinforces an incorrect view of Canadians. C'mon, no one likes to see stereotypes reinforced in the same way, over and over.