At root, Will Ferguson isn’t any funnier than gumtoothed millionaire lapdog Rick Mercer. Still, Ferguson inadvertently explains why we cultivate Fergusons and Mercers here while anybody with bite feels forced to leave the country:
We’re inundated with American pop culture, but it’s not our culture. Whenever you get a culture that’s swarmed with another culture, the people from the first culture tend to become observers. We’re outsiders to American pop culture, so we can look at it in a way they can’t, yet it’s not our culture. That outsiderness naturally leads us toward satire but even more toward spoof and parody. Satire is humour with an agenda, with a reason. Spoof is affectionate, it’s humour that plays on the form not the content.
Canadians are great at spoof; it’s what we specialize in, doing an affectionate, fake version of something familiar… There seemed to be confusion, among the reviewing class, who really should know better, a confusion between satire and spoof. [In Generica,] I wrote a satire, but because satire is considered to be more of a British form and Canadians are more used to spoof comedy, reviewers here tended to judge Generica as a spoof or parody. It’s not a parody, it’s a satire[.]