My good buddy Kevin has let go with another rant in response to my earlier video post featuring a skit from This Hour Has 22 Minutes. In the video they expand on the growing fad of cloning popular TV shows such as CSI into various different cities with different casts. They take the popular show Flashpoint and do a send-off of it “Flashpoint St. John’s”. I thought the exaggerated Newfoundland accent and mannerisms came off as funny. Kevin’s take on it, however, was slightly less accepting. For those of you that didn’t catch it in the comments, here it is, in full:
Ya know what pisses me to no end?
Let’s start with number one. In all me days of living, scratch that, existing on the rock, not once have I heard anyone one say “Lard Tundering” or “Stay where yere at” and so on. It’s not that it’s never been said. I’m sure some poor sod has let part of it slip from time to time in a drunken stupor and not realizing that he is classing him or herself with the mainland equivelent of what’s taken for Newfoundland phrasing and dialect. Even in day to day conversation, letting go with a line, as what mainlanders have come to believe are some of the main catch phrases often heard in every port along our shores, like that would have the fella standing next to ya look at you kinda of funny and ask, “What? What da F*&% are you talking about, b’y?” No one I know from from any part of the Newfoundland planet speaks like that and what’s worse is now we’ve got a few displaced personages from our rocky shores (maybe) passing themselves off as the average day-to-day Newfoundlanders. These individuals are seeking to call themselves comedians, and with funding from the purses of the Canadian public pouring into the CBC, they’ve been allowed to put them on our airwaves, and subject us to the uncomedic ramblings of poor writing, the imagination of a fruitfly and the wit and wisdom of stale bread. I cannot find any jocularity in what these individuals call comedic sketches. This hour . . . and the bottom of the barrel cast are a true insult to all that is Newfoundland. They are as limp as a dish rag with a quick line and their approach to comedy leaves you savagely hunting for the remote in an effort to quickly change the said channel. What are we thinking letting these morons pass themselves off as “True Newfoundlanders”? If this is what we are now presenting to the world as a glimpse of what the common everyday variety Newfoundlander is like, then we’re in big trouble.
Not only would the unsuspecting mainland viewer take this a reasonable facsimile of what he might expect should he venture out of the confines of upper Canadiana to the shores of the far east, he would almost immediately think to himself that the Newfoundland idiot he’s been told that exists on these shores is most certainly alive and decaying at the same time. We have allowed these throwbacks to the whoopie cushion, to box us all together in a tragic farce lasting 30 minutes a week and growing and blanketing our combined faces to the viewing world, saying, “This is us, wadda ya think? Cathy Jones needs to find another line of work, the other just need to stop.
As sad as it is, the newfie joke, lately, has been on all of us.
Did I say that out loud?
