Pop Culture Care Package Pt. 14: Letterkenny
Pitter patter, boys
Dames Nation, do you sometimes just want to watch funny people being witty as hell about absolute gutter nonsense in 22-minute increments? And then, when you’re laughing through a veil of mirth-tears even though you’re pretty sure you’re only understanding about 75% of the jokes because they’re flying so thick and fast, in slang-laden unfamiliar and exaggerated Canadian regional accents, you realize…you love these goobers so damn much? Well. Welcome to Letterkenny.
Letterkenny is an Ontario farm town with 5000 residents: farmers (hicks), hockey players, drug dealers/doers (skids), and Christians. Every episode gives us little glimpses into their intertwined lives, focusing on the ups & downs of Wayne, Daryl, Squirrely Dan, and Katy (hicks), Reilly & Jonesy (the sex idiot hockey players who are Katy’s boyfriends in the early seasons), Stewart & Roald (skids), and Pastor Glen (the main Christian, who is also very, very gay). Everyone is horny and hanging out, either at Wayne’s produce stand, at the one bar in town, at the hockey rink, and occasionally at the agricultural hall or liquor store parking lot or gym.
Over the course of eight short seasons currently streaming on Hulu, they all go from being flat, if funny, stereotypes to being increasingly odd, three-dimensional people (who never quite forget that everyone from outside Letterkenny considers them stereotypes). There’s romance, dogs, chorin’, beer (soooo much beer, this is not a show for the newly or precariously sober), fighting, hockey, double (and single) entendres, and most of all, friendship. People who think they hate each other show up for each other in a pinch, because that’s what friends & neighbors do.
Letterkenny is a show that understands what it takes to maintain a community, what tests loyalty but won’t break it, what people really need to get by in this world. But you can definitely just watch it for the jokes. (Or the music, which is punching way above its class every episode. Would I deny you a link to a complete playlist? Never!)
Someone on Twitter recently compared it to Kevin Smith’s Askewniverse films, and as a lifelong Jersey girl who has a real soft spot for high verbal intelligence in the service of riotously funny filth (with a heart of gold), I’ll let Katy say it:
So! If you’ve watched all of Schitt’s Creek (and if you haven’t, do!) and want more Canadian content, but with the baroque ribaldry turned up way past eleven to, like, eleventy billion, pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er!
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