O! CANADA!

I've been getting a good long chuckle out of the bruhaha (brewhaha?) about Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's appearance in Canada.

The "issue" was first brought to my attention by Damien Penny, who linked to this hilarious weather report by Triumph in Hawaii. Sample: "Howard [anchorman], don't worry about the light winds. Hurricane Isabel couldn't mess up your hair."

But a similar act in Canada about Canadians was, shall we say, not well received in certain quarters.

American talk-show host Conan O'Brien took his cameras to the Quebec Winter Carnival where he launched a satirical attack on French Canadians that is sure to further offend Quebeckers still stinging from comments made by CBC hockey analyst Don Cherry.

Canada's government has condemned a show by U.S. late-night television host Conan O'Brien that insulted people in French-speaking Quebec and seemed to suggest everyone in the province was homosexual

American talk-show host Conan O'Brien turned out to be Conan the Barbarian on his road show into Canada this week. His NBC program threw oil and matches down our national fault line Thursday night with crude jokes about French Canadians. This one ran under the headline "Canada AmBushed by Loose Conan." Self parody just doesn't get much better than that. The linked article is worth reading just to see how the ijit worked Bush into this.

Oh, alright, I'll quote him: "Could it be that our growing U.S. criticism has set the Bush government out for revenge? Do the Americans secretly want to split up our two solitudes so they can pick up the pieces? Could the last week's events be part of a CIA plot to grab our oil, lumber, water and snow? Or our few remaining hockey stars?" Was he serious? Well, he was a few paragraphs earlier when he said "But I wonder how [Conan O'Brien would] feel if we let Canada's Insulting Beaver Puppet loose on U.S. TV to yuk it up about Sept. 11. We all have our raw nerves and O'Brien just hit ours. Where will this loose Conan take his show next? Maybe Ireland, where he could try out his Catholic-Protestant jokes?"

And the sketch that created all this furor? Two days later it was posted on the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.