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But it's a dry funny
Randall King
WINNIPEG is funny.
Take our climate. Please.
Witness Renée Zellweger telling reporters about the deep-freeze phenomenon of "nostricles" endured during the shooting of Chilled in Miami over January and February.
Our people are funny, too. Please note that Winnipeg-spawned Nia Vardalos wrote the most successful indie comedy of all time, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Yet the city has only rarely been acknowledged as a comedic entity. Sure, Guy Maddin's film My Winnipeg was a success at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival largely on the strength of its regionally specific hilarity.
Before that, you'd have to go back to 1989 -- and the movie Mob Story -- to see filmmakers even attempting to mine the city's comedic potential for a mass audience. While the overall film was pretty dismal, it did capture a sense of the city's frozen isolation in its story of a New York mob boss who decides to lay low from his enemies in Winnipeg because, hey, who's ever going to go looking in Winnipeg?
On the national TV stage, we have eluded a comic identity of our own. Saskatchewan has had two major sitcoms -- Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie -- set in its rural environs.
Manitoba: zip.
Until now.
Within a few months, two different sitcoms have...