Justice for ‘Letterkenny’: TV’s Most Underappreciated Comedy

It was many years ago that I came across it for the first time. Scrolling down the spine of the internet on an otherwise uneventful school day, my eye snagged on a clip of two farmers lounging at a roadside produce stand. The video was silently auto-playing, as if I’d stumbled across an incident already in motion. Two more characters rolled up in a Jeep and ripped their muscle T-shirts off, apparently spoiling for a fight. Intrigued, I clicked the sound on.

“You looking for a tilly, buddy? Let’s have a donnybrook.”

I didn’t know what language this was.

“Pump the brakes,” one of the farmers says flatly. “You take your shirt off, but leave your sunglasses on?”

“What sort of backwards fuckin’ pagentry is that?” the other cuts in, equally unruffled.

The pair, Wayne and Daryl, proceed to unleash blazing verbal ruination on their hapless, shirtless foes—hockey players, ergo members of a rival small-town clan—without breaking a sweat. (“What’s up with your fuckin’ body hair, big shoots?” Wayne asks. “You look like a 12-year-old Dutch girl. Your esthetician coif that for you?”) Just over a minute later, as the screen cut to black, I was a Letterkenny fan.

The show, a Canadian sitcom about the problems besetting the hicks, skids, hockey players, and Christians of a rural Ontario community, dropped its 12th and final six-pack of a season on Hulu late last month. In truth, though, I hemmed and hawed and put off starting it. I wasn’t ready to leave town.

I doubt I was the only one feeling this way either. Beginning life as a humble low-budget web series and snapped up by Hulu six seasons into its run on a Canadian streaming service, Letterkenny was a smash hit by the time it ended. Among the highlights: 74 episodes, seven holiday specials, several sold-out live tours, a spinoff that just wrapped its third season, the adulation of both Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, its own line of branded clothing, a licensed Monopoly edition, and a decidedly crushable official beer called Puppers.

And yet Letterkenny still felt like a cult series, Canada’s best-kept open secret since Justin Trudeau’s penchant for brownface. A big part of that was the show’s refusal to become anything but a quintessentially low stakes hang-out show, even as it expanded to become a veritable pocket universe of Wodehousian characters. Its hicks and hockey players were eventually joined by a First Nations crew known as the Natives, the pack of Mennonites, the Québécois (hiques, if you will), some degens from upcountry, and two guys who may or may not have fucked an ostrich one time. But by Season 11, a typical episode description still read, “The hicks organize a fishbowl discussion to determine the best flavor of chip.” To the end, it stayed true to its roots as a 2013 YouTube series made by a kid from southern Ontario who thought some of his tweets could be funny to put on film.

A lack of evolution is a set-in-stone sitcom convention, and there was endless fun to be had watching the denizens of Letterkenny drink, fight, dance, flirt, and smoke a dart or two. But the show was never better than when it slammed to a stop to watch three or four characters sit around in lawn chairs and shoot the shit. By god, could Letterkenny shoot the shit from day one.

The show came roaring out of the gate batting a thousand with its dialogue, reveling in machine-gun rhetorical feats studded with local lingo and obscure pop culture references. It tore off good-sized chunks of each 20-minute episode to devote to extended sequences of pun-upmanship, and puerile wordplay, riffing on the many different artful ways one might refer to the penis or incorporate the word “moist” into different phrases. (Series director Jacob Tierney told Entertainment Weekly that its writers contributed about “400 jokes” on each topic before the script was carved from the best.) The running gags were legion.

As a tween whose own bleak form of donnybrooking consisted of thinking swear words in the direction of the adults in my life who ticked me off, watching Letterkenny was like going to a Cirque du Soleil show as someone who can kind of do a cartwheel. Critics advised would-be viewers to keep a slang dictionary handy or at least turn the subtitles on, both of which I did until my ear adjusted a few episodes in. That was maybe the show’s most Shakespearean quality—that it took a minute to get a handle on the poetry.

Once you did, though, watching Letterkenny became like speaking a secret language. The show’s first season trained you on it, then broke out a whizbang display of abecedarian acrobatics at the start of the second season as if it were a final test. Got it? Good enough. Pitter patter. You were brought into the fold, as long as you followed the rules. King among them: When a friend asks for help, you help them. (Other less important rules included: Belts are unnecessary if you just buy pants that fit; also, there’s such a thing as too much horn talk and a fella oughta be fuckin’ aware of it.)

Letterkenny was refreshingly bass-ackwards in that way—for all its raunch and vulgarity, it wore its heart on its sleeve. It made sure its crude-joke-to-wholesomeness ratio was precisely balanced, such as in a scene where the show’s hockey players invite two gay gym bros to be buddies with them. One of the players shrugs off the bros’ assumption that they’d be homophobic, pointing out, “Fuck, you smash crush ass, we smash crush box, and the world keeps on turning, boys.”

Another of the show’s lodestars? “We hate bullies,” Tierney told the Montreal Gazette. Letterkenny loved to scrap with bullies; the entire town would come together to take them down, petty divisions momentarily forgotten. When an American brutally breaks one of their hearts at the end of the show’s eighth season, the rest immediately stop what they’re doing, pile into their trucks, and rush across the border to kick his ass to the tune of M83’s Do It, Try It.

One of the best examples, though, remains the fall of a nasty character called Hard-Right Jay, an outsider who comes to town to protest the youth soccer team’s decision to change its name from the Letterkenny Chiefs. While trying and failing to call the local populace to arms, Jay and his gang of soi-disant alpha males incur the wrath of the Natives and their leader, Tanis. They face off on the soccer field, with Jay bleating, “We don’t practice violence,” only for Tanis to snap back, “We do.” (Not so incidentally, Tanis was hailed as an example of First Nations representation done right, with her Mohawk actress, Kaniehtiio Horn, being regularly consulted by the show’s writers and designers.) As the Natives prepare to throw hands, the hicks appear out of nowhere, helping them to balletically bust up the basement-dwellers under the strains of a Puccini aria.

If nothing thaws the cockles of your heart like watching Nazis get a vicious pummeling, then Letterkenny’s brand of warm fuzziness was for you. But all things must go, nothing gold can stay, and eventually you have to give your balls a tug and get after it. The show ended when it did because, as creator and star Jared Keeso recently explained in a rare interview on fan podcast The Produce Stand, he felt it had run its course. I’d be willing to bet that most fans disagree, and would happily keep watching the Letterkennians in further storylines about paint drying or grass growing. There could be worse things than a back catalog, though, a town to which to return. No matter how far you go, you can always come home.