HIMYM's Canadian Jokes Offend...no one
How I Met Your Mother is a comedy about a young man called Ted and how he fell in love.
The premise began with Ted, in older age, looking back on his youth and reflecting wistfully on his days of courtship. The series is narrated through flashbacks from the future.
The running gag is that the identity of the "mother" is kept hidden from the other characters in the show -- and from the audience watching at home.
The apple of Ted's eye, initially, in an on-again/off-again way, is Robin, a young Vancouver Canucks fan from Canada, played by Vancouver native Cobie Smulders.
The premise was too limiting, most experts reasoned at the time, for How I met Your Mother to last more than one or two episodes. It was just a matter of time before the gag got old, they reasoned.
Instead, that premise became a jumping-off point for five seasons' worth of stories about dating, friendship, family and lifelong relationships.
When How I Met Your Mother airs its U.S. Thanksgiving episode this Monday, Nov.23, it will be the series' 97th episode.
There'll be more where that came from, too. How I Met Your Mother is now the anchor of CBS' top-rated lineup of Monday-night sitcoms. (Mother airs on Citytv in Canada.)
And there has been growing speculation of late -- behind the camera, as well as in front -- that the "mother's" identity will be revealed before the season is out.
"Sometimes we plant things intentionally," co-creator Carter Bays said at a recent gathering of reporters in Los Angeles. "Sometimes we'll write one joke early in a season, and that will turn into an entire episode the following season. Everything's up for grabs. It's in there."
The premise presented problems over the years, Bays admitted, but nothing he -- and the show's nine million weekly U.S. viewers and another 700,000 in Canada -- couldn't handle."We should have gone with our original title, People Hanging Out," Bays said, deadpan. "Huge mistake."
As for why Robin's Canadian, Bays said: "We made her Canadian because Cobie is Canadian. It's such filthy lucre for writers. At first, it was a case of, 'We'll just throw in a joke about how she's Canadian,' and then we just couldn't stop ourselves."
Craig Thomas, Bays' writing partner and fellow executive producer, concurred.
"We approached Cobie in the beginning and we said, 'We're going to make her Canadian,'" Thomas said. "We told her, 'We're going to do some comedy about that, but it's going to be really smart. It's going to be our smart way of showing the absurdity of American culture.' And we didn't do that even one time. We just completely sold her out immediately."Smulders was OK with that, up to a point, according to Mother's breakout star, Neil Patrick Harris, who plays unapologetic womanizer Barney Stinson on the show.
"By the end of (last) season, Cobie was like, 'All right, dudes, enough with the Canadian jokes,'" Harris said.Perhaps the producers shouldn't have come up with last month's episode, "Duel Citizenship," then, in which Smulders' Canucks fan character is threatened with deportation because she may be staying in the U.S. illegally.
The episode included jokes like Barney's snorting at a Canadian $5 bill: "There's kids playing hockey on the back. It's like you want us to make fun of you."Well, that, and the Canucks' Stanley Cup-winning record.
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