YMMV / Royal Canadian Air Farce

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Is Sheila Copps' (comedically exaggerated) tendency to yell all the time an acceptable joke? Or sexist, as none of the other impersonations (male or female) did the same thing? Mind you, the real Copps had no problem with how she was portrayed, doing the same thing in her guest appearance, and Canadian politicians aren't generally known for being loud or straightforward, so the real Copps was bound to stand out regardless. Additionally, once John Baird entered the federal political scene, the show was more than happy to lampoon him for the same thing as they did Copps.
  • Is Sidney from the “Brenda the Bingo Lady” sketches as embarrassing and sex-obsessed as Brenda implies? Or is Brenda an Unreliable Narrator in her rants? While Sidney does find Brenda sexy and pays a little more attention if she refers to something to that effect, usually he hardly speaks, and at least at the bingo hall, Brenda is clearly the dominant spouse in their marriage, making his Karmic Jackpot at the end of every sketch that much more earned.
  • While Caustic Critic Gilbert Smythe Bite-Me was originally intended as the over-the-top butt of the joke (based on a Real Life critic whose reviews were so harsh and to-the-point that the troupe deemed them ripe for comedy), does that framing hold up throughout all his sketches, or does he become more of a one-man Author Tract as time (and popular culture) goes on, with the writers raving against increasingly easier targets? (This unsurprisingly coincides with later seasons and the Totally Radical slant their writing would also take.)
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Yes, folks, Kicking Horse Pass is real, and not made up for the show. It's situated across the Continental Divide of the Americas of the Canadian Rockies. (It's not the name of an electoral riding, though. Yet.)
  • One sketch with Ferguson impersonating music producer David Foster states that the man is known for running over Ben Vereen with his van. Younger viewers might think he's kidding, but this actually did happen in Real Life in 1992, when Vereen, staggering away from a car accident and suffering from an ensuing stroke, was accidentally hit by Foster on a highway in Malibu.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Lucien Bouchard (like his Real Life counterpart) had a leg amputated due to flesh-eating bacteria and uses a cane, but due to his stick-in-the-mud personality and staid nature, the show wasn't above pointing out his disability in ways that might have been a lot more offensive had it been directed at someone else (the playing piece in the "Separatist Careers" sketch is an artificial leg with a shoe on it, for example). One's mileage will really vary if this holds up today, though.
  • Similar to the above example, while it's generally in poor taste to make fun of someone for their alcoholism, Ralph Klein's accompanying antics and unprofessional behavior (which were unfortunately Truth in Television at the time) could take the sting out of the show doing so. It's worth noting that these jokes did stop once Klein achieved sobriety in Real Life.
  • Deborah Grey (John Morgan) being a masculine, cigar-chewing Straight Man to Don Ferguson's Preston Manning would be at least a little offensive if portrayed negatively, but Grey is also a total badass who takes no prisoners and is generally respected (if also a bit feared) among her colleagues.
  • "Sharon, Lois & Bram" has this line from their "Skinnamarink" spoof, which is crossed with Black Comedy.
    Sharon, Lois & Bram: (singing) I love you on the West Bank, I love you from afar, I can't see you tonight 'cause someone blew up my car!
• Fair for Its Day:
  • While it wasn't ahead of its time, the show generally didn't deal in negative jokes towards gay people, but rather made fun of homophobic politicians and the ridiculous points they made against issues such as gay marriage.
  • Billy Two Willies is still an Aboriginal character played by a white actor, but the majority of jokes in his sketches are firmly directed at the Canadian government and its terrible past and present treatment of the country's First Nations (the Oka crisis and the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords being recent current events). This was later lampshaded in one sketch where Billy is a native in colonial times, interacting with explorer John Graves Simcoe, a white settler played by Graham Greene (Actor).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A Season 7 sketch had Jean Chrétien meeting with Pierre Elliot Trudeau and claiming he thought Trudeau had passed away, before singing a grammatical error-laden rendition of Happy Birthday to You!, ending with the line "Hopes you makes it to 81!". The Real Life Trudeau would be dead less than a year after the sketch aired, not making it to age 81.
  • Like most comedic characters with a similar premise, Big Bobby Clobber’s Running Gag of his short-term memory loss isn’t nearly as funny now in the age of greater awareness of CTE and other conditions stemming from head injuries in sports, especially in hockey, where the NHL has historically been reluctant at best to acknowledge said health conditions in its players.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One sketch depicted Stephen Harper as chanting "Must destroy Liberals!". After the 2011 general election, the Conservative Party gained a Majority, while the Liberal Party was reduced to third party status.
  • A 2001 sketch that rewrote the lyrics of "O Canada" to be more politically correct became quite prescient when years later in Real Life, the song's lyrics "all thy sons command" were officially changed to "all of us command".
  • In "News from Away"'s 2002 year-end sketch, Jimmy O'Toole jokes that the Hells Angels' plan to improve their image backfired when they were photographed with the Mayor of Toronto. ^note At the time, mayor Mel Lastman had been criticized for shaking hands with two HAMC members and claiming to not know the club sold drugs. Over a decade later, Rob Ford's mayoral career took a serious hit when a photo of him posing with known Toronto gang members was leaked to the press.
  • A "Stan" sketch from Season 7 has Stan state that his airline's fare to Brandon, Manitoba costs $0 because the airline doesn't fly to Brandon at all, before asking why anyone would want to go to Brandon. Come 2002, when the Season 10 premiere would be filmed entirely in that city.
  • A 2001 "Chicken Cannon News" sketch had a joke about airport security checks of footwear following the apprehending of "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid, saying security personnel are "just thankful [Reid] wasn't the "Underwear Bomber"." Cut to 2009...
  • One "Undercurrents" sketch with Wendy Mesley (Goy) interviewing Toronto mayor Mel Lastman (Ferguson) has him try to sell her a large plastic moose nicknamed "Wendy Mooseley". Mesley's ex-husband Peter Mansbridge would later get this same naming treatment when he voiced Peter Moosebridge in the U.S. and Canadian version of Disney's Zootopia.
  • The end of Season 3’s “Martha Stewart Nightly News” has the announcer say the following show is “The Martha Stewart X-Files”, implying she is so popular that she also has her own version of a pre-existing series. This would pretty much become Defictionalized with The Apprentice: Martha Stewart in 2005.
  • One “Computer Talk” sketch from Season 4 has P.J. Nosliw tout an interactive banking CD that includes a “cyber lineup” to replicate the feeling of being in line in an actual bank. Nowadays, virtual, online, and mobile queues are a mainstay of websites and apps designed to serve customers and prevent site crashes in many high-traffic industries and sales events (i.e. Black Friday), though banking websites are (thankfully) not among them.
  • A Season 7 sketch about Canada’s Navy trying to keep out migrant ships has the captain ask his subordinate “Isn’t it bad enough we let Goldie Hawn live here in the summer?”. In a funny twist, Hawn and Kurt Russell would later move to Vancouver and live there much more of the time in hopes of helping son Wyatt Russell’s then-blossoming hockey career.
• Memetic Mutation: Mike from Canmore. Specifically, "I sold all my [x] to Mike from Canmore", with many memes replacing the "x" with "guns", despite Mike never being seen (or mentioning) using one.
• Seasonal Rot: The later seasons, when the show tried to be edgier.
  • Some fans consider John Morgan leaving the series in 2001 to be the start of its rot.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Natch. Expect early seasons to feature the Liberals decimating the Progressive Conservatives in the federal election, the Quebec Referendum, the rise of the Bloc Quebecois, etc., firmly placing them in the transformative but long-past 1990s, while later seasons would reflect the country's changes in LGBT rights and the newfound majority of the then-newer Conservative Party of Canada.
  • Interestingly subverted with many of John Morgan's sketches and monologues, as his characters would often smoke indoors in public. While all provinces and territories had banned it by 2010 (hence the trope), Ontario (where Air Farce was filmed) was actually one of the first provinces to ban all public indoor smoking (in 1994). In Real Life Morgan was a lifelong smoker, even smoking when he impersonated Two Fat Ladies' Clarissa Dickson Wright, who was herself a non-smoker.
  • Most of the figures lampooned on the show are still alive, but notable exceptions after the show's run concluded include: Lucien Bouchard's then-wife Audrey Best (who died in 2011), Jack Layton (also in 2011), Osama bin Laden (also in 2011), then-Alberta premier Ralph Klein (in 2013), Rita MacNeil (also in 2013), then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon (in 2014), Two Fat Ladies' Clarissa Dickson Wright (also in 2014), Lois Lilienstein of Sharon, Lois & Bram (in 2015), Aline Chrétien (in 2020), and Prince Philip (in 2021).
  • Stan's first sketch is a great microcosm of Canada's telecommunications landscape in the 1990s, as the competition between phone companies relies entirely on landlines (cell phones being around but hardly common at the time), Luba Goy's competitor character crying that "We figured we'd always be a monopoly!" ^note Bell Canada's monopoly in Ontario, Quebec, and the Northwest Territories had only recently ended by the time the sketch originally aired, and Stan names Unitel ^note Now known as Allstream and Sprint [Canada] ^note Went defunct in 2005 after being acquired by Rogers Communications as other competitors.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The show had several instances of Black Face ^note Roger Abbott as "Baby Doc" Duvalier and Brown Face ^note Don Ferguson as Rahim Jaffer in earlier seasons, as well as Alan Park's portrayal of Barack Obama later on. The former examples would have never flown on American mainstream television even in the early 1990s.
  • Additionally, due to the entirely-white cast ^note Don Ferguson is actually one-quarter Brazilian, albeit very white-passing. in earlier seasons, they would also play other non-white politicians and characters on a regular basis (English-born Abbott as Aboriginal Canadian Billy Two Willies, Ukrainian-born Luba Goy as Scottish-Spanish-Indian-Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian Hedy Fry). Later seasons and casts generally avoided this, however.
  • The series' portrayal of singer Rita MacNeil definitely comes off today as awkward at best, and horribly fatphobic at worst, especially given how it's Goy (in a fat suit) playing her.
  • Likewise with its attitudes towards bisexual (see "News from Away"'s "Anne Heche Watch 2000") and transgender people, much as those jokes were far more common in the late-90s/early-2000s.
  • You'd be very hard-pressed to see a Canadian comedy show today invite politicians with noted anti-gay views (i.e. Stockwell Day, Elsie Wayne) on as comedic Special Guests, especially given how Wayne appeared when attitudes towards gay marriage had begun to shift dramatically in Canada.
  • "English as a Second Language News" has dated in that the term itself and its acronym have fallen out of use since the 1990s, in favor of terms such as "English as an additional language", due to many immigrants already being multilingual.
  • Dave the Cabbie's sketches often feature jokes and cracks related to Dave being a Funny Foreigner, and while viewers today will probably still find him being from Regina amusing, other gags playing Middle Eastern stereotypes straight (playing unintelligible music to drive away a customer wanting her change, reading a newspaper called Daily Terrorist), not so much.
  • The 1980 special, while never quite getting to its planned “Chinese Restaurant” sketch, still involves Don Ferguson in a stereotypical Chinese getup with Asian Speekee Engrish to boot.

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