Beastly Boys

From left to right: John Paul Tremblay as Julian, Robb Wells as Ricky and Mike Smith as Bubbles in Trailer Park Boys. Courtesy Showcase.

So the actors who play the Trailer Park Boys walk into a bar and this fan comes up to them, says he’s seen the show and wonders if they might take care of a little problem for him.

What’s up? The off-duty boys inquire.

“Well, my neighbour has a dog that keeps dumping on my lawn,” he explains. “And I was wondering if, you know, you might take care of it for me.”

Before non-fans go any further they should know that on the show Trailer Park Boys, just beginning its fifth season, the boys are Maritime trailer park entrepreneurs and that some of their past schemes have included stealing Rita MacNeil’s tour bus and setting up a network of prison guard dope dealers, then retiring to let a tide of money wash in. Oh yes, they’ve also dabbled in pet removal.

Catching the drift of the fan’s shtick, Trailer Park actors, Robb Wells (Ricky), John Paul Tremblay (Julian) and Mike Smith (Bubbles) play along. “Yeah sure,” Tremblay agrees, “Two hundred dollars in 10s and 20s.”

Minutes later the pet-hater returns to the bar with 10 crisp Queen Elizabeths from a bank machine and the actors shrink away in horror, for once leaving a fan disappointed.

That somebody should mistake Tremblay, Wells and Smith for pet assassins is sure proof of Trailer Park Boys’ success. The show was conceived by Halifax creator Mike Clattenburg as a cinéma-vérité response to the Fox true crime show, Cops. TPB would be told from the point of view of petty criminals — only it would be funny, like the roughly affectionate home-movie satires Wells and Tremblay made of the down-but-not-out types they knew growing up in Dartmouth. Those amateur digital video sketches tickled their old friend Clattenburg, an aspiring filmmaker. A little seen movie, Trailer Park Boys, led to a series for the specialty channel Showcase, and in the very near future, we can presume, three roach-singed hammocks in the Canadian comedy hall of fame.

Left to right: John Paul Tremblay as Julian, Mike Smith as Bubbles and Robb Wells as Ricky. Courtesy Showcase.

Two weeks ago, Bubbles/Smith threw out the first pitch at the Toronto Blue Jays’ home opener — a one-hopper to the plate (chip grease on the fingers). And what with the fifth-season promo blitz, there are now posters of the boys on convenience stores, garbage containers and bus stops across the country.

Julian, Ricky and Bubbles wear hockey sweaters in the ads, which read simply, “Canada’s got a new pastime.”

Perhaps even a new government! “The federal Liberals are the Trailer Park Boys,” Tory MP Tom Lukiwski exclaimed in Parliament recently, responding to the decriminalization of marijuana. “And to think, most Canadians believe that Bubbles, Ricky, Julian and the rest of the gang reside in the Sunnyvale trailer park in Nova Scotia when they are really alive and well here in Ottawa sitting on the government side of the House.”

If only.

No one should be surprised that this specialty channel hit has managed to create so much excitement. We enjoy it when native talents like Jim Carrey and Mike Myers make it in Hollywood, but it is arguably more difficult for Canadian performers to become such a sensation in English Canada.

Inevitably, when they do, the comic characters that delight us are corduroy to the core, small town eccentrics — the Corner Gas gang, Charlie Farquharson, Red Green, Mary Walsh’s Marg Delahunty or Bob and Doug McKenzie (showing us how to roll a smoke with snowmobile mitts on).

As the first episodes of TPB season five confirm, few TV series have ever exploited Canadian comic types or national traumas better than Clattenburg’s mockumentary. This season, as always, the show begins with the boys getting out of jail and returning to Sunnyvale Trailer Park, where they are doomed to another year of pointless feuds and failed employment initiatives.

In the season premiere, Ricky is still complaining about the smoking ban in prison when the three best friends find themselves at the house of doper acquaintances, trying to score hash on credit. No problem getting the money: Julian’s got $20,000 stashed under his trailer. The boys are set for life.

Except in Sunnyvale, life is a shopping cart with a broken wheel that inevitably takes you crashing into a stack of canned peas. The boys’ archest enemy, Cyrus, shows up waving a pistol, whereupon everybody ends up outside, in a Tarantino-style Mexican standoff, guns pointed at each other, swearing:

Julian: “This is my gun now, so f--- off.”

Cyrus: “No you f--- off.”

Julian: “No you f--- off.”

Cyrus: “No you f--- off.”

Ricky: “Cyrus, you f--- off first, and then we’ll f--- off.”

Bubbles (crying): “Ricky, just everybody, we’ll all f--- off at the same time.”

More trouble awaits them at the trailer park. The boys’ teenage understudies, Corey and Trevor have messed up and Julian’s money has disappeared in a dozen different directions, with Sunnyvale hip-hop legend, “Know-what-I'm-saying” J-Roc (Jonathan Torrens) ending up with a new recording studio, and Ricky’s sometime girlfriend, Lucy, new breasts. Making matters worse, Bubbles’ shed is gone and Mr. Leahy, the boys’ other natural enemy, now owns Julian’s trailer.

Left to right: Tyrone Parsons as Tyrone, Jonathan Torrens as J-Roc and Garry James as DVS in Trailer Park Boys. Courtesy Showcase.

In the show’s best gag, Julian takes matters into his own hands, enlisting Corey and Trevor to help him rip off Cyrus’s hash. He makes his move in broad daylight and so stretches a ski mask over his head. Of course, it’d be easier to conceal an approaching rhinoceros than disguise Julian, a mountain of muscles in a stretched taut black T-shirt. Especially since the alleged brains of TPB comes with a permanent cowbell — a giant highball of tinkling rum 'n' Coke on the rocks.

Rick Moranis observed that one reason SCTV worked was that everybody instantly understood and appreciated John Candy’s characters. True enough. And one of the reasons we enjoy the Trailer Park Boys is that, just looking at them, we recognize a trio of lugs we gratefully skipped past in high school.

With his Dirty Harry pompadour and cauliflower ear for the English language, Ricky is the class clown everybody laughed at outside punching range. In this season’s first episode he responds to a sob story from Mr. Leahy by grabbing his throat and complaining the old man is trying to trick them by “playing a big song on the Magdalene.”

Julian is the Fonz from Happy Days on steroids. But it is Bubbles, perpetually caring and so always worried, his eyes swimming behind inch-thick glasses, who is the heart and soul of the series. “I don’t want to sound f---ed, but I love you guys,” he announces out of nowhere in the April 17 show.

Bubbles provides the Trailer Park Boys with a social conscience and an endless supply of stolen shopping carts and stray kittens. Forever concerned, virtually powerless, he is the ceremonial governor general of Sunnyvale Trailer Park.

The return of the most Canadian of Canadian sitcoms is indeed a cause for national celebration. Bake up some chicken fingers. Snap open a brown buddy. The boys are back in town.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.