'Make me laugh': The North of North co-creators try to figure out the 'Inuit sense of humour'
Co-creators of new comedy talk about the realness at the show’s core
The premise for North of North, a new comedy series set in the fictional village of Ice Cove, Nunavut, came in part from a lot of real, often serious conversations.
In North of North, Anna Lambe — from Trickster and True Detective — plays Siaja, a young mother and self-described "modern Inuk woman." Siaja finds herself suddenly rebooting her life after a literal and figurative falling out (of a boat) with her high-school-sweetheart-turned-husband, Ting, who is Ice Cove's "golden boy." (Ting is played with what can only be described as brilliant himbo vacuousness by Kelly William.)
The show's co-creator, veteran Iqaluit-based Inuk filmmaker Stacey Aglok MacDonald, says that the idea of a young mother questioning what it means to be an Inuk woman is the sort of thing she sees women around her doing all the time.
"There's often things that we notice with the girls that we hang out with," she says. "There's this incredible drive to make our community better, while struggling in our own personal lives. And that's often [about] trying to find the balance between being an Inuk woman — 'Can you sew? Can you speak the language?' — and a real deep need to fulfill that, but also, you know, dreams about travelling or having a career, and how can we have both?"
She and co-creator Alethea Arnaquq-Baril came to the idea of North of North after working together on the feature film The Grizzlies, a very different project, also set in Nunavut. The Grizzlies is about a troubled Inuit community that finds healing through lacrosse.
Arnaquq-Baril — who's best known for the documentary Angry Inuk, an Inuk perspective on the seal hunt — was initially a bit hesitant to try her hand at comedy.
"Comedy is very, very hard to do well … When you try to be funny and you're not, it's embarrassing," she says.
Still, after eight years spent making The Grizzlies — a film that is ultimately uplifting, but also very heavy at times — the pair were ready to do something a little lighter.
"[We] wanted to do something joyful. Something that regenerates our spirits and kind of fills up our reserves to keep working in this business," says Aglok MacDonald.
Unlike her co-creator, Aglok MacDonald isn't new to comedy. She spent seven years working on Qanurli?, an Inuktitut-language comedy about a group of friends trying to create their own Inuktitut-language comedy. Still, she agrees with Arnaquq-Baril that the genre is challenging.
"Everybody has different senses of humor," she says. "Everybody's unique in that way. So finding a comedy tone that works for the masses is difficult. And I think one of the ways that we approached comedy in our show was we always wanted to feel real ridiculous and out there, but real."
One of the ways they did that, she says, was to write the comedy from "a character perspective," meaning that each character comes with their own sense of humour — from dry sarcasm to broad and raunchy to unintentionally funny.
Arnaquq-Baril says the duo have spent a lot of time trying to figure out if there's such a thing as an Inuit sense of humour, and while everyone is different, she thinks they've found some common threads.
"Recently, one of the things we figured out is that we're not above lowbrow humor," she says. "It doesn't mean it's the only humor, but like, people who consider themselves intelligent or sophisticated don't feel like lowbrow humor is beneath them … There are really respected, wise elders who will crack body jokes … In our communities, like, [if] you see someone you haven't seen in a while, and they know you like to laugh, they'll just be like, 'Hey, tell me funny story. You, make me laugh.' It is not uncommon for someone to just walk up to you and say that. 'I'm in the mood to laugh, make me laugh. I don't care if it's cheap humor, just give me something.'"
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