My Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada

As I mentioned in an earlier post, putting 'Canadian' in front of another word just makes for the funny. Put it in front of 'girlfriend' and you've got a whole set of assumptions – she's probably sweet and bookish, maybe French Canadian or a milk-fed Prairie girl. Oh, and she doesn't exist.

TV Tropes has a great entry on the pop culture phenomenon of the Girlfriend in Canada, the first love of countless American geeks and gay guys, both fictional and real.

Apparently this thinly-veiled tactic was first used by Anthony Michael Hall's character Brian Johnson in The Breakfast Club. He claimed to have a girlfriend in Niagara Falls. Of course, no one believed him, and this tends to be the case (do they even have girls in Canada, anyway?) especially now that the internet has overtaken whatever it is we used for communication up in the Great White North in 1985. Pony Express?

One of my favourite takes on it is this Onion article, 'Canadian Girlfriend Unsubstantiated.' I actually know one of the head writers over there (I swear!), I wonder if he wrote it. A taste:

Ever since September, Woronoff has been telling friends and classmates that he is involved in a long-distance relationship with "Audrey de Trudeau," an alleged Banff, Alberta 17-year-old. According to Woronoff, he and de Trudeau met last July while both were counselors at a band camp in the Boundary Waters region of northern Minnesota near the U.S.-Canadian border.

"We totally fell in love with each other at camp, and when the summer ended, we decided to stay together," Woronoff said. "It's too bad Audrey can't come down and visit me all that often, living so far away and all."

I've also attached one of the best modern examples, the song 'My Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada' from the musical Avenue Q (Which I've seen twice and highly recommend).