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51 out of 64 people found the following comment useful :-
They're Old and Need to Retire!, 26 March 2006
1/10
Author: jason_coolidge3000 from United Kingdom

Who watches Air Farce???????

I don't know if Royal Canadian Air Farce was ever funny. Maybe it was in 1937 when it first went on the radio.

Royal Canadian Air Farce is one of the worst shows I've seen on TV though. They should retire and I wonder why didn't they retire twenty years ago?

Popcultured with Elvira Kurt, Royal Canadian Air Farce, Mike Bullard are my picks for three worst shows of all time made in Canada, they are all so bad!

It's like CBC with Beachcombers it was on for like twenty years! Nobody I know watches Air Farce so why is it still on my TV?

These people are 100 years old and they all should have retired in 1976.

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45 out of 54 people found the following comment useful :-
Beating a dead horse, 23 September 2003
Author: Mark (o20230@hotmail.com) from Toronto, Canada

One of the worst shows on Canadian television. The jokes are lame, the performers are wooden and untalented. Good political humour (or humour in general) explores unchartered oceans, this one wades in stagnant waste water. I can't believe so many Canadians like this show, it's time to retire it and it's crew.

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43 out of 54 people found the following comment useful :-
It boggles my mind how anyone can find this funny..., 24 November 2004
Author: Ric17 from Eastern Passage, NS

I have tried several times to find some amusement in this program, but I cannot. The jokes are not funny and to me at least seem to be written by some of the worst writers in the history of comedy. This is beyond bland humour, and if this is what other Canadians find funny, then we have some serious character issue problems.

It's not smart humour by any means and each time I happen to "flick" by the show (and watch several seconds in the hope I maybe wrong) I ask myself how anyone can find this funny? I really did try giving this a chance but it is well beyond me.

Anyone trying to catch some great Canadian comedy check out "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" or even better yet one of Canada's best new shows in "Corner Gas".

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30 out of 32 people found the following comment useful :-
Comedy that past its 'Best Before' date in 1981...., 26 October 2006
Author: Jay Salden from Canada

Royal Canadian Air Farce is horribly bad television.

Please don't get me wrong, I know that there was a time when they were apparently comedy icons in Canada and their radio show was listened to by thousands of Canadians from coast to coast and they did popular live shows that my grandparents and their friends honestly enjoyed (yes I said grandparents and I am 40!). I'm sure they deserve appreciation for a job well done, but there comes a time when it's time to hang up the skates and gracefully step aside before it just get embarrassing, and I'm afraid that date may have already passed them by.

I don't find them funny at all. The jokes are terrible and worst of all they keep repeating the same characters and sketches over and over! Air Farce belongs in a museum, not on TV.

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31 out of 38 people found the following comment useful :-
The W.O.R.S.T.!, 21 October 2006
1/10
Author: bobsmith6040 from Canada

Royal Canadian Air Farce should have retired in the 1950s.

I have never met anybody who says they watch this show, so I'm assuming the only people who do are 100 year old brain dead people who live in old folks homes where the TV has to be set to CBC 24 hours a day because it is the only channel they can get.

Maybe they used to be funny back in the days when families would sit around their radio sets after dinner with grannie and pappy, but they sure aren't now. Take for example their chicken cannon. Every show they put up a picture of a politician who is in the news that week, load up a compressed-air powered 'chicken cannon' and shoot the picture with hilarious 'ammunition', like for example they might put BALONEY in the chicken cannon 'because this guy is full of BALONEY!' They try not to laugh at their own hilarious jokes and shoot the picture. And it's called the chicken cannon because it's got a funny cartoon of a chicken drawn on it! They also do impressions of all the country's big politicians. They actually can't really do impressions though, they just put on different glasses and a wig and then say "hello I'm so-and-so"...

They have Luba Goy who impersonates every female character on the show which is so terrible it's not even funny because she's like 3 feet tall and 400 pounds and 75 years old so watching her pretend to be people half her age is just sad.

The writing is the worst, none of their sketches even make sense. They just come up with lame jokes based on the week's news and then have random characters to talk about it. Like they'll have a news reporter talk about the week's top news even and interview three people, the girl from the mattress commercial, the prime minister and george strombolopoulos... what? wtf? Yeah they also have a cabbie who talks about random news events for no reason at all and his catch phrase is "no vie-sa you pay cash!" and he is on like every week even though it wasn't even funny the first time. "Hey did you know that they are cutting the GST? That's weird, usually politicians want to take MORE money! No VIE-SA you pay cash! And hey how about those Maple Leafs? They lost again this week... they lose so much they shouldn't even bother showing up for the games! No vie-sa you pay cash! And Stephen Harper has no personality, he's like a robot! No vie-sa you pay cash!" One of the new cast members does an impersonation of Stephen Harper that belongs in a grade four play. You see, prime minister Harper doesn't have much of a personality, so they play him like he's a robot! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! No wonder this show is still on the air! And they do a news report based in Newfoundland so they talk about the news but they keep talking about fish too, because people in Newfoundland go fishing a lot! And they wear fisherman's rain slickers, HAHAHAHAHAHHAA!!!!! CBC please put a fork in this stupid show because pretty soon the 100 year olds who watch it because they don't have the ability to change the channel are going to die and then you won't have anybody watching Canada's national channel at all. How can you blame us for watching other channels when you keep crap like Royal Canadian Air Farce on TV for like 20 years? Get with it!!!!!

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22 out of 23 people found the following comment useful :-
It embarrasses me that this is a major Canadian show, 30 December 2006
Author: (cvmedia@gmail.com) from Canada

Royal Canadian Air Farce is one of those comedy shows where you tune in, sit there, waiting to laugh... but you don't. The show never gets into anything story-wise by design, because it's a sketch show, so you're left trying to get a cheap laugh out of the (usually political) premises of the sketches. Problem is, they're not good.

According to Wikipedia, the comedy group started off in 1970 as 'The Jest Society', a play on Pierre Trudeau's goal of a 'Just Society'. Kind of a lame title. This tactic of taking a letter and changing it was repeated when the 'Jest Society' changed their name to the Royal Canadian Air Farce. When the current show started in 1993, the crew had Jean Chretien and multiple other targets of Canadian politics to satirize, and ample material in Canadian culture (like those silly Canadian Tire commercials). But even then, the sketches didn't move past a simple caricature of Chretien's accent, or any other one-dimensional premise.

I specifically remember a sketch about the 'War on Christmas' - and the premise being a guy was reading a Christmas story by a fireplace. What's the joke? Every time the word Christmas should come up, he says 'holiday' instead. And the sketch continues like this for about 7 or 8 minutes. Somewhere along the way, somebody should have said, "Guys - don't you think we should do something more? Make something happen? Have at least some kind of a story, at least?" I guess that didn't ever happen. or maybe it did, and they fired the guy who said it.

Sometimes I have relatives from outside Canada ask me what good Canadian TV shows there are, this show (plus the Mike Bullard show) always comes to mind. It makes me sad that this is such a poorly made show, and yet it's financed and probably shot on HDCAM and viewed by millions (funny considering Canada's population is only 33 million, give or take).

I know it's probably schadenfreudenic (I think that's right) for me to take so much pleasure hating this show. Maybe it wasn't always that bad, but it's just not funny at all. Anyway, to sum up: Don't watch it.

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24 out of 27 people found the following comment useful :-
Comedy for Geriatrics, 8 December 2006
Author: bobbymalonetherobot from Canada

The jokes on Air Farce probably were never funny but if they ever were it was back in World War Two.

They have a chicken cannon. They put garbage in the cannon and then shoot it at pictures of politicians.

It's like watching half an hour of a nightmare where you're stuck in the audience of a community theatre show at an old folks home where nobody is allowed to walk out.

It's just painful.

They do impersonations where they put on a wig and then say for example "Hi I'm Bob Rae" but then they just use their own voice. That's not an impersonation, it's just a confused senior citizen wearing a wacky wig telling jokes that for some reason they think might be funny to somebody else.

What is CBC thinking? The people writing the jokes for CBC must be world war veterans who think that wacky wigs and puns are the peak of comedy, maybe in ten years they'll start writing the latest craziest kind of comedy, knock knock jokes!

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17 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
Embarrassingly bad!, 14 February 2007
Author: misssallyberg from Canada

As a Canadian I am ashamed of this show.

I can't believe after so many years it is still on and doing the same lame jokes. I don't dislike them as people I just feel embarrassed for them when I see them on TV doing such pathetic jokes.

Bringing in the new cast member hasn't helped because they are just as bad as the old ones. Jessica Holmes is just as bad as when she was on The Holmes Show on CTV, I don't understand how she got another chance as a TV star. She always did impersonations of Celine Dione and Liza Minelli that were so irritating! But that is the kind of thing Air Farce is about so I'm not that surprised.

I know some people must like Air Farce because it is still on but I honestly don't understand it and don't know anybody who says they do like and watch Air Farce or maybe they just don't want to admit it.

I think the only thing worse than Air Farce are reruns of Air Farce where the topics are so out of date we don't even know what the jokes are referring to anyway.

1/10, I hope it goes away soon.

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15 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Suffered the SNL fate, 2 April 2007
Author: AdnanZ from thecinemajournal.blogspot.com

While the early episodes (in particular the first 3 years) were absolutely hilarious and thoroughly enjoyable, "Air Farce" has been on a downward spiral for about 6 years now. It just isn't funny anymore. All the jokes are recycled and unfunny, and the cast is boring. The writing just isn't good anymore and they haven't introduced a decent character actor since Colin Mochrie as 'Queer Guy for Al Qaeda Guy'. All "Air Farce" does nowadays is rehash old jokes and predictably pick on whoever is in office wherever in Canada by commenting on their physical appearance etc.

For solid, funny social/political commentary, see "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" or "The Rick Mercer Report". Both are still hilarious and feature a lot more talent than "Air Farce". How this show got to 300 episodes is beyond my comprehension.

Letter Grade: F

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11 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Horrible Writing, 8 July 2007
Author: clevelandrockie from United States

I understand most people hate this show and it is terrible but everyone seems to be blaming the cast. How about the writing? I assume they don't write their own jokes like on most TV shows. The writing is so horrible and stale, they are doing the same jokes they did in 1993 since the first season of Air Farce. This show used to be good but now it's just painfully awful, I feel bad for these people who have to go on TV and read such horrible jokes. But I think if they got new writers the show might still turn around and be funny. I'm not too optimistic about that though. Royal Canadian Air Farce is just sad and disappointing, I like new cast member Alan Park though, he is funny.

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