How About That Thing?

Letterkenny has been around since the early 2010s. I must confess, I didn’t discover it until about 2021 or so. But once I discovered it, I became a pretty huge fan of it. In fact, I found myself wondering what took me so long to give it the ol’ college try, other than the fact I didn’t really have the money for a Hulu account until about 2020 or so.

Then I got to season 5. The season where the hockey players finally exited the limbo that was the gym, and began coaching The Letterkenny Shamrockettes. The season where the skids discovered the unholy majesty of the darkweb. The season where the hicks… Um… Also did stuff. All be it on a more episodic basis. And, to my utter disgust, it was the season that gave us Hard Right Jay.

Hard Right Jay was basically the human embodiment of things like Q Anon, OAN, The Proud Boys, and anything else that got stuffed under the umbrella of alt right. Except we call it the HARD right in Letterkenny, because everything is either hard or soft.

Not going to lie, the moment I saw this walking talking hack comedian punchline made flesh show up on my screen, and spout all the usual “hard right” bullshit about being an alpha, fighting the libtards, and so on, I began to suspect that this was the point Letterkenny was going to jump the shark.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: for all the shit I’ve talked on here about the modern culture being delicate little flowers who’d cancel you for putting something like Steel Panther or The Man Show out into the zeitgeist, that doesn’t mean I support the right. Honestly, the closest thing to a political identity I have is referring to myself as a “greenertarian”, though mostly as a joke.

More than anything, I’ve just really grown to hate it when people feel like they have to talk politics. Especially around the first Trump presidency, when literally everybody had to make Donald Trump the allegory for undisputed evil, or had to make all the same tired jokes about his baby hands, or use Trump slogans or Trump like qualities on villain characters like giving someone Trump hair or Trump manorisms when they talk… Basically, the only thing I hate more than Donald Trump HIMSELF are all the hacks who make fun of him. Every time I hear about a remake, or a reboot, one of the items on my bingo card is “obvious Trump allegory”.

And since we’re about a couple months deep into a second Trump presidency, I suspect this trend of tired, played out, hack comedy is only going to get worse before it gets any better. But that’s an article for a different day.

When I saw Hard Right Jay show up on camera, I feared the worst. At first, he was only around for one scene. Basically, it was there to serve as an example of the fringe lunatics you might encounter when you surf the darkweb.

Then, the very next episode, he became the focus. For AN ENTIRE EPISODE, we followed this dead horse of a parody around Letterkenny as he tried to recruit people to The Hard Right, and convince them to help him protest the renaming of The Letterkenny Chiefs. Only to find that the people who owned The Letterkenny Chiefs were actually first nation, and they wanted to change the name to something else because they thought calling themselves The Chiefs was lame. It’s… Not the worst punchline ever. Hell, when they revealed who owned the team, I got a bit of a chuckle. But even then, one entire episode of having to follow this guy around was too much.

I found myself thanking god at the end of it all that Hard Right Jay was only in two episodes. Well, technically three episodes, assuming the Christmas special counts. I usually skip Christmas specials as a whole, though, so I don’t usually count it. Regardless, thank god this guy was only on two episodes.

If this guy had been a regular character in Letterkenny from that point onward, I probably would’ve dropped this series right then and there. Instead, I just skip the episode he’s in altogether. Trust me, you aren’t missing much. The Letterkenny Chiefs rename to The Letterkenny Roughriders, and have to take on another team called The Roughriders to see who takes on a THIRD team called The Roughriders in the championship. The Skids go back to their basement and do drugs. Jonesy and Reilly continue to be in over their head as they try to figure out how to get The Letterkenny Shamrockettes to cooperate and win a threepeat. That’s pretty much it as far as plot goes, outside twenty minutes of Hard Right Jay spitting out all the usual alt. right jargon like that all by itself counts as a punchline.

But maybe I’m in the minority. Maybe everybody else thinks this character was pure brilliance, and I’m just a poopy pants. All I know is that, in my opinion, you can afford to skip this episode.