"Of course Toronto might as well be Buffalo, because we get each other's TV"
About this Quote
Toronto "might as well be Buffalo" is funny because it’s both an insult and a shrug, delivered with the deadpan logic of someone who knows exactly how petty cultural borders can feel in daily life. Kevin McDonald isn’t arguing geography; he’s dunking on the way mass media flattens identity. The punchline isn’t that the cities are literally interchangeable. It’s that the most intimate marker of “place” in late-20th-century North America often wasn’t history or architecture, but whatever was on TV after dinner.
The line works because it smuggles a real Canadian anxiety into a throwaway comparison. Toronto is a major metropolis with its own institutions, but American cultural gravity has long made Canadian distinctiveness feel like something you have to actively defend, schedule, or subsidize. “We get each other’s TV” turns that anxiety into a banal technicality: the border is less a line on a map than a cable package. That’s the sting. Sovereignty, reduced to reception.
There’s also a sly jab at Toronto’s self-seriousness. If you’re trying to be a world-class city while your cultural diet is shared with Buffalo, the comedy is in the deflation: big ambitions, same channels. McDonald’s intent is not to litigate Canadian inferiority so much as to expose how easily “national culture” can be undercut by convenience, proximity, and the soft power of entertainment. The joke lands because it’s plausible, and because it makes the listener complicit: you can’t argue with it without admitting how much TV quietly tells you who you are.
The line works because it smuggles a real Canadian anxiety into a throwaway comparison. Toronto is a major metropolis with its own institutions, but American cultural gravity has long made Canadian distinctiveness feel like something you have to actively defend, schedule, or subsidize. “We get each other’s TV” turns that anxiety into a banal technicality: the border is less a line on a map than a cable package. That’s the sting. Sovereignty, reduced to reception.
There’s also a sly jab at Toronto’s self-seriousness. If you’re trying to be a world-class city while your cultural diet is shared with Buffalo, the comedy is in the deflation: big ambitions, same channels. McDonald’s intent is not to litigate Canadian inferiority so much as to expose how easily “national culture” can be undercut by convenience, proximity, and the soft power of entertainment. The joke lands because it’s plausible, and because it makes the listener complicit: you can’t argue with it without admitting how much TV quietly tells you who you are.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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