By David Topping

At first it all seemed simple: Billy Bob Thornton, famous actor, goes on CBC’s Q last Wednesday and is a total dick to the show’s host, Jian Ghomeshi, for hinting at Thornton’s Hollywood fame rather than his barely known band, the Boxmasters. And that’s how it played out, for a while, landing on Perez Hilton, Gawker, the Star, BlogTO, the Canadian Press, Digg, etc., etc., etc.
But after a while, the story started to say less and less about Thornton’s bizarre hypersensitivity than it did Canadians’.

A bit over ten minutes into the video, as the tense air was finally clearing, an obviously uncomfortable Ghomeshi asked a stewing Thornton if “different audiences react to you in different ways,” a question based on how “eclectic” the Boxmasters’ music was and that tourmate Willy Nelson’s audience, Ghomeshi suggested, was less than eclectic.

Pictured: Billy Bob Thornton not acting. Photo by blmurch.

Thornton: “Well, the good news is that Willy’s audience is pretty eclectic, you know. He has everything from bikers, to, you know, old people to young people, so somewhere in there, you find, you know, an audience, or at least we do in Europe and the United States. Uh, Canadian audiences seem to be very reserved.”
Ghomeshi: “Yeah?”
Thornton: “Yeah.”
Ghomeshi: “We’ve heard that before.”
Thornton: “You know, we tend to play places where people throw things at each other, and, uh, here they just sort of sit there.”
(Ghomeshi laughs.)
Thornton: “And it doesn’t matter what you say to them.”
Ghomeshi: “Even when you’re playing,..but you’re playing theatres as well, right?”"
Thornton: “Some are theatres, some are, like, stadiums, or whatever you want to call it. But uh…it’s very, um, well, very, um, well—it’s mashed potatoes with no gravy, you know what I’m saying?”
Ghomeshi: “We got some gravy up here as well.”
Thornton: “Yeah, you do actually, on a lot of things.”
(Ghomeshi and Thornton both chuckle.)
And somehow that slowly became the big story. Instead of douchebag actor/musician is total prick to well-meaning interviewer, it got reframed as asshole American is total prick to well-meaning, earnest Canadian and—God help us—our concert audiences.
The defensiveness was already omnipresent in the comments of every outlet that covered the original story (especially Q‘s own blog), but in seemingly every major story thereafter—especially after Thornton played Massey Hall, in spite of his explanation that “I love the country, I love the people,” and his calling Ghomeshi an “asshole,” leaving little doubt as to who he was really pissed at—the “mashed potatoes with no gravy” comment was the fulcrum for every outlet’s coverage of the interview. It only got worse after the Boxmasters dropped out of the rest of Nelson’s tour. The comment has already become a cultural touchstone in the worst way—you know a joke is dead when the Star‘s lead into an article is a heavy-handed reference to it that has little to do with the actual story: “Note to Billy Bob Thornton: The Scott Mission has potatoes and gravy. Volunteers piled it on yesterday as about 400 needy people filled the Spadina Ave. shelter for an Easter meal that included roast lamb, soup and hearty vegetables.”
Thing is, Ghomeshi chuckled throughout Thornton’s comments about Canadian audiences because, at least from what we’ve seen, those comments are mostly right; we’ve heard that before, too, and seen it with our own eyes. Torontonian audiences are famously reserved. We tend to not throw things. We do just kinda sit there, especially for countryish bands like the Boxmasters (rather than, say, Daft Punk). The interview between Ghomeshi and Thornton was no microcosm of a larger problem of cultural relations: it was an awkward morning confrontation between a grumpy wannabe rock star and self-described “music historian” and an interviewer who just thought he was giving “context” by mentioning the thing the person was actually famous for. Even if Thornton’s comments weren’t mostly true, his jab at us wouldn’t be worth taking up arms about, just as Red Eye‘s stupid jokes weren’t. Ghomeshi, the real target of Thornton’s anger, seemed to shrug it off just fine, so why has it been so difficult for some of the rest of us? After all, a country without some gravitas or a sense of humour about itself is just like…well, you know.