"Piss off Brits," concludes a furious email typical of the Guardian's Vancouver Olympics mailbag, "and stop producing so many ugly women."
"I am deeply disappointed at the tone of this article," fumes a response to my colleague
Martin Kelner's intentionally amusing article about the unintentionally amusing opening ceremony, "and the tone of many Brits or expat Brits enjoying the hospitality of our country." To which the only appropriate reply is: do lighten up, Canada!
Sorry for coming over all capital letters about it, but Olympic hosts are SUPPOSED to be teased. You basically pay billions of dollars for the world to laugh at you. Deal with it.
It's not like the merriment gets in the way of the sport. It's the après-sport, if you will something that happens around the edges, but in its way as much a part of every Games fortnight as the competition itself. Treating anything reverently bar the sport is creepy. Even the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, appeared to tacitly understand that the Games were war by other means, for all their facile message of world peace.
This is why Australian comedians Roy and HG scored such a hit with their nightly TV show during the Sydney Games, and it is why Vancouver is made for the latest stunt from the brilliant Steven Colbert, whose gift for debunking sacred cultural events is becoming second to none.
When a key US sponsor went bust the Colbert Report star got his viewers to raise $300,000 of donations to take their place, and it is in this guise as a faux right-wing talkshow host who just happens to be funding the US speed skating team that he arrived in Vancouver this week. The artist behind the iconic Obama poster has created an image of Colbert holding a torch astride a bald eagle, which fans are being encouraged to post "all over Vancouver".
"Vancouver 2010," reads the slogan. "Defeat the world!"
I suspect Canadians will get the joke, because they are by and large a nation of good sports much better than the Americans, of course, but then who isn't? Apart from the Chinese and stuff.
Which brings us to another of the most magical things about the Olympics. For 16 days every two years you get a free pass to joke about questions of national character without feeling like your least reconstructed relative. And so it is that when you hear that Switzerland haven't won gold in any Alpine event since Calgary Calgary! 1988! you are perfectly within your rights to shriek: "Jesus, Switzerland buck up. Alpine events are what you DO. Hello? Are you failing to medal in cuckoo-clock competitions as well? Did you accidentally publish every murderous dictator's banking details online?"
So it is, too, that news the Olympic flag would be borne into the stadium last Friday by eight famous Canadians was the cue for the rest of the world to chortle: "Wait, there are eight famous Canadians? Are they exhuming people?"
The Brits are particularly entitled to laugh, because in two years the rest of the world will be laughing at us and good on them. Please, did you see our eight‑minute spot in the Beijing closing ceremony? Find me any Brit who could contain their mirth at that and you will be holding a copy of the Daily Mail. It used the adjective "embarrassing". Even London's mayor was giggling. So let them lacerate us in 2012. We'll revel in the delicious shame.
Delete as you find applicable, but the fact is we are too irreverent/self-loathing/crap at stuff/ to take ourselves seriously. And anyway, hosting the Olympics means you paid for this stuff. It's your party and you can ridicule it if you want to.
Come 2012, London's bigwigs will be trying desperately to present a stage‑managed image of us to the world. Inevitably they will fail in various ways mostly in a manner that will amuse us serfs because hosting the Olympics is like going inside the Big Brother house. You might be able to put up a front for a day or two, but you can't hide your true nature for long. Blood will out.
So any Canadians upset by people giggling at their malfunctioning ice penises or bad weather need simply wait for what is going around to come around. And make no mistake: no one will be cheerily undermining London 2012 more than the British themselves. It's what we do. To co-opt the most apposite cliché, were it an Olympic sport, we would win gold every time.
