Justin Trudeau: Just Another Quantum Politician?
Like many other world leaders, PM shows how to be true and false at the same time.
Cartoon by Greg Perry.
Never mind that it was probably a setup, with a reporter primed to ask Justin Trudeau about a topic he’d just been intensively briefed on. If nothing else, it showed the former drama teacher is a quick study who doesn’t need to read his talking points off a sheet of paper like most of our parliamentary clods.
The online media went into a predictable tizzy: Not only cute, not only a boxing punchmeister, not only a good feminist husband and dad with six-pack abs and a cool tattoo, but he also does standup comedy about quantum computing.
Trudeau’s not the first Canadian to startle audiences with such wit and fluency. Mark Rowswell, a tall white guy, went to China to improve his Chinese. He got so good that he turned up on Chinese TV in 1988 as “Dashan,” doing a comedy shtick called crosstalk, swapping rapid-fire gags and puns with a native Chinese speaker.
Half a billion Chinese TV-watchers fell out of their chairs laughing — not because he was bad, but because he was really good. If anything, he spoke better putonghua — common speech — than they did. Rowswell became an instant star and made a tidy fortune appearing on TV and opening new shopping malls. China fell in love with him because unlike most westerners, he’d taken the trouble to listen to and learn their language and speak it like one of them.
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