Two Strangers Realised They Were Both Quoting the Same Cancelled CBC Show. They've Been Married Six Years.

Karim grew up in Mississauga. Joelle grew up in St. John's. They had nothing in common except a CBC syndication schedule from 2004 to 2009. This turned out to be enough.

On the date, Karim had given up. The conversation was polite and dying. Joelle had ordered a second drink she didn't want, and was preparing the ‘early morning tomorrow’ exit. Then their server, distracted, brought the wrong appetizer. Karim looked at the plate, sighed, and muttered, ‘…produce stand has produce in it’. Joelle blinked. Then she laughed in a way that scared their server.

She said the next line. He said the line after. They went through an entire scene from a Corner Gas episode that aired on November 1, 2004. They had both seen it on its original broadcast, twenty years apart in different time zones, and both had — independently, without ever knowing the other existed — internalised it deeply enough to recite it cold.

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They stayed at the pub until last call. They moved to a 24-hour diner. They quoted Corner Gas, then Trailer Park Boys, then a single Beachcombers reference from Karim that Joelle had to look up. By 4am Joelle had a list on her phone of every Canadian show they both still quoted. The list was 23 items long. They were both crying laughing by item 19.

They got married in 2019. The ceremony included a single Corner Gas reference in the vows — Karim said he'd love her ‘like a dog loves a slipper’. The officiant, who is Joelle's aunt, paused, looked at the audience, and asked, with genuine concern, if anyone wanted to leave. Half the room laughed. The other half — the non-Canadians — looked deeply confused. Karim's brother-in-law from Houston later said the wedding was ‘the most foreign experience of his life’.

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Their dog Davis is named for the character. Their wifi password is a Trailer Park Boys quote we are not going to print here. Their children — twins, now three — know that Sunday morning is for cartoons, but Sunday afternoon is for Corner Gas reruns, which they don't understand and yet now also quote. Karim has filmed his daughter, age three, saying ‘Ah, geez, Brent’ in the bathtub. The video is 11 seconds long. He has watched it 800 times.

We asked Karim and Joelle for their actual list. They sent us 23 shows. The top five, in order of household quote-frequency: Corner Gas, Trailer Park Boys, Letterkenny, Schitt's Creek, and — surprisingly — The Friendly Giant, which Joelle's grandmother used to babysit her with on VHS in the late 1990s.

We posted a version of their list on our Instagram in March. It got 14,000 comments in 36 hours. The most common reply was some variation of ‘oh god, I forgot The Beachcombers existed and now I'm going to spend my night on YouTube’. The second most common reply was ‘my husband and I quote this exact show — should we be worried?’

We told Karim and Joelle about the response. Joelle replied with a single line: ‘Ah, geez. Welcome to the club.’ It is, of course, a Corner Gas quote.