Canada is no longer lending the United States its best celebrities. At one point, its most famous cultural ex-pats were actors like Ryan Gosling, Sandra Oh, Michael J. Fox, and Keanu Reeves or musicians like Drake, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and the members of bands like Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, and Wolf Parade. More recently, though, Canada’s most notable exports have been dominated by people like Gavin McInnes and Jordan Peterson, Lauren Southern and Stephan Molyneux, and, the latest celebrity to garner international attention, the guy who tweeted about not realizing he was using dog shampoo for several months.
The person in question is Jonathan Kay, a well known figure in Canadian media whose current job is senior editor of the right-wing reactionary rag Quillette. Unable to resist needlessly posting the transcendent self own that he’s been washing his hair “for the last few months” with dog shampoo—he assumes “this is common” because of the “4-pt typeface” labelling it for pets next to the photo of a happy dog—Kay found himself the butt of many internet jokes.
Rather than ignore the mockery, Kay took the “tweeting through it” approach—a risky move that almost always, as it did here, makes the initial embarrassment worse. In this case, it led fellow Canadian Seth Rogen to tweet a reply to Kay that reads: “you’re stupid.”
When Kay tried to turn the insult into another joke, Rogen replied that he wasn’t “trolling” Kay, adding, for good measure, “This was objectively stupid.”
Undaunted, Kay’s continued in a desperate attempt to salvage his internet reputation by tweeting more and more about it, changing his profile picture to a photo of the dog shampoo’s dog, and basically just doing everything possible to ensure that he will forever be known as “the guy who washed his hair with dog shampoo.”
Kay’s mom, also a very well known Canadian media figure, even tried to help her son, making everything worse in the process. And then last night, to ensure that even those without Twitter would know exactly how goofy this all is, Kay appeared on Fox News to cement his reputation.
To nobody’s surprise, the segment, including its chyron “Adult Journalist’s Mom Defends Him From Seth Rogen,” has given fresh attention to the fact that Jonathan Kay will forever be known across the world as “the dog shampoo guy.”
We’d like to think this is the end of the whole thing, but, having seen how things have gone so far, a few weeks from now will probably see Kay appearing in a dog shampoo ad, helping Arm & Hammer in a bid to advertise its products as “human-friendly.”
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