- What the hell is Canadian food?

- What is it about Canada that creates so many funny people?

- How do you deal with that f-----g weather?

Those are but a few of the pressing questions posed in Being Canadian, a delightful new documentary from filmmaker Rob Cohen.

Being Canadian is a featured film at this year's Hot Docs festival and is available on demand all over the country.

Cohen, who is better known as an Emmy Award winning writer on such series as The Ben Stiller Show, The Simpsons, The Wonder Years and American Dad! undertook the film as a labour of love. He put it together over seven years.

The entertaining documentary plays a bit like an extended inside joke; part social study, part comedy and part travelogue, the movie enlists the help of Canadian celebrities — Alex Trebek, Rush, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Seth Rogen, Martin Short, Jason Priestley, Cobie Smulders, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner and many others — to answer important questions about this country.

The movie also includes commentary from American stars (such as Ben Stiller and Kathy Griffin) and regular folks from all over the place. In his opinion, says Cohen, "Those people are all a little jealous of Canadians."

A Calgary native, Cohen has lived in Los Angeles for many years and he's married to an American. (His wife is Jill Leiderman, executive producer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!) Still, he regards himself as a tried and true Canuck.

He says the experience of being a Canadian in the United States, "Is kind of a pleasant secret."

The filmmaker drove coast to coast making Being Canadian, and was surprised — in a good way — by this country and its people at every turn. His general affection for Canada began in his hometown of Calgary, which he obviously loves.

"It's just the coolest town when you're a kid. It’s a cowboy town, but you've got skiing and scenery. I honestly love it. Banff to me is the best place in the world. It's the coolest town and Calgary is the best city — rivers and mountains and cowboys and some big oil personalities."

For all his writer/director/producer credits (he's co-executive producer of The Big Bang Theory and directs TV shows and commercials) Cohen's biggest claim to fame may be that he inspired the character Milhouse Van Houten on The Simpsons, where his brother, Joel Cohen, is a writer and producer.

A self-described 'super-nerd', Cohen says he and his brother were attracted to TV comedies like Monty Python and The Two Ronnies, "But neither of us had aspirations of comedy or show business. We both kind of fluked into our careers.

"Through weird circumstances we both ended up working in this field."

After high school, Cohen went to Los Angeles to visit a cousin. And never left.

He worked at odd jobs — shoe salesman, security guard, food delivery.

"One of the guys I delivered deli to was a TV producer, and he told me if I ever wanted to leave the glamorous world of pastrami carrying to call him," says Cohen. "So I did, and he got me a job as a production assistant on the Tracey Ullman Show."

Cohen learned the business by osmosis. He says, with typical Canadian self-deprecation, that he only got into writing comedy because he wanted to help the writers on the show as they laboured long into the night, trying to come up with jokes. As a lowly production assistant, Cohen couldn't leave until they did, and so he started feeding the writers material — hoping to get home earlier.

"I'd start to slip them jokes. The hope was that they'd leave," he says, "not that I'd get into comedy. They were very kind to buy an idea of mine for a sketch, and I got an agent. There was no master plan."

He adds, "I am genuinely appreciative of the weird series of flukes that led me to this."

The Hot Docs film festival continues in Toronto through May 3.

Twitter: @LizBraunSun

liz.braun@sunmedia.ca