Long before Donald Trump hijacked the term “fake news,” a little known comedy show called This Hour Has 22 Minutes hit the CBC airwaves. About a decade before the satire boom that brought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to prime time south of the border, Canadians had developed a taste for the medium.
22 Minutes founding member Rick Mercer performed comedy from a fake news desk for 25 years before the final episode of his show The Mercer Report aired in April 2018.
“When we created This Hour Has 22 Minutes, no one had seen that type of show before,” says Mercer. “We were ambushing politicians, but we were also editing news footage in a way that had never been done before for a comedy show.”
Their anonymity was soon lost as 22 Minutes went prime time, but Mercer says that there was a very exciting time when people were tuning into the show or catching clips and actually thinking they were watching a newscast.
“I remember a point when we had only been on the air five or six weeks, and the CBC put us on election-night coverage,” says Mercer. “Some people were aghast when we did a conga line around the news desk, chanting, ‘Mulroney is no more.’ People were freaking out, thinking they had cut to a CBC news desk in Halifax and thought they had caught us doing a conga line.”
Mercer says that his sense of humour led him to maintain a professional image while he sat at the show’s desk.
“I always played it straight when sitting at a newsdesk,” says Mercer. “Certainly on 22 Minutes they’ve moved away from that over the years, and that’s fine, but it was always my preference. If someone is tuning in for the first time, I want them to think they’re watching a real news anchor, so there was no mugging or making faces, or any behaviour that you wouldn’t see a regular news anchor exhibit.”
While he was best known for his rants on politics and current events, Mercer says that he also finds physical humour funny.
“Like anyone in comedy, I like to think that I’ve got a sophisticated sense of humour,” says Mercer. “I always loved the fact that the format at the Mercer Report allowed me to do straight-up satire and political commentary, but it also allowed me to do sketches where the entire joke was a guy getting kicked in the stones repeatedly by someone from the tax department. That was the entire joke, but it was funny.”
Mercer has been in the spotlight for 26 years. He’s received the Order of Canada, he’s won Geminis, and he’s published several books, but he felt the time was right to move on and try something he doesn’t do too often: Mercer is part of the Just for Laughs Comedy Night in Canada tour, which features comedians Ivan Decker, Debra DiGiovanni, Ali Hassan, and Sophie Buddle.
“This tour that I’m going on is certainly stretching me because I’m going out on the road with three of the finest standups in Canada,” says Mercer. “That’s not something I’ve done a whole lot of. I did a Just for Laughs tour 15 or 16 years ago. I learned a lot, and I’m expecting the same thing will happen again. It’s certainly challenging and nerve wracking, but I think you have to do those things every now and then. If I wanted to take it easy, I would have done the Mercer Report again this year.”
Just for Laughs Comedy Night in Canada
7 pm and 9:30 pm Saturday, November 16
$63.80, Farquhar Auditorium, UVic
uvic.ca/farquhar