Comedy Show Host Finds Plenty To Rant About
TORONTO (CP), April 28, 1998
By Kim Covert
There are probably worse ways to spend an April afternoon than sitting on a sunny patio with a star of one of Canada’s hottest comedy shows, having a coffee and frequently being reduced to fits of giggles. Rick Mercer says he saves his rants for his alter ego, newsman J.B. Dixon on the CBC program This Hour Has 22 Minutes. He’s compiled the rants into a book called Streeters (Doubleday Canada, $19.95) and came to town as part of a promotional tour.
But given the right comedic fodder, Mercer gives a good idea of how the rants might start. For instance, he pokes fun at Bloc Quebecois MP Stephan Tremblay, who took his chair out of the House of Commons last week and held a news conference featuring the chair back in his riding.
First Tremblay said the chair was a symbol of the individual backbencher of Parliament’s inability to effect change, Mercer said. “And I thought wow, what a rude awakening that must be for you,” Mercer laughed.
“But then he said it was a symbol representing the gap between the rich and the poor in Canada. And there is a gap – rich people are rich, poor people are poor, by definition there’s a gap – but I don’t know how his chair fits into it. ‘Come in, pull up a symbol that represents the gap between the rich and the poor, take a load off,’” he called. “And you know they’re up there now bolting them down. And that will cost about $9 million.”
Mercer has been doing the rants on the show since it began in 1992, but he’d been doing his political commentary “streeters,” as he calls them, long before that, first for radio and then for the CBC program Midday. “I always had it in the back of my mind that I might put them in a book some day,” says Mercer. “It was nothing I really concentrated on until this year, when there was enough of them. And then also we would get requests for streeters – after every show a few people would usually want the script of the streeters. So I had a kind of sneaking suspicion some people might like to have them.”
The 90-second rants, shot in black and white, feature Mercer pacing around various locations in Halifax, where the show is shot – usually on the waterfront – declaiming on some topic that’s in the news that week, like the Ontario teachers’ strike, or British Columbia threatening to separate. “Sometimes you sense a general feeling out there, like, say, with the Bank of Montreal ads. They’re just out there and you think, boy, that ad is really pissing me off. Am I the only one? And you do the streeter and you hope to get the response that you want and with that one we did.”
This Hour Has 22 Minutes had a lot of fun with the Bank of Montreal’s “Can a bank change?” ads that featured people holding up signs, what Mercer in his rant calls “one of the most bizarre and irritating ad campaigns in the history of television.” “For some reason, lost on me, it makes sense for a bank too promote itself by showing us endless pictures of people that a bank wouldn’t cross the road to spit on, let alone lend money to,” Mercer writes.
One of the show’s more popular features is the frequent ambushes of politicians. So, turnabout being fair play, NDP leader Alexa McDonough arrived at Mercer’s book signing in Ottawa, showing up with three television cameras and complaining Streeters wasn’t worth $19.95. At least one media report suggested Mercer didn’t take the disruption very well.
“People asked me, did you know she was going to show up? I said no, it was an ambush. So people say ‘Mercer complains he was ambushed,’” he said. “But I mean that in the highest form of sincerity. If you’ve been spending five years attacking the NDP on a weekly basis, you can’t really say ‘no fair!’ Now if anyone asks me, I say yes, I cried like a girl for a week. The hotel doesn’t know what to think. He’s just up there crying.”