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Inside
the mind of Rick Mercer |
We
speak to the comedian and Canadian icon, in the midst of
the second season of his news satire show, Monday Report |
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PIECE
OF MIND: Mercer talks about the success
of his comedy series 'Monday Report' (Photo:
CBC) |
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BY
ROBERT BALLANTYNE
POSTED NOVEMBER 25, 2004
Two regular-sized
inkjet paper signs announce that you've arrived at the offices of Rick
Mercer's Monday Report. It looks like every other office in the labyrinth-like
Toronto CBC Headquarters. Inside, there's a farm of grey institutional
desks with fabric cubicle walls. Lined around the room are tiny, mostly
square workplaces. Near the end of the hall, to the right, is Rick Mercer's
small and windowless office. You can tell because there's an oversized
paper envelope taped to the door with his name on it.
Right now, Mercer is not in his office and it looks like he never is. His
Spartan home base holds a simple desk with a few accessories and two basic
bookshelves on opposite walls. It looks like a humourless place in which
to produce a comedy show. However, further exploration is put on hold as
Mercer steps out of another office to introduce himself.
Once we shake hands and exchange pleasantries, Mercer takes a few minutes
to pose for a few promotional photographs. He's smaller than you'd think
he'd be, but everyone says that about television celebrities. Other than
that detail, he looks exactly as he does on television: an average-looking
Canadian, with an average build. He has green eyes that are housed over
thick, arched eyebrows. His curly black hair looks unmovable and forever
in place. Today he's wearing a pair of grey dress pants with a black suit
jacket over a navy T-shirt.
After the photo shoot, his expression is serious, but not intimidating.
The chit-chat between celebrity and journalist is civil and efficient,
like a business transaction. He seems wary, like the friendly face of Popjournalism could
at any time turn into an ambush.
It only takes a misplaced pen to crumble that impression.
As we walk into Mercer's office to start the interview, following a covert
effort to find my missing pen or to locate a stray replacement, I sheepishly
admit that I need to borrow a pen.
This act seems to break the ice for Mercer. He sits down behind his desk,
takes off his suit jacket, and turns his burgundy plastic pen organizer
towards me.
"It's the first day back to school and I've got my supplies," he says. "Help
yourself."
Yes, back to school. It's Mercer's first day back to Monday Report since
the first season ended in March. To mark his return to television, he has
a bunch of freshly supplied ballpoint pens, the kind you'd find in cheap
boxes of 10. After selecting a blue pen from his assortment, I can't help
but think that Mercer's surroundings are unbefitting of his stardom. Surely,
the CBC could provide him with a bigger office and fancier furniture -
or at least a wire mesh organizer. But Mercer will have none of that. When
I tell him later about my impression of his office, he laughs it off and
says: "Good offices don't breed good comedy."
He would know. The 35-year-old comedian has yet to experience failure in
his more than 15 years on television. First, there was his eight-year run
with This Hour Has 22 Minutes, then, a four-year run with his entertainment
industry sitcom Made in Canada and now Monday Report has
continued his winning streak. On Monday Report, Mercer starts the
show with a from-the-headlines monologue, followed by a celebrity interview,
then a satiric look at newspaper photos, and later, his trademark rant.
For his celebrity interviews, Mercer has been able to snag high-profile
Canadians week-after-week. On the first show of this season, Mercer scored
a coup by getting journalist Pierre Berton to give tips on how to roll
a joint. This year Mercer has already carved pumpkins with Prime Minister
Paul Martin, shot pool with Justin Trudeau, and went to the Calgary Zoo
with Jann Arden.
His show has been doing remarkably well as a result. In the debut season, Monday
Report drew an average audience of 786,000 viewers. This season, that
number has grown to an average of 850,000 viewers a week.
Mercer is clearly happy with the show's performance. "I was really glad
the show was a success. Even though I work for a public broadcaster, as
a comedy, I'm required to deliver a large audience to survive."
Yet, the show had an inauspicious start. In the first season, viewers in
Ontario and Quebec saw a re-run of 22 Minutes in place of his second
episode. A CBC technician had punched in the wrong computer code and the
switching error lasted three minutes and 10 seconds before it was corrected
- enough time for viewers to miss Mercer's opening monologue.
"You just roll with the punches," Mercer says. "It's funny that they ran
a show that I left three years ago. But I have no control over what happened.
I don't have the phone number to call the guy asleep at the switch."
It was a quite a coincidence that 22 Minutes popped up once again
in Mercer's life. The similarities between Monday Report and his
former show are striking. Both take on current events and have fake news
sets. So why did he leave 22 Minutes in 2001 if he was willing to
go back to the same kind of work a few years later?
"I do miss the 22 Minutes beat," he says, "but with Monday Report,
I get to do it in a different way." He adds that he now gets to travel the
country a lot more, to visit places that 22 Minutes wouldn't go to. On Monday
Report he's visited government ministers in Nunavut and is now doing a tour
of Canada's campus pubs.
Of course, This Hour Has 22 Minutes was the show that made him famous.
He was the breakout star in the Halifax-based comedy ensemble. He earned
early recognition for his one-take political rants, but it was his segment Talking
to Americans that put him over the top. For Talking to Americans,
Mercer posed as a reporter and quizzed streeters south of the border on
their knowledge of Canada. He asked absurd questions like, "Do you think
that Americans should be bombing Saskatchewan?" The streeters would
never fail to offer an uninformed and simultaneously hilarious opinion.
As Mercer commented during a segment in Washington, D.C., "[Americans]
are our greatest friends, our strongest allies. They are kind. They are
generous. They have an uncanny ability to go on at great lengths on subjects
they know absolutely nothing about."
When Mercer launched a special edition of Talking to Americans in
April 2001, it was a sensation. The show drew 2.7 million viewers, a record
for a Canadian comedy special. Over the summer, Americans themselves began
to take notice, making Mercer a hot interview subject, ironically, in the
place he ridiculed.
"I've been the subject of media coverage before," Mercer says, mentioning
his infamous on-air petition to have politician Stockwell Day change his name
to Doris Day. "But when something like that happens in Canada, I can spend a
day talking to radio stations, unlike when the Washington Post wrote about my
interview with George W. Bush. I could've spent two weeks talking to [American]
media. I had calls from 900 radio stations - not like the, maybe, 25 stations
in Canada."
That attention-grabbing interview with Bush required a lot of effort and
an equal amount of luck. "It was the craziest scrum I'd ever been in," Mercer
recalls. "People were rough. I got punched in the kidneys."
Fortunately, Mercer and his crew successfully fought off international
reporters for their chance to go face-to-face with the future president
during the 2000 presidential primaries in Michigan.
"How we got to talk to Bush was a series of flukes. For months, Bush didn't speak
to anyone without a campaign press pass. We went the wrong way and caught him
at the exit."
At the exit, Mercer told Bush that "Prime Minister Jean Poutine" had
endorsed him for president. Dubya showed off his knowledge of the world
and thanked "Prime Minister Poutine" on camera.
So what does Mercer think of Bush now?
"Of course, my impression of him has changed drastically over time," Mercer
comments. "Back then I thought he was a dumb, harmless governor. Well, he certainly
isn't harmless."
As he was garnering U.S. media attention for that interview, Mercer was
offered many projects in the States, including the hosting duties for the
short-lived NBC primetime game show The Weakest Link.
"I would've ended up hosting the Anne Robinson version," he reveals. "Anne
used to make jokes about the American health care system on the British version.
And they liked the idea of people making fun of Americans, but they didn't want
a Brit to do it. So when they saw Talking to Americans, they thought their rescuer
had arrived. And they called me."
He turned it down.
Anne Robinson ended up earning a reported £2 million for her U.S.
hosting duties.
What was Mercer's offer?
"They offered me crazy money," he says.
In the seven figures?
"I won't go into that. But I will tell you that they tried to convince me that
I'd be the next Pat Sajak. Now I'm sure Pat has a nice, comfortable life, but
that wasn't for me."
He decided to keep working in Canada, so during all that U.S. media attention,
Mercer was in the strange position of doing high profile interviews with
no product to push.
"It's weird, I never thought I'd ever end up on Nightline, being interviewed
by Ted Koppel. It was crazy. It truly was. I could've spent months there doing
press. But the craziest thing is that I didn't have anything to promote, no book
to plug, no video to sell."
Then, September 11th happened. A week later, Mercer's Talking to Americans was
nominated for two Gemini Awards. He quickly turned down the nominations. "I
feel that this is not a time to be making light of the differences between
two nations but rather a time to offer our unconditional support to our
neighbours, friends and relatives to the South," he said in a statement
at the time.
All of his American interview requests ended. "September 11th changed everything," he
says. "The least of which was my silly career."
Still, doing interviews on Nightline sure is a long way to go for
a kid from Middle Cove, Newfoundland. Mercer was born and raised in Middle
Cove, a small community of fewer than 2,000 people located along the Atlantic
coastline, just northeast of St. John's. His father worked at the Department
of Fisheries and his mother was a psychiatric nurse. Together, they raised
the four Mercer children. Now retired, Mercer's father currently sits on
the town council for the Middle Cove region. So it's no surprise that conversations
at the Mercer home were often about politics while Rick was growing up.
Those conversations clearly had a formative effect on Mercer, though he
doesn't like talking about his family life. He gets visibly upset when
asked for any minor details.
"You can ask, but that doesn't mean I'm going to answer," he says tersely
when the topic is introduced.
Of the few details he has revealed over the years, Mercer seems to have
led a relatively normal life. He was a popular student and gravitated towards
acting in high school, but remarkably, never graduated, despite serving
as student council president. Instead, he formed a sketch comedy troupe
with some of his friends called Corey and Wade's Playhouse. During that
time, he worked as a dishwasher and even once handed out prizes as an assistant
to a roller skating clown in St. John's.
While working as a dishwasher at the Duckworth Lunch restaurant in St.
John's, Mercer noticed a group of people from the CBC dining there. He
heard that the network paid good money for radio commentaries, and so,
he stepped out in his dishwashing gear, and pitched them an idea right
there on the spot. His commentary, on how to make politics funnier, earned
him $75, the same amount he earned in a week as a dishwasher. At 19, his
career with the CBC had begun in earnest. He has never stopped working
for them.
"The CBC has balls," he says of his devotion to the public broadcaster. "No
other network would've considered putting something like 22 Minutes on
the air. Maybe the private networks would now, but back then it was unheard of.
CBC really is the place to be."
Yet, despite his travels with the network, he has never truly left Newfoundland
behind. He says that comedy and laughter is an essential part of life for
him and most Newfoundlanders.
"Comedy in Newfoundland is intrical," he says. "In Newfoundland elections,
we always vote for the funny guy. They say in job interviews that it's the kiss
of death to tell jokes - never endeavour to be funny. But if you don't tell jokes
during an interview in Newfoundland, you're toast. I think comedy comes from
being outside the centre. If you're from Des Moines, you can see how silly L.A.
is. It's the same with Newfoundland; you can see the silliness in the rest of
Canada."
Now that he lives in Toronto - he moved here last Labour Day to do Monday
Report — he still makes trips back to Newfoundland on a regular basis.
"There's nobody from Newfoundland who doesn't want to return home," he says. "I
still feel like a tourist in Toronto. I used to live right in the heart of downtown
St. John's. But the house I live in now is the quietest I've had since I was
a kid, ironically enough."
But it was Newfoundland, not Toronto, which inspired his two trips to war-torn
Bosnia and Afghanistan for separate television specials.
"Newfoundland makes up a large percentage of the population of the armed forces.
I knew lots of people on my street as a kid who were in the armed forces. I wanted
to support them."
But an army base in a war zone doesn't seem like a very funny place to
be. However, Mercer found comedy there. Did he go looking for it?
"No, I didn't think there was comedy there. I just hung out with the soldiers
and it ended up being funny. But I saw it could be an adventure and possibly
something heartwarming."
There are certainly much safer ways to have an adventure.
"It was a great opportunity, though. Where else can you get that kind of access?
It's cool to fly in Bosnia in a helicopter or driving the streets in Kabul."
Mercer says he traveled on Afghan streets in armoured vehicles. One of
his army escorts was the nephew of Newfoundland comedian Greg Malone, a
friend of Mercer's. He said that coincidence made him feel more at home
in Kabul ("What a small world, eh?"), but he wasn't scared to travel
there.
"I wasn't in any danger," he says. "I was surrounded by people with machine
guns. I mean, I'm as big a coward as anyone, but I didn't think about it."
However, his flight to Kabul on Ariana Afghan Airlines was another experience
all together.
"I will say that travelling on Ariana was pretty rough. The doors on the overhead
compartment were torn off; the seat belts were ripped out. The plane also did
evasive maneuvers in the air to avoid snipers. There were 12 people on the crew
and you know at least three or four people have problems with air travel. I don't,
but it does make you appreciate Air Canada."
Now safely at home, Mercer says he doesn't find life as a Canadian celebrity
to be very different from civilian life.
In fact, he's very uncomfortable when you ask him about being famous. He
looks off to the side and says he doesn't think about it very much.
"People do look at you a little bit more than everywhere else," he
admits. "They think, did I go to school with him? Otherwise, they nod and
smile at you or say, Hello Rick. I get surprised when I go to an airport in Calgary
and someone recognizes me. I forget that the show airs outside the province."
When he's told that he's probably one of the most well-known Canadians,
he seems embarrassed, genuinely so, without a twinge of false modesty.
Still, it's shocking to learn that one of our nation's biggest talents
still takes the subway and drives an old Volvo around town.
"I don't know how old it is," Mercer says nonchalantly of his car. "But
yeah, that's what I drive."
By the end of the interview, the hesitant and guarded figure from earlier
in the day is gone.
"I always wanted to be a magazine editor," Mercer confides as we leave
the office. "If I wasn't able to do this, that's what I'd probably be doing."
Why not try it out anyway?
He leans in to respond.
"Because I think you'd have to be crazy to launch a magazine in Canada."
And with that statement, Mercer says goodbye. 
This
story originally appeared in the first issue of Popjournalism Magazine |
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