Talking to Canadians: A Memoir

Penguin Random House/November, 2021

Reviewed by Anthony Wilson-Smith

October 14, 2021

For someone whose Twitter tag is “anger is my cardio”, Rick Mercer has a not-so-dirty secret: he’s happy, content and grateful for the most important aspects of his life. Those include his upbringing in the community of Middle Cove, Newfoundland; his long personal and professional relationship with his partner, producer Gerald Lunz; his parents and family, his career, and the country in which he lives.

In fact, when Mercer was in the midst of writing his new memoir, Talking to Canadians, in the summer of 2020, he told a friend that his biggest concern was that “my childhood was wonderful and my family members are terrific, so how the hell can I make this book exciting?”

The answer, as the thoroughly engaging final product makes clear, is that Mercer is incapable of being boring. Just turned 52, he is three decades removed from the selectively angry young man who burst on the scene in 1990 with his one-man play, the not-so-briefly titled Rick Mercer’s Show Me the Button: I’ll Push It – or Charles Lynch Must Die. (The title was sparked by a column written by Lynch, a legendary Ottawa commentator over many decades, that slighted Newfoundland. Lynch gleefully showed up at the opening night of the show in Ottawa, plugged it in his column, and the two became friends of a sort.)

Today, Rick’s hair is more silver, and his reputation as a comic and satirist is baked into the country’s DNA. But he remains a master of the timely rant — carefully calibrated, elegantly phrased takedowns of whoever is perpetrating the greatest foolishness any given week. The restless energy that characterizes his career shows no signs of abating.

Talking to Canadians reflects the same vivid conversational style so familiar to millions of Canadians. For example, describing the Lynch column that set him off, Mercer says the writer “might as well have attached booster cables to my ears and run every drop of power generated in Labrador through my cerebral cortex.”

The book, in traditional memoir narrative form, traces his life from his birth to present times. But his career is in midstream, so rather than an end-of-line summing up, it’s more a pause for reflection, leavened by his continuing wonder at it all working out so well.

A key to Rick’s enduring popularity is his extraordinary ability to read the room — to absorb the collective mood of Canadians and reflect it back to them in condensed, entertaining form. When he and Gerald Lunz were planning what would become the 15 season-long Rick Mercer Report, they understood that Canadians were feeling buffeted by collective uncertainties and needed reminders of their country’s strengths. They decided that while they would lampoon politics and politicians, the show would celebrate the rest of Canada. The operating rule, he writes, was ‘at this show, we don’t s— on Thunder Bay’ – or anywhere else within the country’s borders.

If a town is big enough to have a theatre or meeting hall, chances are Mercer has done a show there, or perhaps visited because he heard of a local, quintessentially Canadian attraction worth sharing with a national audience. If members of Canada’s military are on peacekeeping missions far beyond our borders, Rick is likely to be there, bearing best wishes from home and bringing theirs back in turn. The sections of this book on visits to Bosnia and Afghanistan are among the most emotional.

A key to Rick’s enduring popularity is his extraordinary ability to read the room — to absorb the collective mood of Canadians and reflect it back to them in condensed, entertaining form.

As for politicians, the withering snark he delivers with such gusto is born of a mix of affection and frustration. He genuinely likes (most) politicians, observing that “walking around Parliament Hill with a cameraman and armed with a Parliamentary Press Gallery pass was everything I’d ever wanted.” For every time he lured an unwitting pol into a career-shortening clip, there was a moment when he humanized a politician in particular or politics generally (the naked leap into a lake with now-United Nations Ambassador Bob Rae comes to mind.)

What’s startling is to realize how many times Mercer has not only successfully satirized the news, but also become part of it. In 2000, Canadian Alliance party leader Stockwell Day promised that if he became prime minister, he would pass legislation requiring a referendum for any petition that obtained more than 350,000 signatures. Rick, then a charter member of the This Hour has 22 Minutes cast, launched a petition calling for Day to change his first name to ‘Doris’, after the iconically perky American singer and actress. Even though it was early days for the internet, the petition quickly received more than one million signatures. Day — Stockwell, not Doris — shelved the idea.

Then, there was the way Mercer played off Americans’ eternal, usually benign ignorance of Canada with the Talking with Americans feature, in which he asked absurd, patently false questions about Canada to which they faithfully, cheerfully and solemnly responded in a way that betrayed hilarious levels of bilateral ignorance. Among the victims: presidential candidate George W. Bush accepting the endorsement — shouted at him by Mercer, feigning the role of reporter — of Canadian prime minister “Jean Poutine”. (By then president, Bush joked about the incident during a visit to Halifax years later.)

What sets Mercer apart from most performers is that he’s as happy listening to his audience as he is talking to them. In private conversation, his stories invariably have more to do with people he meets rather than himself. The cutting humour of his rants is juxtaposed against his delight in most aspects of Canada and the people within. Wherever he goes, he keeps in mind the advice of his partner, Gerald Lunz: “Just do what you’re good at, just talk to people.’ When he writes that, “We were going to the greatest place on earth via Bearskin Airlines…we were headed to Iqaluit, Nunavut”, he means it. Although, of course, he might fondly apply the same description to other places across Canada – in particular, of course, anywhere in his beloved Newfoundland.

That passion — for Newfoundland, all of Canada and the people who live within — sparks the fire that feeds Mercer’s trademark rants. It is also evident throughout this alternately funny, moving and always heartfelt book.

Contributing Writer Anthony Wilson-Smith, President and CEO of Historica Canada, is former editor of Maclean’s Magazine.