♪ >> Hello, welcome to Canada Files.

I'm Jim Deeks.

Our guest in the studio on this edition has been recognized as arguably, the funniest man in Canada for over twenty years.

But Rick Mercer is much more than that.

Born in St John's, Newfoundland, on the Atlantic ocean coast of Canada just over 50 years ago, Rick has earned a reputation as a comedian, satirist, humourist, and political pundit and perhaps even, the conscience of our country.

As a featured performer on a weekly satire program, and later as the host of The Rick Mercer Report onCBC Television for more than 15 years, Rick regularly pointed out our idiosyncracies, our politicians' shortcomings, and perhaps best of all, the finest aspects of our national character.

Do we miss him on our televisions each week?

We sure do.

>> Jim: Rick, I feel I should just hand you the microphone and let you talk and rant for the next 25 minutes.

>> Rick: Not at all.

>> That may be how the interview works out.

But considering the fact that you've been off the air-- off regular television for almost two years, so let's just ease our way into the interview.

>> Yes, I'm an elder statesman now.

I used to be an angry young man- now I'm wise and quiet.

>> You don't look a day older than 20 years ago when you started your show.

>> That's not true but thank you.

I've had a lot of work.

>> It has been nearly two years since you've been on with The Mercer Report.

Do you miss the pressure and adrenalin of producing a weekly television show?

>> Yes and no.

There's parts of it that I miss, obviously.

I was on television for over 27 years with a regular show.

There was no break from This Hour has 22 Minutes to Made in Canada toTalking to Americans to The Mercer Report .

So I was always on tv.

It's all I ever wanted to do.

But I put in a full life of television.

What I miss about it mostly is, your work family-- the people you spend all your time with on the road.

I do miss the pressure but I've put myself under pressure in other ways.

I just finished a stand-up comedy tour of the country.

I'm not a stand-up comedian.

And I did two 20 minutes sets, along with 3 or 4 other professional comedians.

That was nerve-wracking for me.

We were playing big rooms-- 2,000 to 3,000 seats.

That was a lot of pressure.

While I was preparing for that, I was going to 'o pen mic' nights something I'd never done before.

I was thinking, "Why am I doing this?"

"Good Lord.

You used to have a tv show."

>> You used to talk to a million people each week on your tv show.

Now it's an audience of 2,000 or 3,000.

What do you say to the people that come up to you every day and say, "Oh Rick.

We miss you.

Please come back to tv."

>> That's very kind I felt that the format of my show had almost run its course.

I was really conscious of the legacy of the show.

I was so proud of the show and so many things that we accomplished with it.

I was proud that people kept tuning in year after year.

Fifteen years, that's three or four lifetimes in television.

It just doesn't happen.

So I wasn't going to jeopardize that.

I easily could have milked another year or two, or three out of it.

But I really felt that it would have jeopardized the legacy.

>> Let's go back to the beginning and trace the path of your relationship with your country and our many foibles.

Your mom was a nurse.

Your dad was a civil servant in St John's, Newfoundland.

>> Yes.

Now I'm getting nervous.

>> This isn't This is your Life .

>> Okay, good.

>> But I do want to give our audience a sense of what it was like growing up in your home.

Was it a normal home?

Was it funny?

Was it hysterical?

>> My home growing up was ridiculously decent.

There's a conceit that people who work in comedy are damaged.

And there are a lot of damaged people in comedy.

But there's also a conceit that they come from difficult upbringings.

I had to stop talking about growing up around other people in the comedy business because I remember Mary Walsh would stop and say, "Where did you grow up?"

Because I'd be saying I remember when I took my pony down to the pond.

And they're like, "What!

You had a pony?"

For a couple of years, we had a pony, yeah.

My parents are both incredibly normal nice people who are good parents.

All the things that can go terribly wrong in a childhood-- I never worried about where a meal was coming from.

I never worried about anyone being angry in the house.

They're just incredibly decent.

We had a pony at one point.

We lived in a rural area outside of St John's.

It was all very Pollyanna-ville, really.

>> Were you always the funniest kid in the house, or among your friends?

>> No, not really.

I think there's a lot of funny people in Newfoundland.

I think I probably- I'm not one of those people that remembers a lot of stuff but I certainly had teachers contact me over the years and say, "Oh, I remember when you said this in class one day."

And I think "Wow, that's pretty good.

I said that?"

So maybe I was, I'm not sure.

>> When and where did you come to the conclusion that 'You know, I could actually make a living out of being a funny person'?

>> That took awhile.

I've been thinking about this lately and I realize that when I was a kid, even though it was certainly a happy childhood, I was kind of bored.

Not in a bad way, you know.

Guys would like to play with Dinky Toys or Tonka Toys and that was fine.

But I wasn't obsessed like they were.

Same with dinosaurs, "Yeah sure, but I'm not obsessed".

Play basketball, yeah sure.

Then I can remember being in grade three, and we're all brought together in a room and put on the floor, and some little play was put on with a bunch of older people that showed up in a van.

I was like, "Oh my god, that should be me up there!"

and when they called for volunteers, I basically trampled children to get to the front.

I was really suddenly drawn to show business.

>> Who were some of the people that you watched on television, or listened to on the radio, or even humorists you read in newspapers or novels, as a kid, that you loved and maybe had an influence on you?

>> I had an aunt in the United States who would send clipped columns of, I'm guessing Dave Barry, in hindsight.

Just the funny columns and I was very young when I would read those and that fascinated me.

That someone could have a column with interesting, amusing notions about what's going on in their life.

Yes, I thought, "Oh, and they make a living."

"Isn't that interesting?"

But, I was mostly influenced by a television program the CBC produced, The Wonderful Grand Band.

In Canada, the public television network, at one point, did regional programming, not just news-- regional programming of all sorts.

In Newfoundland, we were our own region.

The island of Newfoundland and Labrador.

A population of less than 350,000 at the time.

There was this weekly television show featuring two comedians, that would do drag and also male characters.

And a traditional Newfoundland Irish band, but also with a rock and roll edge.

These people were superstars .

This was the biggest television show on the network.

Dallasor Falconcrest was number two.

>> This is the early 80's we're talking about?

>> Yeah.

The world stopped in Newfoundland when this show came on.

It had such a huge impact on me, but what really had an impact was that it looked like where I was from.

The people sounded like Newfoundlanders.

They were Newfoundlanders.

The houses were in Newfoundland.

It was very much about where I was from.

Growing up in Newfoundland, you never really felt your own community reflected back to Newfoundland, because we're a little weird, and we're off in the Atlantic.

We have funny houses and all that business.

>> You've done a lot of stand-up and theatrical one-man shows in your career.

What is easier to do?

Satire on television where you don't have a live audience, or doing your routine in front of a live audience and getting the live feedback?

>> It's just so different.

I can't really say which one is easier or not.

There are so many things you can do on television that you can't do live .

You can be writing on television up to the last minute.

Whereas, if you're working on stage, at a certain point you have to lay the pencil down.

You have to start rehearsing it.

You have to start building it.

Days will go by before it's...in front of an audience, and that can be a lifetime in satire.

I used to worry about the fact that with The Mercer Report, we would tape on Friday night and air on Tuesday.

But we also had a mechanism in place to go in and re-do the rants if events unfolded that changed the rant.

We did that a number of times.

>> You mentioned the rants.

That was my next question.

Quite early in your career you made a point of not just being funny, but being outspoken with what we all now know as the rants in Canada.

Our American audience might not know but these became a staple of your television program for over 15 years.

Ninety-second editorials which could be very funny but could also be quite pointed.

How did that whole concept start?

And how did you manage to persuade the CBC to allow you be so outspoken?

>> I got my start doing a one-person show called Show Me The Button: I'll Push It or Charles Lynch Must Die.

I was a teenager.

Charles Lynch, who is now deceased, became a friend of mine, and was a beloved Canadian institution.

>> A political journalist in Ottawa.

>> Political journalist, former head of Southam News .

He was a war correspondent and in his retirement he became a gentleman columnist.

We were going through a constitutional crisis in Canada.

I'm from Newfoundland and Labrador.

Charles wrote this column, perhaps satirical.

He argued it was , in hindsight.

If push comes to shove-- if there's a constitutional crisis in Canada and Canadian unity is at stake, if it can be solved by throwing Newfoundland out, that's what we should do.

Because they're a basket case .

So everyone in Newfoundland went crazy.

And I sub-titled my show, Charles Lynch must die.

I did the show in Ottawa and Charles came to the show.

He declared he was now the Salomon Rushdieof Newfoundland.

The show was a very big success and it ended up touring the country.

But it was very pointed, political, angry one-man show.

A very angry young man.

When the opportunity to do 22 Minutes came along, I knew I had to bring some of that to the show.

There was a real mercenary reason why the rant worked.

22 Minuteswas supposed to be six episodes.

There were four very different creative people creating the show.

Everyone was pulling in a different direction.

I thought when this show is cancelled after six episodes, I need something to be able to show the network that I can do.

I came up with the concept of doing this rant.

The reason why they said yes to it immediately was because there were no costumes.

There was no set.

We didn't have any money.

I said, "I'm going to take the camera... and come back in two hours with 90 seconds of programming."

They said, "Sold!"

They were in every episode of 22 Minutes while I was there.

>> Was there ever a rant that you did on This Hour has 22 Minutes or theMercer Report that got you into trouble?

>> Not so much because it was always my opinion.

Certainly, there were times when I voiced an opinion and a big chunk of my audience was aghast that I had that opinion.

Because I think, I grew close to the audience they grew close to me, and at a certain point you think it's like your spouse-- when your spouse drops an opinion that surprises you.

So people were shocked sometimes.

But nothing that really got me into trouble.

There were a few that I pulled from circulation because I... not because I was wrong.

I never cared if my opinion was wrong.

In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have said that.

>> You put out your last book.

It's called Final Report and this is a compendium of your best rants.

So there's a plug for you.

>> Thank you very much >> Hopefully, this will now sell millions of copies on both sides of the border.

You did a regular feature on both This Hour has 22 Minutes and later on a program called, Talking to Americans in which you famously, in the United States, would talk to people on the street.

But you actually talked to important people like governors, senators and the President of the United States, asking what Canadians would understand were totally dumb and made-up questions.

But the Americans didn't.

Do you know want to take this opportunity to apologize to any of them?

>> I should apologize because when I was making that segment, I used to justify it in my head by saying these people will never see this.

This will be on the public broadcaster in Canada.

It will air once and then it's gone.

How is anyone in Iowa going to see this?

Now of course, many years later it's on Youtube .

But this was before YouTube existed.

It was a wildly popular segment.

It was made out of desperation.

I was on location in Washington, DC, one day.

And it just kinda happened.

I was doing streeters on the street.

I started talking about a prime minister that didn't exist.

And a summit that didn't exist.

And people were so polite.

They just went with it.

It was a very funny segment and it was the original Canadian US joke when the Americans show up at the border in July saying, "Where's the ski hill?"

It's the original joke.

I just kept doing that joke over again.

The first time the segment aired, and it was obvious it had really struck a nerve, my father called me and said, "I saw that..." "Promise me that you'll never do that ever again."

He thought it was in terrible taste.

But it was all in good fun.

It really was and ultimately, Canadians understand we know everything about the United Sates because we get America channels and pop music.

It's behemoth .

Of course, we know everything.

Likewise, Americans don't know anything about Canada because we're tiny compared to them.

Not physically, but in terms of population.

When Ted Koppel did a piece on Talking to Americans-- and Good Morning America , they all did the same thing.

They all sent crews to Canada to do ' Talking to Canadians' to turn the tables.

But they went out on the streets of Toronto.

They were like, "So the President of the United States, John Wayne, is visiting Ottawa this week."

And everyone went, "No.

The President of the United States is not John Wayne.

And if the president was here we would know about it."

They said, "Wow, they know everything about us."

>> It sounds like wah, wah waaa .

Another very popular segment of your shows was when you would show up in the most unlikely places.

Whether it was a potato chip factory in New Brunswick, or the bowels of the Air Canada Centre in Toronto-- the hockey arena.

Basically you would spend, the next five minutes, getting in the way as you would explain how these places worked.

They were very funny.

Do you have some favourite experiences?

You probably did 250 of these.

>> No.

I've done everything I sat in a plane one day.

There was a gentleman next to me.

Sometimes people open up to you.

And I'm one of those people that sometimes, people tell things to.

This gentleman had had a near-death experience.

He indicated to me that he probably didn't have a long time to live-- four or five years.

He had literally retired, cashed out, and was going to work through a bucket list.

I never met anyone who actually had this notion.

It seemed to me like the type of thing that people write books about but don't really do.

He started telling me things he wanted to do before he died.

I had to stop myself because every single thing he said, I would say "Oh, yes I've done that.

You've gotta do that."

"Flying a fighter jet, I've done that twice."

"You've gotta do that."

It just went on, and I thought, "Stop, Rick.

You've literally done everything on this man's bucket list."

So there's very little I haven't done.

There's very little I haven't driven.

From a combine harvester, to a hovercraft, to everything.

It was a great privilege.

And you say I got in the way.

I did sometimes but I always tried my best--literally.

And I always celebrated them.

I didn't go and make fun of farmers.

Nor the women who were working in that potato chip factory.

The idea was to celebrate them, show people what they did, and make them look great.

That's why the show was a success, I think.

Yes, I had rock stars.

Yes, I had prime ministers.

More importantly, I had fishermen and farmers.

>> They were great segments.

We had Peter Mansbridge on Canada Files recently.

After the interview, I mentioned to him we were having Rick Mercer as a guest.

He said "Rick is a fabulous guy, but you know what, I think Rick would really rather be a serious political commentator than a comedian."

Is he right?

>> I got to do both.

I was very lucky with the rants.

Quite often, the subject matters would be about something absurd.

If you're talking about something absurd in politics, it lends itself to humor.

If I was talking about something that wasn't absurd, then I could just do the rant, straight up.

If people didn't like that it was over in 90 seconds, but I could do straight up commentary.

I certainly have always been a political junkie, and that's what I read, moreso.

I don't wake up in the morning looking for satire to read.

I read Andrew Coyne or whoever.

So it's interesting that Peter says that.

But I've still got a lot of time left.

>> Yes you do.

>> Do the stand-up comedy, then do that.

>> I want to ask you, because we ask almost all of our guests on Canada Files, being Canadian.

What does that mean to you, personally?

>> Oh, goodness gracious.

>> Jim: It's a tough question.

>> Yes!

No-one has ever answered the question, "What does it mean to be a Canadian?"

I believe there was a Royal Commission that looked into what does it mean to be a Canadian?

The government literally sent people all over the country asking people, looking for an answer.

Now Americans must find this completely absurd because no American has ever asked the question, what does it mean to be an American?

If you google that, it probably doesn't even come up.

Canadians have grappled with this since the beginning.

>> We probably have a bit of an inferiority complex about ourselves.

That's why it's a question we do ask.

>> It's a question we ask and almost always, if a group of Canadians are asked that question, and they start to ' auger in ' to answer that question, we start to talk not about what it means to be a Canadian but how we are different from Americans.

Which again is completely bizarre.

No-one else on the globe does that but we do.

What does it mean to be Canadian?

All I know is, I'd never wish to be anything else but.

That's as close as an answer as I've ever gotten.

>> Let me drill down even further-- to be a Newfoundlander?

What does that mean to you?

Is it something you wear on your sleeve?

>> Sure.

Everyone from Newfoundland is informed by the fact that they grew up in Newfoundland.

For starters, uniformally, everyone who grew up in Newfoundland wants to be in Newfoundland.

I can count on one hand, the number of people from Newfoundland that I've met who don't live in Newfoundland, and don't want to be there.

They all want to be there.

The weather is terrible, or it's certainly challenging.

You need to dress for a couple of seasons.

But it's a very unique place.

You grow up there, and you feel like you're an outsider.

We're an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, off the east coast of the continent.

We were the last people to join Confederation .

We didn't join Canada until 1949.

For most of my lifetime we were written off as an ' economic basket case' .

Which is why people like Charles Lynch would say, "Oh we should just get rid of them.

Who cares?"

We were like the poor cousins, but we had a real outsider's view and an outsider's perspective.

Everything we saw on television, whether it came from Canada, or the United States, just didn't feel like home.

Everything is a little bit different in Newfoundland.

People are funny-- they're Irish people!

>> Are Newfoundlanders funnier than the rest of Canadians?

>> Newfoundlanders certainly put an emphasis on being funny.

I saw a fellow do a TED talk, or it was on television.

He was talking about how to get that job, and rules.

One of the most important rules was do not endeavour to be funny in the interview.

I thought, "Well, you wouldn't get hired in Newfoundland."

They're not going to hire, you know- the two candidates-- one was funny, one wasn't.

Obviously we're going to hire the funny one.

>> You've won many Gemini awards, which is the Canadian Emmy .

You've been given a number of honorary university degrees.

You've worked with many charities.

You wear the Order of Canada insignia on your lapel.

What's the greatest honour that you've received?

>> I think the Order of Canada, certainly.

That was something that literally came out of the blue.

I was driving, got a phone call from David Johnson, the Governor General of Canada , and it came up 'David Johnson'.

I know a David Johnson-- another one.

>> Don't tell me what you're gonna say.

>> He was starring in a musical in Seattle at the time.

so I said, "Hey, how's it going in Seattle?"

It was the Governor General, and I was getting the Order of Canada , and the motto is, they want a better country, and I certainly always have.

It's very flattering to receive the Order of Canada as a civilian honour.

You go, and the people that you're honoured with are such tremendous individuals.

I'm at the showbiz table, which is great.

But there's people that have helped-- they've developed a cancer treatment for children.

Or they've restored a village.

Or they invented something that might save lakes.

I mean, people who have made tremendous contributions.

To be even in the room was a huge honour.

The other highlight of my career was I got the key to my hometown, Outer Cove-Middle Cove-Logy Bay.

And my parents came.

They never go to anything, but they came to that.

All these people I grew up with were there.

It was in the local elementary school in the gymnasium.

The local kids in the grade 3 class made a presentation, It was all very nice.

It was a big deal.

like nothing I ever imagined growing up-- that something like that would happen.

>> You're still a young man, and you're busy.

It's not as though you've gone to a rocking chair and decided, "Ok, That's it for my career."

Do you see yourself getting back into a television situation, or are you happy just doing the scattered live events?

>> Yeah, I do like doing the live stuff.

I'll host New Years Eve on the CBC for all of Canada again this year.

That's something I like.

I've hosted Canada Day celebrations-- all those kinds of things.

In terms of getting back on television-- once someone figures out what television is now, then I might have an answer.

But I don't have the same desire, to be on a network at eight o'clock in a prime-time hit, that drove me for ever .

It kept me going to work for fifteen years.

Sitting in a room like this, talking to an interesting person is a lot more appealing right now.

So I just have to figure out what it is I'd like to do.

I'm very fortunate.

I could pretty much do anything now.

Or at least they'd give me a shot at it.

>> Well you've got at least 30 years to go.

>> That's very kind.

>> I'm sure you'll figure it out.

Rick, it's been delightful.

Thank you so much.

You are one of the most popular people in Canada, and it's been a real pleasure to have you on Canada Files.

>> Thank you >> Cheers >> And thank you so much for watching.

We'll see you on the next episode.

Take care.

♪