King Jeer
With his nasty new show Made In Canada, comedian Rick Mercer bites the hand that made him
Saturday Night Magazine, October 1998
By Andrew Clark
Six Gemini awards sit on a garish silver tiered podium in the offices of a Halifax-based film and television company. They are arrayed in a triangular pattern rising upwards. “They all have to have one of these,” says a grinning Rick Mercer as he stands before this altar symbolizing the highest honor in Canadian television. “They have to have a shrine in their honor.”
”They” are TV executives – a “they” very much in the “them” sense of the word, as in us and them, as in Rick Mercer is going to get them.
The comedian smiles sweetly and inhales deeply from a cigarette. His murky green eyes may smolder as they survey the Gemini shrine, but Mercer is entirely at peace. Then again, peace may not exactly be the right word. Mercer is at peace in the same way a lion is at peace as it scans the savannah for prey. He is at peace the way a boxer is at peace before a title bout. He’s at peace because he knows that soon he will have his chance to be cruel. A comic predator. The term springs to mind and I quickly write it down while making a list in my head titled, “Things You Must Know about Rick Mercer”:
--- unless he is eating, he will ignite a Player’s Extra Light no more than five minutes after meeting you. (But he’s planning to quit.);
--- he is twenty-eight years old and from Middle Cove, Newfoundland, where his family (two sisters, one brother) treated watching the news as a spectator sport;
--- he is immaculate. Mercer’s hair is always well groomed. His clothes are stylish. He favors black;
--- he laughs often. Nothing is more telling in a comedian than his laugh. Mercer’s has the tinny rattle of a machine gun; it has play in it, but it’s almost lethal;
--- he jokingly practices what he calls “the Newfoundland method of argument” – seesawing between the statements “Don’t be so foolish” and “You are insane”;
--- he is happy to be here, working seven days a week for six weeks as the star and co-writer (with This Hour Has 22 Minutes writer Mark Farrell) of Made In Canada, a six-show series for CBC television starting October 5 that’s meant to savage the television industry.
I’m snapped out of my musings by Mercer’s next observation. “They don’t care about the creative. They’re not circus people,” Mercer says, using his term for showbiz folk. “They went to law school in case they needed something to fall back on.” He laughs, turns from the awards and, as if he were pronouncing sentence, quips, “They come from the dark side.”
Mercer’s Made In Canada character, Richard Strong, is himself from the dark side – a young, ambitious junior executive who destroys anyone who threatens his climb to the top of the imaginary television company, Pyramid Productions. Scenes feature such duplicity as the CEO of the company on the phone to a reporter, denying his star is on drugs while he rummages through his own drawer for pills, and Richard Strong spiking a co-worker’s drink with Rohypnol, the so-called “date-rape drug,” and then setting him loose at an office party. Made In Canada executive producer Gerald Lunz, who also produces This Hour, refers to the style of comedy in both shows as “peeling back the onion to show the people who control the product.”
On the set the air is hot and thick with cigarette fumes. Film equipment is strewn around the office, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere. In a bid to save money, and in the interests of verisimilitude, Salter Street Films, the company producing the series, has offered up its own digs (from Friday night till Monday morning) as the set. Salter Street has even lent the set decorators its Geminis. It’s like some sort of parallel universe – even the Pyramid Productions logo is eerily familiar as it resembles that of the former Alliance Communications.
The crew is setting up to tape a host of scenes, including one featuring a screen kiss between Richard and a co-worker, Veronica, played by Leah Pinsent. Meanwhile, the Made In Canada publicist aims a running monologue at me. She wants coverage for another Salter Street series, Emily Of New Moon - a turn-of-the-century drama in the vein of Anne Of Green Gables. She suggests that I come to the set on Prince Edward Island, all expenses paid. Perhaps Chatelaine would be interested? Did I know, she asks, that Eliza Butler, L.M. Montgomery’s nine-year-old great-granddaughter, will be playing a part on the show?
She pitches shamelessly while sitting in front of a poster advertising Beaver Creek, a turn-of-the-century drama (like Emily Of New Moon) set in rural Canada. It stars make-believe Canadian icon Walter Franklin (played by real-life Canadian icon Gordon Pinsent). The Made In Canada set-cum-actual production office is decorated with a number of other posters for imaginary Pyramid productions. There is Sword Of Damacles, a cheesy Hercules rip-off. The slogans are subtle satires just this side of ridiculous. The poster for a show called Unseen Secrets declares, “They do not want you to know. You do not want to know.” (Three weeks later, may newspapers will actually run the L.M. Montgomery’s great-granddaughter story, proving that, if nothing else, the publicist is effective.)
Made In Canada is a comedy lampooning the clichéd hypocrisy of the very business that spawned it. “Foolish people saying foolish things with the greatest conviction,” Mercer calls it. Off-camera, Gordon Pinsent’s character, TV star Walter Franklin, says that Canada has no money. “It means no audience, it means do it for cheap.” On camera, he says, “This country, this nation, this Canada, means everything to me.”
I begin to recognize a strange duality that simmers just below the surface on the set – I watch actors play scenes in which their characters lambaste the superficial nature of the entertainment business, then, seconds later, off-camera, they parrot the stock lines of film and television interviews, telling me: “We’ve become a family,” and “I’m surrounded by funny people,” and, “I can’t say enough about the cast.” Even Mercer plays the game. “It’s a great experience and the crew is excellent,” he says.
But Rick Mercer sees the satiric line. He always has. He sees it instinctively and then processes it intellectually. He sees it the way Wayne Gretzky say the puck in his prime. That is his greatest strength as a comedian. His two-minute “streeters” (read: rants) on This Hour over the past six years featured Mercer speaking directly to camera while he vented about the political outrage du jour. They were the acerbic conscience of the Canadian political system, making him the country’s unofficial opposition party.
When Mike Harris cut a provincial home-oxygen programme and then suggested Ontarians in need of such a service turn to the church, Mercer noted: “It’s funny that he brings up the church, because people who go to church believe in God. And people who believe in God believe in Heaven. And people who believe in Heaven know that if you take away someone’s oxygen you’re not getting in.”
Made In Canada is built on Mercer’s trademark confrontational style. Richard Strong often directly addresses the camera. What’s different, though, is that Mercer is playing a character, not himself. He is acting. That is a substantial break from the trajectory of his comedy. It’s hard to get used to him playing someone else, despite the fact he plays recurring characters on This Hour.
Canadian satirists have traditionally used characters to make their comedy, adopting satiric masks when performing. Every great Canadian solo satirist from Don Harron (Charlie Farquharson) to Dave Broadfoot (Sergeant Renfrew) to Michael Magee (Fred C. Dobbs) shared this technique. Canadians, as a rule, do not like people who rock the boat. In America, where stand-up comedy was born, comedians can step forward and criticize. In Canada, they must create a character to criticize for them. That way, the comedian never elevates him or herself above the audience; the character takes the blame for any offence that may be caused.
Mercer represents the new breed of Canadian comedian. Had he grown up surrounded by American pop culture we could chalk his individuality up to Americanization. Mercer’s roots, however, are as un-American as you can get. Unlike comedians such as Jim Carrey and John Candy, he didn’t watch American TV. Mercer’s comic tastes were honed by watching the news and the popular eighties Newfoundland television show, The Wonderful Grand Band, which was enthusiastically regional. Inspired, he formed Corey and Wade’s Playhouse, a comedy troupe that performed Newfoundland-based sketch comedy. “People from Newfoundland are not afraid to say anything,” his producer Lunz maintains. “There’s a natural geographical barrier. They have the freedom to say what’s on their mind.”
Until this point in his career, Mercer was like every other Canadian satirist before him. During the Meech Lake debacle, however, his course changed. He read a column by Charles Lynch in a St. John’s newspaper. Lynch slammed Newfoundlanders for their stand on Meech Lake and wrote that although they were characters and good for a laugh, we’d be better off kicking them out of the country (with the exception of Gordon Pinsent). Mercer went berserk. He included a rant about Lynch in a routine he performed at a late-night cabaret in St. John’s. Lunz, who had begun working with CODCO in 1986 for the CBC, saw the show and was floored. He noticed the same savage comedic fire in Mercer as in the CODCO troupe, and encouraged Mercer to expand his Lynch material.
The result was his one-man effort Show Me The Button, I’ll Push It (or, Charles Lynch Must Die). Lunz asked Mercer if he would take the show to Ottawa, mission control for constitutional bickering. Mercer replied, “When do we leave?” Show Me The Button won Mercer national attention and was performed 140 times across the country. Mercer followed it up two years later with I’ve Killed Before: I’ll Kill Again, produced and directed by Lunz.
In 1993, Mercer joined This Hour and his metamorphosis from character comedian to social critic was complete. “It gets it out of your system,” he says of his ranting style of comedy. “You say the bad thing.” Mercer claimed his right to slam authority as an individual, not as a good Canadian collectivist. There was a sea change underway in the national psyche and Mercer’s popularity reflected the anger in Canadian society. While he vented his dissatisfaction on television, voters vented their anger by turfing out political parties: viz. the federal Tories in 1993. Mercer achieved his greatest success when he dropped the flimsy masks of his early stage work and stood up as himself.
”And now I’m trying to act and the people I’m acting with are talking about what they did at Stratford,” Mercer says with a sigh. “I’m a little intimidated.” The cast of Made In Canada consists of some of the more respected comedic actors in television, including Peter Keleghan, Leah Pinsent, and Dan Lett. Both Keleghan and Pinsent worked with Ken Finkleman on his CBC series The Newsroom. There will certainly be comparisons made between the two shows. Made In Canada also has a documentary feel, and, like The Newsroom, is shot in real offices.
But Mercer’s Richard Strong and Finkleman’s George Findlay are substantially different. Mercer’s junior-exec creates catastrophe and then exploits it. Finkleman’s producer reacted to events. Findlay was a baby-boomer; Strong is a baby-buster. He is under thirty and his victims are over forty. He practices intergenerational warfare. Finkleman’s character was neurotic and full of self-doubt. He is unwavering in his ambition. “We see the people who are totally unscrupulous and they get ahead,” Mercer says of his character’s appealing venality. “Richard is a chance for the audience to live out the thought that says ‘If I was a total bastard, I could do it too.’”
Richard Strong, as an archetype, has his roots in the morality plays of the late Middle Ages, in which characters personified human vice and virtue. Unencumbered by ethics, those representing vice (with names like Carnal Lust or Concpiscence of the Eyes) indulged in illicit desires. Shakespeare drew on these figures to develop some of his protagonists. Mercer says there’s a Richard III sensibility to his character – this Richard has no compunction, doesn’t care about consequences, and breaks the “fourth wall” in talking to us directly, as did Shakespeare’s Richard.
Throughout Made In Canada, Strong assumes that everyone he meets is a fraud who can be bought off and/or destroyed. They never disappoint. He uses free student labor to film a low-budget series by giving the students’ professor a “five-thousand-dollar option” on his doctoral thesis. He turns the death of the “star” Walter Franklin into a clever stock-option scam. He eliminates those with talent and hires those who are stupid. “She’s the smartest person in here and she’s in my department,” Strong says of a co-worker. “She’s got to go.”
Around midnight, five hours after they began their shooting day, Mercer and Leah Pinsent, as Richard and Veronica, finally enact their embrace. They have been thrown together to produce a “mill show,” a low-budget specialty-channel programme. The pair watch the day’s clips from a series on home birth, called “Such Is Life.” On a TV monitor, the Russian version is running. A bottle of wine nestles in an ice-cube-filled recycling bin. Veronica and Richard sit on a couch and exchange flirtations.
”Eight episodes in four languages,” she says. “That’s a good first day.”
”You do good work.”
”We do good work.”
”You think?” he asks.
”I think.”
Lips meet. Rockets flare.
In an earlier scene, Richard Strong had lambasted just the type of show he and Veronica have packaged. Mercer used his signature style of comedy, speaking directly into the camera, stationed about six inches from his face. The rant was combative, frank and pointed; the disgust almost palatable.
”The mill show, the bottom of the food chain,” Strong spat. “You never make just one episode, you make fifty-two of them. That’s the minimum. Assembly-line television. It’s not about quality. It’s about quantity. Make the most shows, with the least money, in the fastest time. Hire some mook to stand in front of the camera and cook, bake, sew, decorate, renovate, give advice, or show some old commercials, it doesn’t matter. As long as you can keep pumping them out. Five, six, seven, eight, ten episodes a day. It’s not about art. It’s about widgets.”
Mercer is no stranger to the genre. He himself is a “mook” who hosts a mill show for History Television called It Seems Like Yesterday, which runs old news footage summing up different weeks in history. Fifty-two episodes were produced last year, with five shows packaged each shooting day. Fifty-two more will be produced this year. “I’m not acting, I’m hosting. I’m just the cherry on top,” says Mercer, who obviously can play the TV game from both sides of the mirror.
After the Veronica and Richard screen kiss, in the makeshift greenroom the crew has carved out of Salter Street’s digs, thinking is the topic of conversation. Thinking and its complete absence in the television game. “These executives couldn’t run a corner store,” Mercer says. “Ninety-nine per cent of what’s on TV is there because it worked last year. If Ally McBeal worked, there’ll be sixteen Ally McBeal rip-offs.”
Earlier, Mercer had mentioned the importance viewers were bestowing on his rants on This Hour. He has even been asked to run for office. They don’t understand, he told me, that his ability to knock politics doesn’t endow him with answers. “Comedy is not rocket science and it’s not curing people of cancer. I rarely give answers. All I know how to do is make fun of politics. You point things out. Rarely do you offer solutions. That’s for thinking people, not TV people.”