Rick Mercer takes time to chat with 'The Citizen' ahead of Kitchener show
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
Comedy jack-of-all-trades Rick Mercer spent 15 years as host of the Rick Mercer Report (RMR), a satirical comedy show that strove to spend a little time each week showing off the unique people, places and events that make Canada into so much more than just a really big country.
RMR took Mercer from the biggest cities to the farthest flung corners of this great nation, and for 12 years, I had the privilege of playing a small part in helping it all come together each week as a researcher and member of the production team. Mercer was kind enough to sit down with The Citizen in his Toronto home for a wide ranging chat about the various ways he’s been engaging the nation since the golden age of television came to an end six years ago.
The conversation began with a challenge of factual accuracy from the man himself. “Has it been six years?” he asked with disbelief. “One of the advantages and disadvantages of my life is that timelines never really seem to have an impact on me. It surprises me that it’s been six.” A bit of temporal unsurety didn’t dampen his trademark enthusiasm for the task at hand. “I love talking to newspapers! I’m a huge newspaper fan - I’ve always been a huge newspaper fan. So I’m thrilled to do this. One of my favourite things in the world, after a lifetime of travel, is to sit on a plane with all the newspapers... you just consume media differently when it’s a newspaper in your hand than when you’re looking at it online.”
Mercer offered a charmingly macabre example of that difference. “In The Globe and Mail, they have the ‘Lives Lived’ section, which is someone writing about a notable individual who has passed away. It could be a famous person, or it could be, you know, a well-known botanist from Northern Ontario. And then there’s an ‘I Remember’ section, where someone just writes in and talks about remembering someone. You’re never going to read that online! How many times have I been flipping through the newspaper, and I see a photograph of a woman wearing a WWII uniform with a big obit, and I’m like ‘who’s she?’ And you read about her, and her incredible life. I’ve never looked up an obituary online. Unless it’s somebody I know that’s dead.”
It’s been a busy half dozen years for the Newfoundland funnyman. He’s starred in music videos, hosted Comedy Night with Rick Mercer, which featured stand-out stand-ups like Sophie Buddle and Dave Merheje, and his latest book, The Road Years: A Memoir Continued, hit shelves last October. Fans of iconic comedy pair-ups also got a bit of good news in February when it was announced that Mercer would be hitting the road for a cross-country comedy tour with Canadian singer-songwriter and RMR regular Jann Arden. The first stop on the Ontario leg of their “Will They or Won’t They” Tour will be in Kitchener this Saturday, with upcoming dates in Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton and London.
The impending tour came as a bit of surprise to Mercer. “Getting ready to go out on the road with Jann is a completely unexpected development. In my last book, I write about my relationship with Jann. You were there - it was odd that she became a regular on a show that didn’t have regulars.” Arden’s first appearance on RMR was intended to be a one-time thing, but the two performers hit it off, and the audience loved it. “She’s incredibly funny, and she’s a great friend. For the first many, many, many years of our friendship we only ever saw each other when we were working together on the show.”
“Jann episodes” became an annual tradition, and a crowd favourite. When the show ended, Mercer assumed that also meant the end of his time with Arden. But laughter, like life, finds a way. “I didn’t see it coming! Certainly, it was never discussed,” he explained. Their impending project started out as a simple book tour, which, in itself, was another development that took Mercer by surprise. “I guess when I wrapped up the Mercer Report, I was kind of wondering what it is I would do next. I didn’t know, but I certainly didn’t expect that it would be writing books. I got into the book-writing business, and I only did that because of the pandemic. There was literally nothing else to do. And I realized I really liked the book-writing part of the book-writing business.”
It just so happens that Arden also really likes the book-writing part of the book-writing business - her most recent book, The Bittlemores, came out a few weeks after Mercer’s. Joining forces just made sense. “I wrote a book, and she wrote a book, and her book was fiction and mine was non-fiction, and they were coming out at the same time, from the same publisher, so we decided to do these events together.”
Mercer and Arden made plans for four dates, which rapidly escalated in scope. “They wanted to give away the books at the events, so then they had to ticket the event, so then they were in real theatres, instead of bookstores.” Conflicting schedules meant the two had no time to discuss what they’d be doing before they stepped out onto a stage for the first time. All four shows went so well that they decided to keep the good times rolling after their book tour came to an end. They’re still not making any plans in advance, though. “I like to be a little more prepared than Jann, but it’s also not unlike when I was doing the TV show - as much as you could prepare, when you were doing things like jumping out of a plane, or whatever, you literally were working without a net. You can only prepare so much, and then, you know, things would go sideways. I’ve realized there’s a certain advantage to not having a safety net, and not having a plan.” The tour will take Mercer and Arden from coast to coast over the next few months.
Mercer is more than just a little familiar with life on the road - hence the title of his memoir. His travels with RMR brought him all over Canada, to which he attributes a lot of the show’s success. “I think people like seeing different parts of the country. It may be cliché, but I think that is an important part of the public broadcaster that, more and more, they’ve lost sight of. I grew up loving the CBC ‘cause I grew up loving regional programming. Really, I just stole that idea and did it on a national level. The stuff that I loved about CBC St. John’s, from my childhood, I just kind of did the same thing. We never tried to come across as big-city cool. I always hated that when I was a kid.”
Making a national program in Toronto just made sense, but Mercer and the RMR team never forgot that it was a show for all of Canada. “I was really aware of the fact, when we started the Mercer Report, that we did the show out of Toronto. We stood me on top of the CBC Broadcasting Centre, with the CBC logo and the CN Tower in our opening - you couldn’t get a more urban, big-city Toronto opening. We didn’t hide the fact that we were in Toronto... but the only time we shot in Toronto was when we needed money. That was the attraction of Toronto - it was cheap to go across the street to a convention centre and shoot a segment. We felt that what made the show great was flying somewhere, and then driving two and a half hours. That’s where the great segments were.”
A few of those great segments were actually filmed in communities that are familiar to Citizen readers, including Mercer’s 2010 visit to the International Plowing Match in St. Thomas, his deep dive into Walton’s dirt bike culture, and his trip to Kincardine where he thanked Kincardine District Senior School’s class of 2018 for their impressive fundraising effort for ‘Spread the Net,’ the charity Mercer co-founded to stop the preventable spread of malaria around the world. Mercer remembers filming those segments fondly. “Oh, Kincardine’s ‘Spread the Net’ episode was a great episode! They were a great school! And The International Plowing Match, of course, is famous. You can’t become the Premier of this province without partaking in the International Plowing Match, right? I bet every premier has done it.”
It’s obvious why the IPM appeals to Mercer - as the rural political event of the year, it’s got all of the makings of a great RMR segment. “It’s always one of those things... certain people, they can go, and enter the International Plowing Match, without worrying about it too much. I think I’m one of those people. I can just say ‘Sure, I’ll go! What kind of plowing? I’ll do it!’ But [for] some people, of course, it puts the fear of God into them.”
Since he’s stopped jumping out of planes, Mercer’s had some time to develop his agricultural skills. “I would not be able to speak with any authority on the agricultural industry, but I do have a ‘Farmers Feed Families’ sticker in my office, just 10 feet away. And I would never suggest that I’m a farmer, but, in the last 10 years, I’ve got a potato patch, I’ve got a carrot patch, I’ve got garlic coming this spring that I planted in the fall, and that is something that I’ve done now. I grow vegetables!”
Mercer finds a lot of value in spending time in both rural and urban locations. “I’m very grateful to have my foot in both worlds. I wouldn’t want to pick one, quite frankly. It seems a little bit absurd to pit one against the other. Somebody could grow up in a rural environment and then go live in the city for a while, go to school in an urban environment and then go back. And then there are all sorts of people like you. You didn’t grow up in a rural environment - well, there you are.”
RMR never brought Mercer to Blyth on official business, but, as a theatre fan, he’s had his eye on the village for a while now. “I love the Blyth Festival’s mandate! I happened to be talking to a young actor the other day who’s going to be in the anniversary production of The Farm Show... It’s an incredibly important show in Canadian theatre history - I mean, it essentially launched the collective movement in Canadian theatre, which had a huge impact in Newfoundland, of all places. Professional theatre in Newfoundland came about because of the collective movement... theatre in general is my favourite thing in the world to do. There’s no greater moment in my entire life than when the lights go down, and you’re in the theatre, and it’s pitch black - in that moment, anything is possible. I’m not the first person to say that.”
Live theatre is one of civilization’s oldest forms of creative expression, and Mercer believes in its staying power, even in a rapidly changing world. “Technology has played havoc with the way our world works, but none of that is going to have any impact on theatre. A.I. is not going to impact theatre. Streaming is not going to impact theatre. None of that stuff impacts theatre. Theatre is pure, and real - nothing will ever touch it. It’s as good as it ever was, if not better. It’s bulletproof.”
Rick Mercer and Jann Arden will be in Kitchener on Saturday, April 27 and London on Wednesday, May 15.