Comedian Rick Mercer is coming to town as part of an event outside his comfort zone (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cI remember a point when we had only been on the air five or six weeks, and the CBC put us on election-night coverage,\u201d says Mercer. \u201cSome people were aghast when we did a conga line around the news desk, chanting, \u2018Mulroney is no more.\u2019 People were freaking out, thinking they had cut to a CBC news desk in Halifax and thought they had caught us doing a conga line.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mercer says that his sense of humour led him to maintain a professional image while he sat at the show\u2019s desk.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always played it straight when sitting at a newsdesk,\u201d says Mercer. \u201cCertainly on 22 Minutes<\/i> they\u2019ve moved away from that over the years, and that\u2019s fine, but it was always my preference. If someone is tuning in for the first time, I want them to think they\u2019re watching a real news anchor, so there was no mugging or making faces, or any behaviour that you wouldn\u2019t see a regular news anchor exhibit.\u201d<\/p>\n
While he was best known for his rants on politics and current events, Mercer says that he also finds physical humour funny.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike anyone in comedy, I like to think that I\u2019ve got a sophisticated sense of humour,\u201d says Mercer. \u201cI always loved the fact that the format at the Mercer Report<\/i> allowed me to do straight-up satire and political commentary, but it also allowed me to do sketches where the entire joke was a guy getting kicked in the stones repeatedly by someone from the tax department. That was the entire joke, but it was funny.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mercer has been in the spotlight for 26 years. He\u2019s received the Order of Canada, he\u2019s won Geminis, and he\u2019s published several books, but he felt the time was right to move on and try something he doesn\u2019t do too often: Mercer is part of the Just for Laughs Comedy Night in Canada tour, which features comedians Ivan Decker, Debra DiGiovanni, Ali Hassan, and Sophie Buddle.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis tour that I\u2019m going on is certainly stretching me because I\u2019m going out on the road with three of the finest standups in Canada,\u201d says Mercer. \u201cThat\u2019s not something I\u2019ve done a whole lot of. I did a Just for Laughs tour 15 or 16 years ago. I learned a lot, <\/i>and I\u2019m expecting the same thing will happen again. It\u2019s certainly challenging and nerve wracking, but I think you have to do those things every now and then. If I wanted to take it easy, I would have done the Mercer Report<\/i> again this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just for Laughs Comedy Night in Canada
\n7 pm and 9:30 pm Saturday, November 16
\n$63.80, Farquhar Auditorium, UVic
\nuvic.ca\/farquhar<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Long before Donald Trump hijacked the term \u201cfake news,\u201d a little known comedy show called This Hour Has 22 Minutes hit the CBC airwaves. About a decade before the satire boom that brought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to prime time south of the border, Canadians had developed a taste for the medium. 22 Minutes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18526,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,243],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-november-6-2019"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18525"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18573,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18525\/revisions\/18573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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