Rick Mercer could make folks chuckle. He is at the moment doing it as host of CBC-TV’s Comedy Evening with Rick Mercer, an hour-long program that includes Canadian stand-up comics.
And he is been making Canadians chuckle for a very long time. From 2004 to 2018, he starred on The Rick Mercer Report (initially Rick Mercer’s Monday Report) and earlier than that, he was a founding solid member of CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes. He was with the present from 1993 to 2001.
However even additional again, Mercer was incomes nationwide consideration. On Feb. 6, 1991, Mercer was a visitor on CBC-TV’s Noon to debate his new play, Present Me the Button: I am going to Push It (or Charles Lynch Should Die). The present, which premiered on the Nationwide Arts Centre in Ottawa in October 1990, was impressed by a controversial column by the journalist Charles Lynch. It was the Meech Lake period, and in Lynch’s opinion, Newfoundland was expendable insofar as Canadian Confederation was involved. Mercer was of a special thoughts, and in March of 1991, the play earned reward from the Globe and Mail‘s theatre critic Ray Conlogue. As Conlogue wrote on the time: the present was a “comedian battering ram that Mercer wields in opposition to a Canada he sees as conceited, bullying and dismissive of himself and his folks.”
Throughout Mercer’s Noon look he was joined by Lynch. Each males said their positions on this system. Mercer, then 21, stated he felt that Newfoundland’s enter wasn’t sought amid discussions of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990. The play had been his response.
Air illness
Playwright Rick Mercer provides a scathing commentary on the airline in mild of its new coverage on misplaced baggage. Aired Oct. 14, 1992 on CBC’s Noon.
Noon grew to become an everyday gig for Mercer, who started making occasional appearances on the noon-hour present affairs program later that yr. The “all-around wunderkind,” as host Tina Srebotnjak described him in 1992, delivered sharp monologues on subjects starting from royal commissions to Air Canada’s new technique for monitoring misplaced baggage.
And Mercer was nonetheless writing performs throughout that point. In October 1992, Globe and Mail theatre critic Liam Lacey described Mercer’s one-man present I’ve Killed Earlier than, I am going to Kill Once more as a “wildly imaginative story advised by an exceptionally intense and proficient performer.”
Early in 1993, Mercer was a visitor on the CBC late-night discuss present Friday Evening! with Ralph Benmergui to carry out a scene from that play. Throughout a chat with the host, hee stated playwriting was an ongoing pursuit for him.
“The Nationwide Arts Centre of Canada has commissioned myself and Gerald Lunz, who’s additionally the producer-director of I’ve Killed Earlier than, to write down a brand new play for his or her ’94 season,” he stated.
In line with the Nationwide Arts Centre web site, Mercer’s play Canada: A Good Place to Conceal reached the stage in 1995.
Canadians get to know the younger playwright from Newfoundland on a CBC discuss present. Aired on Feb. 5, 1993 on CBCs Friday Evening! with Ralph Benmergui.