Rick Mercer Report: The Book was the publishing phenom of 2007, hogging the top of the bestseller lists. Prime ministers' memoirs came and went, and RMR outstayed them all. And now it's back - bigger and better and funnier than ever.
Rick Mercer Report: The Paperback Book is an updated, expanded remix of its bestselling predecessor, containing 10,000 words of new material from the show's fifth season.
Rick's celebrated rants are some of the sharpest political commentary to be found anywhere in the country's media, and certainly the funniest. They are featured here, along with other moments from the show - including encounters with Conrad Black, Jean Chrétien, and Anne Murray - and many additional pieces, some of which first appeared on his website. Because when he's not jumping into a lake with David Suzuki or Bob Rae, or helping the leader of the Green Party kill a tree, Rick Mercer likes to relax by blogging. From Kabul, say. Or the bearpit of a leadership convention.
Rick Mercer Report: The Paperback Book will help you make sense of five extraordinary years in the life of Canada - or at least laugh despite them. "The most fun I've had in bed in a long time." —Shelagh Rogers, Sounds Like Canada Rick Mercer is Canada's sharpest and funniest political satirist. He first came to fame with "Show Me the Button I'll Push It, or Charles Lynch Must Die," a one-man show that toured across Canada. He co-created and was a resident performer on CBC's "This Hour Has 22 Minutes", and is now the host of "The Rick Mercer Report", the Corporation's highest-rated comedy show. Rick is co-chair of the Spread the Net campaign, dedicated to preventing the spread of Malaria in Africa, and has also campaigned for the Canadian AIDS Society's The Walk for Life project. His many honours include 21 Geminis and the Governor General's Performing Arts Award. He is from St. John's and currently resides in Toronto. The truth is I rarely know where I am going to be from one day to the next. My luggage has remained packed for over a decade and I have more long underwear than any city dweller in his right mind should need.
Over the last four years, while on the job, I have almost lost consciousness midair while doing aeronautics with Canada's Snowbirds, I have experienced intentionally induced hypothermia at the hands of a celebrated university professor in Winnipeg, I have made a five-thousand-foot free fall out of an airplane over Trenton, Ontario, and I have done donuts in the middle of Halifax harbour while operating a tugboat. I have faced death (or at the very least the possibility of severed thumbs) when lying "nose down, bum up" on a skeleton sled while hurtling down a bobsled track in Calgary. In Rockland, Ontario, I signed a waiver and got behind the wheel and joined a demolition derby.
My job description includes sleepovers at Stephen Harper's house and getting buck naked with Bob Rae.
Despite the latter two I am still convinced that I have the best gig in Canadian show business. And through it all I have managed to stay true to my one ultimate career goal—no heavy lifting.
The travel is the best part.
If you are lucky enough to spend time in the North it will change you. It will inform the way you feel about the country in a way that no amount of reading on the subject ever can. When you spend time eating raw caribou north of the tree line with a politician in Nunavut or listening to an Inuit hunter before he heads out alone on the ice to hunt a polar bear—those things tend to stay with you.
The same can be said for spending time on the Prairies, in Northern Ontario, Newfoundland, the oil sands of Alberta, or in any of the many Chinatowns or Little Indias that dot the country.
Canada has so many problems—and geography is often the root cause. For the size of the population we are simply too bloody big.
