Talking to Americans (2011)

Name: Talking to Americans
Released: 2011-03-30

Country: Canada
Rating: 8.5 of 10 from 2 voters
Elsewhere: IMDb

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How it feels

A Canadian comedian interviews Americans on the street about Canada. He gets them to agree with obviously false claims about the country. The bit satirizes how little Americans know about their northern neighbor.

satiricalplayfulfast-pacedlightheartedmischievousdeadpan

What happens

Talking to Americans was a regular feature presented by Rick Mercer on the Canadian political satire show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which was later spun off into a one-hour special that aired on April 1, 2001, on CBC Television. The purpose of the skit was to satirize American lack of awareness about Canada, by interviewing Americans on the street and convincing them to agree with ridiculous statements about their northern neighbour. Mercer freely acknowledged that he did not think Americans were collectively stupid; in an interview on Nightline, he explained: "I'm just looking for the short answer. Some people hem and haw and they seem to be on to me, and of course we don't include them.... About 80 per cent of the people give me the right answer, by which of course, I mean the wrong answer." He also acknowledged that it would be entirely possible to put together a similar feature getting Canadians to agree on camera to strange statements on topics they knew little about, with the primary difference being that Mercer could not do it himself because Canadians would recognize him. In his 2021 memoir Talking to Canadians, Mercer described the segment as having had its genesis in 1998, when he was in Washington, DC, to film an unrelated segment for 22 Minutes. While waiting to begin filming, he met a Capitol Hill staffer whose apparent willingness to talk freely about subjects he did not actually know anything about led to an impromptu filmed interview in which the staffer was asked questions about a fictional presidential summit between Bill Clinton and Ralph Benmergui, and was successfully convinced by Mercer that Canadians were unfamiliar with the concept of alphabetical order. On shooting the segment, Mercer wrote in his memoir: “I suppose I had a nagging feeling that 'Talking to Americans' was a tad unsportsmanlike. They didn’t stand a chance. It wasn’t just shooting fish in a barrel; it was more like throwing dynamite into a shallow pool. All I had to do was stand there with a net and scoop them up as they floated to the surface, completely oblivious to what was happening to them. And they just kept coming. It really was a great gig.” (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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