This Hour Has 22 Minutes
This Hour Has 22 Minutes (or simply 22 Minutes) is a Canadian television comedy. Begun in 1993, the show focuses on Canadian politics, combining news parody, sketch comedy and satirical editorials. The show is created by Mary Walsh.
The show features four Newfoundlanders on the desk (Cathy Jones, Rick Mercer, Greg Thomey and Mary Walsh) satirizing the weekly news and Canadian political events.
Rick Mercer left the show in 2001 and was replaced by Colin Mochrie for two seasons. Mochrie then left, replaced by Shaun Majumder.
Mark Critch was introduced on 22 Minutes in the tenth season as and still is a backup and a writer on the show. You may remember on This Hour when he was when he went to the Nokia Brier (a curling center) and argued with Stephen Harper on who should win the match between Alberta or Newfoundland and when he said, "The official name of the province now, Newfoundland and Labrador, how does that play into the thing? Are you worried about the dogs? If you have a Newfoundland dog, is that now a Newfoundland and Labrador dog? If you have a Labrador retreiver, is it now a Newfoundland and Labrador retriever? And if you have a Newfoundland-Lab mix, is it a Newfoundland and Labrador-Newfoundland and Labrador dog or what?" to a person or recently went trick-or-treating on Parliament Hill and at the end he dressed up as Jean Chrétien.
Gavin Crawford, Bette MacDonald and other young Canadian comics will be other extra backups (besides Critch) for Mary Walsh this season, as she has other film commitments and will only have six appearances this season.
22 Minutes is taped before a studio audience in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
This Hour Has 22 Minutes is in its eleventh season. It is produced by Salter Street Films, an Alliance Atlantis Company, and is broadcast on the CBC television network and Showcase for repeats.
The show's format is a mock news program, intercut with comic sketches and humorous interviews with public figures. These have included such well-known segments as Rick Mercer going out to eat at Harveys with Jean Chrétien; Colin Mochrie disguising himself as journalist Peter Mansbridge for insightful interviews with none other than Peter Mansbridge; Shaun Majumder visiting California, checking who would win the election for California governor (later won by Arnold Schwarzenegger); such luminaries as Paul Martin and Walter Cronkite putting Greg Thomey in a headlock; Cathy Jones giving marital advice to Canadian politicians; and a variety of segments with Mary Walsh's character Marg Delahunty crashing press conferences, hosting a "sleepover" for the nation's leading female politicians, and threatening to "smite" the likes of Mike Harris, Chrétien, Lucien Bouchard and Sheila Copps as Marg, Princess Warrior.
Another of its regular segments with Rick Mercer was turned into an enormously popular one-hour feature show titled "Talking to Americans".
The troupe's most famous joke was during the federal election campaign in 2000 (which was created and ranted by Rick Mercer). The Canadian Alliance proposed a mechanism to call for a national referendum when roughly 100,000 voters signed a petition calling for it concerning any subject. The show called on viewers to sign an on-line petition for a referendum to change Alliance leader Stockwell Day's first name to Doris. The show claimed to have obtained well in excess of 1,200,000 on-line signatures. Although this was cheerfully admitted to be a stunt unhampered by the rigours of an Elections Canada-controlled petition, and although it had no effect on Alliance policy, it did obtain international publicity for the show and contributed to the general air of farce surrounding Day's election campaign.
This Hour Has 22 Minutes is on CBC at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT on Friday nights.