Rick Mercer Report: The Paperback Book by Rick Mercer (Review)

Released September 2008 (Anchor Canada) * 320 pages * ISBN 13: 9780385665193

If you haven’t heard of Rick Mercer, I have only three guesses:

• You’ve been living under a rock.
• You have no sense of humour.
• You’re not Canadian.

The first two I can’t help you with, but if you’re not Canadian then you should know that Rick Mercer is a comedian, a satirist, and all around delightfully twisted soul (which isn’t really all that uncommon up here in Canada, but Rick Mercer happens to make a living at it). If you’re American, think of Rick Mercer as our Jon Stewart — only more twisted and with better access to our politicians, er, I mean targets.

This book is a follow up to Streeters which was also a collection of Rick Mercer’s trademark rants. This time the book includes not only rants featured on The Mercer Report (previously known as The Monday Report until CBC moved it) but also rants that have appeared on Mercer’s blog.

The rants are typical Mercer (that’s good). The only complaint I had about the book had to do with the way rants are grouped by topic and sometimes the chronology of the rants is mixed up in order to make a better read. That gets a bit annoying when you are constantly going back and forth through time within a single topic.

If you watch the show regularly and read his blog, you’ve likely seen all the content before, but it is nice to have it in book form. I don’t read the blog so there were rants that I hadn’t seen before as well as ones that I remember from the show. It is a good book to pick up, read a few pages, and put down without losing any of the impact of the rants (or read it all the way through if you’re so inclined).

Most of the rants are political satire, so a knowledge of Canadian politics and current events is needed. Think of trying to watch Jon Stewart with no knowledge of American culture or politics and you’ll realize why.