Tuesday, Oct. 21. 11:00 a.m.
It’s the morning after the Blue Jays made it into the World Series in dramatic Game 7 fashion.
Jordan Foisy, like probably a million other Canadians across the country, is at work, watching a video over and over of Sportsnet correspondent Hazel Mae interviewing an emotional Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Head writer Jordan Foisy at the writers pitch session for This Hour Has 22 Minutes on Oct. 21, in Halifax.
Unlike others doing this, however, Foisy – head writer on CBC’s weekly Halifax-shot satirical comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which, now in its 33rd season, has been around since the Jays last played in the Fall Classic – is listening carefully to the phrasing and cadence of the questions and responses, imagining how to parody them for a sketch where a Mae-like sportscaster will burst into a fan’s living room.
“‘Tell me what the emotions are Vladdy,’” Foisy says aloud, typing into a Google Doc shared with the showrunner Mike Allison and the other writers on the show.
Around the table from him, writers Clare Belford and Kyle Hickey start spit-balling ideas for the trials and tribulations these fans might have been through in the postseason.
“You guys have watched some big playoff games. How is this one different?” Foisy asks them, riffing on another of Mae’s questions.
“Well, I’ve been diagnosed as celiac,” Belford offers, as a mock-emotional response from a baseball-watching veteran. “But my buddies, they were flexible with the snacks.”
Clare Belford and other writers for the sketch show have continued to create a format that has endured since 1993.
The room loves this – and Hickey rolls with it, adding exuberantly: “My cousin Sal came through with the cauliflower-crust pizza, yeah!”
Behind-the-scenes topical comedic TV in the U.S. has always been subject of intense fascination – which reached fever pitch recently through the international incident that occurred when Jimmy Kimmel Live! was briefly pulled from ABC under pressure from Donald Trump’s administration.
This Hour Has 22 Minutes – produced out of the Light House Arts Centre in downtown Halifax ever since CBC shuttered its studio in town – is pretty much all Canada has in this department. It’s a mix of news satire like The Daily Show with sketch comedy like Saturday Night Live – a format that has not only endured with subtle tweaks since 1993, but risen again in popularity in recent years.
Indeed, social media has taken the best 22 Minutes sketches to millions beyond its linear viewership, which is still respectable in its peer group. The Oct. 21 episode, recorded a day earlier in front of a live audience, will get 386,000 viewers on CBC; by comparison, an average of 550,000, in a country with more than eight times the population, tune into the The Daily Show’s Monday episodes with Jon Stewart. (22 Minutes’ additional viewership on CBC Gem, like most numbers related to the public broadcast’s streaming service, are not public.)
I’ve come to Halifax to watch how the Oct. 28 episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes comes together over the seven days leading up to it. What first hits me – and perhaps this is obvious – is just how hard it is to write time-sensitive comedy that will keep for seven days. Writer Peter Anthony frets that ”You’re Going to the World Series” – as the collectively written fan sketch becomes known – will air on a night that the Jays might be swept by the Dodgers.
But Foisy believes the premise has legs. “For me the hook of this sketch is less about the Jays and more about the weariness of a playoff run for a fan.”
He has no idea the episode he’s writing the sketch for will air the day after an 18-inning game.
Wednesday, Oct. 22. 11:45 a.m.
Cast and crew crowd in a room for the first read-through, on Oct. 22.
While the baseball fans among 22 Minutes staff writers were tired Tuesday after watching Game 7 on Atlantic Time, it’s nothing compared to Wednesday morning and the first read-through of sketches.
Hickey, a stand-up originally from Nova Scotia who recently relocated back from Toronto, is a parent of two young children. After working on the “You’re Going to the World Series” sketch yesterday, he went home and was with his kids until bedtime, then wrote solo sketches again from 8 p.m. until 1 a.m.
Kyle Hickey and other writers for the show submitted 50 sketches to be considered for the week's episode.
He then set an alarm for six in the morning and got another hour of writing in before dropping the kids off – and spent another hour afterward polishing before hitting his 9:30 a.m. deadline.
That’s a lot of work for sketches that might not even make today’s read: Showrunner Allison has already culled down 50 submitted sketches to 25.
Just before 11 a.m., 22 Minutes’ current cast – who all write on the show as well – file in to the writer’s room for a cold read of contenders. They are, in order of seniority, Mark Critch (around since 2002), Trent McClellan (2017), Aba Amuquandoh (2021), Stacey McGunnigle (2021) and Chris Wilson (2023).
Mark McKinney, a sketch legend from The Kids in the Hall, is there too; he’s been an off-and-on guest performer playing Mark Carney to Critch’s Trump and Wilson’s Pierre Poilievre.
The small, long writer’s room is soon packed with as many production heads and staff as can fit – though all eyes are on Michael Donovan, the executive producer eminence grise who’s been with the show since its 1993 premiere (back when Cathy Jones, Mary Walsh, Rick Mercer and Greg Thomey made up the cast).
Donovan is described to me in a whisper as the Lorne Michaels of 22 Minutes, referring to the creator and producer of Saturday Night Live. But he himself tells me later that Allison, like showrunners before him, has the creative control Michaels does on SNL.
Mark McKinney (centre), an off-and-on guest performer on the show, sits between cast members Mark Critch (left) and Trent McClellan (right) at the first read-through.
12:00 p.m. Boardroom
After the morning read, Allison and Donovan join Foisy and executive producer Tracey Jardine from Islands of Misfits, the TV company that currently produces 22 Minutes, for what is called the “pick me” meeting.
The titles of the 25 potential sketches are written on index cards and put on a whiteboard with magnets. Allison sorts them into three areas of the board, which he describes, diplomatically, as “like, kind of like and not as much.”
Only six can be taped this week on Thursday and Friday.
Cast members Aba Amuquandoh (top) and Stacey McGunnigle have been with the show since 2021.
There’s not much of a fight. Five of Allison’s “like” pile, including “You’re Going to the World Series,” stay there through the meeting. Ultimately, “Carney Slow Talk” – a resurrected Wilson/McGunnigle/Nigel Grinstead idea from last season in which a bird nests in the PM’s hair as he gives a speech – is rescued from the “kind of like” pile through Donovan’s advocacy.
The choices are partly about the how the reading went, but a lot about pragmatism – such as the desire to capitalize as much as possible on the presence of McKinney while he’s in town. (As Critch, who has the most sketches selected, says later, it helps to write to the show’s needs: “There’s funny and then there’s current and then there’s shootable.”)
The “pick me” process has been the opposite of agonizing because it can’t afford to be. Within 10 minutes, the boardroom is flooded with heads of departments.
Siobhan Kennedy-Cameron, 22 Minutes’ long-time sage-like production manager, helms this meeting – in which so much is communicated through shorthand and shared looks that I have to ask her to decode it for me afterward.
In it, set designers Iain MacDonald (the only staffer other than Donovan who’s been around all 33 seasons) and Tony Owen flip through binders of images of past sets stored in the basement that could turn into Dr. Frankenstein’s lab for a Bride of Frankenstein sketch penned by Dan Dillabough. Locations manager Andrew McInnes starts to search for a house in Halifax that could double as Rideau Cottage for a Carney trick-or-treating sketch penned by Critch. Props head Greg Baller sources vintage microphones for a sketch that will see McLellan play Ray Parker Jr. recording the Ghostbusters theme in 1984.
Flash forward a couple of hours to the proper 3:15 production meeting, where each sketch’s logistics are reviewed with its writers, and the big question about “You’re Going to the World Series” is the ending where a fan gets a bucket of Gatorade poured on him.
“There’s lots of ice in the Blue Jays buckets,” says art director Andy Miller. “Do you wanna see ice?”
“I want it to look as close to the thing as I can without it, you know, ruining everyone’s day,” Foisy says.
Miller nods. “We’ll put the actor in a kiddy pool. We’ll lose any rug. It’ll be on vinyl floor. Plastic down. Mops all around.”
Meeting adjourned.
Thursday, October 23. 11:00 am. The Studio.
When 22 Minutes correspondent Dan Dillabough tried to do a field piece with Poilievre in 2024 at a “Spike the Hike” rally in Halifax, the politician promised him that after he was elected: “You will have to earn a living rather than getting it from taxpayers’ money.”
If I learn one thing watching 22 Minutes get made, it’s that the 100-odd people who work on the show each week definitely earn their living.
Less than 24 hours after a Dillabough-penned Bride of Frankenstein sketch got the green light, designers, construction team, scenic painter and set dresser have built a credible lab for Dr. Frankenstein – played by McKinney – from the materials stored on site in the studio.
Director of photography Kevin Fraser and sketch director Allison Johnston have watched the relevant scene from 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein on loop to block the homage. Wilson has already been at work for hours, getting into the elaborate hair and makeup, while working with Foisy to refresh “Carney Slow Talk” to reflect the prebudget speech the Prime Minster gave in Ottawa the night before.
The spin-off effect of that rewrite is that the designers have quickly scrapped a previously planned LED screen background for a physical set backed by flags that looks like where Carney spoke, a more timely visual reference.
“Bride” is the first sketch that McKinney has done for 22 Minutes in recent memory in which he is not playing Carney – and, when the shoot goes over time, he has to transform into the PM in 30 minutes instead of an hour and a half.
“If you do sketch, you’re gonna wind up having days like this and you just roll with it,“ McKinney says, as his mad-doctor makeup is removed. “One of the great things about doing sketch is that everybody is kind of last minute-ing it and full of energy and hyper-focused on it – and things will get funnier as a result.”
Behind the scenes of the The Bride of Frankenstein sketch shoot.
Monday, Oct. 27. 11 a.m. Writer’s room.
Monday begins with a cast read-through of “copy jokes” – headlines, followed by quick punchlines. The 30 that are read – and will be recorded in front of the live studio audience that night – have been whittled down from the 300 originally penned by writers on Thursday.
An average of 5.61 “copy jokes” make it into each episode according to a spreadsheet the numerically inclined showrunner Allison shares with me, but material on 22 Minutes gets updated all day as new jokes based on breaking news get swapped in.
A whole section of this episode now reflects a sudden pique of Trump’s − to add a 10-per-cent tariff to Canada in response to Doug Ford’s Ronald Reagan ads.
Over lunch, Foisy tells me that the scripts have been updated at the last minute much more often since the petulant POTUS’s return to the White House.
I ask the 22 Minutes head writer how what happened with Kimmel earlier this fall affects the way he thinks about his job. The way he sees it, Foisy says, is that political comedy isn’t essential for liberal democracy, but liberal democracies inevitably produce political comedy.
“People just want to see people telling jokes about the news,” he says. “It certainly doesn’t stop fascism. It doesn’t stop anything. But it provides catharsis. It provides a release.”
Noon. The studio.
This year, the show's set has been refreshed.
Rehearsals for 22 Minutes’ sixth episode of its 33rd season begin on the show’s set, which is fresh this season – with a new “desk” at the centre that the anchor-comics stand behind (as they have since Peter Mansbridge first stood up at The National) flanked by a horizontal and vertical video wall and backed by an up-to-date LED screen wall.
During a pause, I see Miller, the art director, going around wiping the platforms of the set with a dusting glove. It’s below his pay grade – so I ask him about it.
“No one else would notice, but I would notice,” Miller says. “For me, it’s sacred. It’s an altar of comedy.”
Director Allison Johnston and Mark Critch before the rehearsal of the live sketches.
7 p.m. The studio.
Aba Amuquandoh and Chris Wilson rehearse a live sketch.
I take my seat for a taping of 22 Minutes. Hickey, one of the writers, puts on his stand-up hat to warm up the crowd – making jokes, handing out merch and asking the audience members where they are from. This week, most are from Atlantic Canada, but there’s an atypically large contingent from the Greater Toronto Area and a couple over all the way from England.
22 Minutes demographics have changed since CBC started uploading its sketches to social media: This week, a Trent McClellan field piece in which he plays a N.I.C.E. agent stopping American tourists on the Halifax boardwalk to ask to see their phones – in order to see cute pictures of their pets and grandkids – has amassed more than five million views across platforms. It’s the first truly viral sketch of the season.
During the taping, Allison is in the control booth measuring audience reaction to each joke – he ranks it on a scale of one to 10 – and, in a spreadsheet, starts arranging a cut of the show that will go out to CBC.
Trent McClellan and Mark Critch prepare to rehearse live sketches.
This Hours Has 22 Minutes’ running time is actually 21 minutes and 19 seconds, and a taping features twice as much material as makes it into any given show.
At 8:15 p.m., there’s one final meeting in Allison’s office where he, Donovan and Foisy go over what stays and what has to go.
The “You’re Going to the World Series” sketch has, against all odds, made it from pitch to shoot to the first rough edit that Allison has assembled. It survived the first sketch cull, the pick-me meeting and concerns over how to dump a cooler full of Gatorade on the set. And, in advance of the live taping, it was posted to Instagram and TikTok owing to its topicality.
But the sketch doesn’t make it into the actual episode. The studio audience didn’t laugh as much as everyone had hoped – and it’s bumped for, of all things, a desk piece about the NDP leadership race that overperformed thanks to McGunnigle’s delivery.
Maybe the Lorne Michaels of 22 Minutes isn’t Donovan or Allison, but the folks who show up to watch it live. Donovan certainly believes it’s why 22 Minutes has survived 33 years and continues to connect: “The key to the show is the audience – this Halifax audience, this Nova Scotia, Maritime audience.”
