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Talking to Americans


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Talking to Americans was a segment that aired with This Hour has 22 Minutes in 2000 – 2001. It was stopped after September 11 for obvious reasons.

It widely known that Americans have little to no knowledge of the Canadians to their North. This segment capitalizes on this lack of knowledge.

The host Rick Mercer convinces average Americans, politicians and even the leader of the free world of completely ridiculous facts regarding Canada. If you hail from the United States of America you probably will not find this funny at all, and you will probably be highly annoyed as many Americans are.

The standard question asked by most people upon seeing this is what is how many people out of those interviewed see through the joke. Rick Mercer stated in an interview that about 1 out of 20 Americans caught on to joke.

Here are some clips from the show I discovered.

Rushmore

Arkansas

Iowa

Woody

Springer

Provinces

Gore

Bush

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Lol, Desmond, take it easy. Some Americans are dumb, some Norwegians are dumb, some Canadians are dumb and so on! Just that he got some dumb American interviews (As far as i know), so in this case, it was the Americans that felt pretty bad :muaha:

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I bet if an American did show of this type of show for any other nation, he'd get similar results. And even if most caught on, he would of course only air those that didn't caught on since that whats the most entertaining. Always remember that not everything you see or hear on the is total fact and has be tweaked around by others. :muaha:

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Nothing tops the one where Rick was in Florida asking the opinion of people of whether Canada should bother constructing a navy seeing as we lack access to any body of water and if they supported the idea that Canada should borrow American ports.

If there was an American version of this segment it would be a lot more challenging to come with questions as American culture is shoved down every other countries throat.

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I would then ask to Canadians what they know about our northern neighbor...

"Hi, I'm Ugo, and I want to ask you questions about Greenland, or Kalaalit Nunaat. Do you know who lives there? What's with them? What languages do they speak north there?..."

Most Canadians won't be able to answer you : No body cares about a small north country, when you're in a bigger one. I indeed understand that Kalaalit Nunaat is not as well known internationally than Canada, but we must keep our perspective : There are around the world bigger countries than Canada, here, we try to learn about the world around us, if we get to meet the world, because we are small. But we'll always fall to bigger countries, or even regions that can have totally different people : who could tell that Iranians are the old Persians, and that they are related to us by language, and that they grew a link with the arabic world only when Islam entered? In my family, they cannot distinguish between a Chinese and a Japanese, an that gives me problems, for I learn Japanese, not Chinese (which is actually only a written language)...

I'm a lucky one who tries to distinguish the most between people, but there are so many cultures around the world it just freaks my head out! And you cannot fully categorzie, everyone being different.

And I know about Kalaalit Nunaat (Danish : Gronland), a Autonomous region of Danemark, whose official languages are Danish and Inuktitut (Greenlandic), the last one being the most known. Their two letter ISO code is GL.

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Nothing tops the one where Rick was in Florida asking the opinion of people of whether Canada should bother constructing a navy seeing as we lack access to any body of water and if they supported the idea that Canada should borrow American ports.

If there was an American version of this segment it would be a lot more challenging to come with questions as American culture is shoved down every other countries throat.

I remember one when he asked about the fact that we got rid of the edderly by putting them on little blocs of ice in the northern ocean and letting them die there...freezing to death.

The question was : Should we stop doing that...plz sign a petition...

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lol :nod:

It's somehow hard to speak to French from France...because your vocabulary somehow differs from ours.

I had a friend who'd come here to visit and told me he wanted to buy some "baskets" and I didn't understand it meant running shoes :)

but now I'm OT...back on topic :indifferent:

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(beer.gif

Indeed Uppy ... but we do that only with Americans to counter their arrogance ... :)

And maybe you think it is a pain to talk to a French person because at least it is the only person who will dare saying out loud what the other people think ... :nod:

Well Curu you have sertinaly (Sp?) not meat my dad. He says the truth about everything and he is American. :indifferent:

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