As he played a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk on “Saturday Night Live” in March, veteran Canadian comedian Mike Myers was not intending to make a personal political statement. But when he stood onstage for the closing credits of the show, he said, “I got angrier and angrier.”
He thought about Musk’s remark that Canada is “not a real country,” and about how President Donald Trump had called the former Canadian prime minister “Governor Trudeau” and rudely referred to Canada as “the 51st state.” He thought about tariffs, and about graffiti he’d seen in Winnipeg, Manitoba: “There’s no greater pain than being betrayed by a friend.”
And he thought about legendary Canadian hockey player Gordie Howe and his famous “elbows up” response to aggression on the ice.
And so Myers, the 61-year-old star of the “Wayne’s World,” “Austin Powers” and “Shrek” films and a beloved figure on both sides of the Canadian-American border, boldly opened his down vest and flashed his “Canada Is Not for Sale” T-shirt on live television. “Elbows up,” he mouthed into the camera, twice.
“What happened came from my ankles and from my brain and from my heart, and it was not about me — it was about my country,” he said. “I wanted to send a message home to say that I’m with you, you know.”
As public acts of defiance on “SNL” go, the unveiling of Myers’ T-shirt was less shocking than, say, Irish singer Sinead O’Connor’s dramatic destruction of a photo of Pope John Paul II in 1992. But for the mild-mannered Myers, an expatriate who said that “no one is more Canadian than a person who no longer lives in Canada,” it was the moment the gloves came off.
“What’s happened has really hurt our feelings,” he said in a recent telephone interview that began when, in what felt like a classically Canadian move, he apologized for having hay fever and perhaps sounding a bit snuffly. “We love America. We love you guys. We don’t understand what this madness is.”
Myers moved to the United States in 1988 because “America is the entertainment capital of the world” and it was where his career took off, he said. Though he divides his time between New York and Vermont, he said he travels back home to Toronto often. He has an American wife, three American children and an American passport (alongside his Canadian one).
“I am also an American citizen, and I took my oath very seriously,” he said. “That’s what’s so crazy. Americans are the last people you would think would ever be a threat to us.”
In Canada, Myers has two streets named after him, appears on a postage stamp and in 2017 was named an officer of the Order of Canada for his work in comedy. He published “Canada,” a memoir-cum-Valentine to his native country, in 2016.
Emboldened by how his “elbows up” defiance on “SNL” caught on up north, Myers plotted an escalation of his political involvement.
“I consulted with my brothers, who are both, obviously, Canadian, as well as being very savvy politically and smart and funny,” he said. The result was a television ad for the Liberal Party, featuring Prime Minister Mark Carney and Myers — wearing a “Never 51” jersey — chatting beside a hockey rink. Though the race has been tightening, the Liberals have been buoyed by a surge of anger at Trump’s bellicose behaviour, and pollsters say they are favoured to defeat the Conservatives in Monday’s federal elections.
Inspired by “those World War II movies where they ask the fake Americans who won the World Series” as a way to unmask them, Myers said, he wanted the ad to be a reaffirmation of his own Canadianness as well as an endorsement of Carney.
“I wanted it to be like, ‘I know I don’t live there anymore, and let’s talk about that,’” he said. “I thought it would be funny if the prime minister of Canada ran an identity test on me.” (The part in which Myers correctly identifies Toronto’s “two seasons” as “winter and construction” was contributed by Myers’ best friend since childhood, David Mackenzie, he said.)
The ad shows that Carney, in addition to being a former governor of the Bank of England, has fine comic timing. “I think he’s very reasonable,” Myers said of Carney. “He’s taken a calm, resolute, articulate stance in defence of our sovereignty.”
Myers was an “SNL” cast member from 1989 to 1995. He’s now appeared three times this season as Musk, who is originally from South Africa but who was raised in Canada. (At one point, Myers had Musk make a classic Dr. Evil pinkie gesture.)
“To the extent that Elon Musk is involved in our democratic government, it goes against how I feel as a Canadian,” he said of Musk’s slash-and-burn approach. “We don’t have a distrust of the government. We have a belief in good government.”
And comedy is one way Myers can make that point, he believes.
“Fascism doesn’t like to be ridiculed; it likes to be feared,” he said. “Satire is an important tool in the toolbox to say that this is not normal — that the cuts he’s making are not normal.”
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