Tariff skit from This hour has 22 minutes, with Mark Critch.CBC/Supplied
“War is no time for soft cheezies!”
This Hour Has 22 Minutes went viral this past week as trade war with the U.S. loomed with a sketch penned by veteran cast member Mark Critch in which he played a patriotic man confronting a shopper in a grocery store – knocking Cheetos out of his hands and replacing them with Hawkins Cheezies.
Capturing the mood of Canadians planning their resistance at the cash register to Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs, Critch’s short comic scene has so far amassed more than 11 million views on TikTok – and more than five million others in separate videos posted on Facebook and Instagram.
Even on YouTube, where it didn’t quite take off in the same way, it has more than 800,000 views.
Those are particularly impressive numbers in a country where a show on linear TV that hits one million viewers is considered a hit.
Though, of course, online, it wasn’t just Canadians laughing at Critch’s jokes about how hard it is to tell American brands from Canadian ones. (“Boston Pizza, New York Fries – basically, if there’s an American city in the name, it’s probably Canadian.”)
Critch’s son, who produces K-pop music, had pals in Korea send the sketch to him – and a friend of his who lives in the United Arab Emirates told him it popped up in one of his group chats.
“Sometimes people go like, ‘Is it too Canadian? Is it too specific? Is it too local?’” he said, in a phone interview this week. “People will figure it out; they have local things too.”
Critch wrote the first draft of his buy-Canadian sketch in about three minutes flat. “Those are always the ones that work,” he says. “If you’re pondering, if you’re rubbing your chin, pacing back and forth, just walk away.”
Of course, that three minutes of work was based on more than 22 years of experience working on 22 Minutes – and being able to anticipate where the country’s politics and populace were headed.
Critch, who first joined the show in 2002 as a writer, first pitched the idea at the weekly Tuesday morning meeting on Jan. 21. Later that week, Critch, co-star Chris Wilson and the production team filmed it on location at a Halifax store – pausing whenever someone needed to use the cash register.
The sketch aired on CBC on the Jan. 28 episode and was up on the socials the next day just in time for an intense, unusual burst of nationalistic fervour that led Canadian hockey fans to boo the American anthem at NHL and NBA games.
This wasn’t Critch’s first time writing a 22 Minutes sketch that went viral. The very first was one he penned in 2010, in which he got Gordon Pinsent to read aloud from Justin Bieber’s memoirs – it took off on YouTube.
The difference back then was, when it got more than one million views, broadcaster CBC was, believe it or not, angry and made 22 Minutes take the sketch down and put it up on its own website.
“Everything had to go through, you know, cbc.ca-slash-programs-slash-comedy-slash-episodes-slash Oct. 15, and then you had to go watch three car ads,” Critch says about those days.
CBC has since allowed the comedy show to capitalize on the fact that its content is easy to cut up and put on short-form video sites – and in the last few years, it’s built a younger audience (and renewed its wider relevance) on TikTok where the best sketches regularly rack up more than one million views.
Indeed, 22 Minutes is planning a clip show for next week (airing Feb. 11) that is based around its most viral sketches of this season.
“I went to the bank the other day, and the guy behind counter he said, ‘You’re the guy from TikTok,’” says Critch, who is also the creator and co-star of the popular CBC semi-autobiographical sitcom Son of a Critch.
These days, 22 Minutes will even throw short comedy clips up online after Monday tapings in Halifax, but before the show is available on CBC Gem and on CBC on Tuesday. This week, Critch quickly wrote a monologue for Donald Trump – who he plays on the show – about backing down on the tariff threat. It was put up online as a teaser for the show.
“I did the impossible, I made peace with Canada and ended the unjust trade war that I started,” his take on Trump said. “But then, like a Groundhog, I saw my shadow, and so there’ll be 30 more days of threatening tariffs.”
That clip’s doing well in a more conventional sense – 650,000 views on TikTok and counting as of writing this.
Says Critch, whose Trump impression is up there with the best of them: “I don’t like doing him too much, but it’s kind of good to have villain, I think, for comedy.”
