'News is just comedy without the punchline'

The upcoming U.S. election is uniquely high-stakes — although, to be fair, it feels like we've been saying that for close to a decade now. Still, with one party's candidate surviving not one, but two assassination attempts; the other party swapping candidates mid-stream; and some commentators saying that American democracy itself is on the ballot, you have to wonder how the hell political satirists are supposed to find humour in all this.

Dan Dillabough says it's actually quite easy. Dillabough is one of the field correspondents for the This Hour Has 22 Minutes Has 44 Minutes: A U.S. Election Special, which airs Monday, Nov. 4. He's spent the last several months criss-crossing the United States, talking to Americans, decoding American politics for Canadians and finding the funny in a highly fraught election.

"The most satisfying thing is when the stakes are so intense and so monumental," he says. "[That's] when you really want to dig in and look for the gold."

For Dillabough, one of the funniest developments in this election cycle has been the number of podcast appearances the candidates have had to make.

"Now, it's like the podcasters are the real influencers and the real deciders," he says. "So you have two people vying for the most important job in the world, and they're slumming it in a basement with all these deranged weirdos. And it makes sense, because that's how you get your message out. But it's just such a wild shift from the idea of what a presidential campaign should be, that it should be very austere and sort of fancy, and yet Trump is talking about doing blow [with] Theo Von. That shift is a very silly one and a very fun one to watch."

Peter McBain executive produced the special. He says that "news is just comedy without the punchline." And he would know: prior to working with 22 Minutes, McBain held a number of positions in CBC's actual news operations, giving him a unique perspective on political satire. He says that political satire and comedy news also provide an opportunity to reach across political divides and create understanding.

"So much of the news is, like, you're watching a rally from a politician, you're watching an ad; you're not actually getting to challenge real people on the street about what they think," he says. "And often, in that moment, when you can make somebody laugh, you can make a connection that you might not have thought was there with somebody who might have very different beliefs than you."

Dillabough says that two moments of his American experience particularly stand out to him. One was at a Trump rally in Michigan, where he met a man in the parking lot who was waving an American flag that was so large, it wasn't actually allowed inside the building. 

"He told us he was at Jan. 6, that he waved this flag at the Capitol Building," Dillabough says. "And it was like, the way he talked about it, it was like the happiest day of his life … And I was they wouldn't let him into the rally with the flag. So he was just kind of in the parking lot. But it was very compelling, very sad and, like, weirdly beautiful, in a way."

The other was when they ran into disgraced former Republican congressman George Santos in New York City. 

"He was out and about doing interviews," Dillabough says. "And he gave us tips for how the Trump campaign could sort of clear up their messaging and be more appealing to the LGBTQ community. We were very fortunate to run into one of America's greatest weirdos. That was a real treat for me."

Both McBain and Dillabough say that, while Canadians often think we're very similar to Americans, being as they're the source of most of our popular culture, the two countries are actually very different — and the further you get from the border, the more apparent that becomes. 

"There are certain states, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, that we Canadians understand quite a bit," says McBain. "Pennsylvania's got two hockey teams, it's got about 14 million people, it's an industrial place, so it's a lot like Ontario. The weather in Michigan is just like Ontario. When you get a little further afield, it tends to be even more foreign for a Canadian. Like in Florida. You know, we have lots of Canadians in Florida, but boy, it's a different place."

Those differences became apparent in a million different ways, from having to wait for college football games to end before they could conduct interviews to learning that — for Philadelphians — one's favourite cheesesteak place can say a lot about who you are as a person.

For Dillabough, the thing that stuck out the most was discovering the extent to which "purple" swing states matter in a presidential election.

"When we were in San Francisco or D.C., we didn't see any kind of lawn signs or anything," he says. "I think because people are so like, 'We've got it in the bag.' It's not an issue. Whereas in Michigan, like, every house has a lawn sign, and on the same street you have [alternating] Harris, Trump, Harris, Trump. Every other TV commercial is a political ad. There's a very sort of omnipresent sense of 'this is a battleground, this is where it will be decided.' And the people we talked to, you kind of get that sense from them. Like, 'This is our moment to really show up for our candidate.'"

What struck McBain the most was how many things Americans vote on. In many parts of the country, you're not just voting for president, governor and congressional representative, but also for things like mine inspector and even coroner. And it's for that reason that he's actually slightly less worried about the future of American democracy than some other commentators.

"There's a lot of concern, and rightly so, about 'Will democracy survive?'" he says. "But in America, they vote all the way down the ballot. They're voting for judgeships. They're voting for district attorneys, prosecutors, state representatives, I mean, thousands of city commissioners and city clerks and the mine inspector in Arizona. It goes deep. And so that's actually a really encouraging thing — that democracy, for Americans, is so built into their culture. There are concerns, obviously, about the rhetoric from one side, [but] when you really get down and talk to people who have their lawn signs out and they're knocking on doors, this is a huge part of their culture, being able to vote for all these positions. There's so much passion about it that I think democracy is a lot more resilient than we might give it credit for."

This Hour Has 22 Minutes Has 44 Minutes: A U.S. Election Special airs Monday, Nov. 4 at 8 p.m. (8:30 NT) on CBC, and will stream on CBC Gem.