The Current - 22 Minutes’ Mary Walsh on life’s highs and lows

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Most Canadians know comedian Mary Walsh from her iconic characters on the CBC TV show, This Hour has 22 Minutes.But the story of Mary Walsh's life goes far beyond her comedic and acting triumphs. She tells those stories in her new book, a collection of essays about the highs, and the lows. We talk to Mary Walsh about her life and her new

This week on two blocks from the White House, we're talking about a Supreme Court decision that could have a big impact on American elections. The decision narrows, some argue guts the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and it's expected to lead to a major redrawing of electoral maps. Join me, Paul Hunter, and my fellow Washington correspondents, Katie Simpson and Willie Lowry as we break down U.S. politics from a Canadian perspective. Find and follow two blocks from the White House, wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. If you ask most Canadians about the comedian Mary Walsh, they might tell you about some of her iconic characters on the CBC television program this hour has 22 minutes,

characters like Marg Dela Huntie, Princess Warrior, Dickie Dunn, and Mrs. Enid. Mr. Prime Minister, oh my God, we never thought we'd hear you say you were going to retire. At least that's what we think we heard you say, Because to be honest, it's hard to understand what the name of God you've been talking about here lately in both official languages. Boy, Bacchazna. Gentlemen, here's 22 minutes masculinity correspondent, Dakey Dunn. Like most men, I'm a bit of an emotional anorexic. And I'm all right with that today.

I'm just happy I'm no longer the feelings bulimic that I once was. Oh, that was bad. Every day having to stuff down anger, pain, despair. let alone I'll the joy and then the worst of it. Home by Christmas, oh limited engagement, mind of. But they say there's going to be no boots on the ground. Boots on the ground, I'd like to put a boot.

Now, right up the Prime Minister's rear ends. And where are they going to get the money for it? Yes, because we got to fire half the civil service. I've decided to be the right-in candidate for the liberal leadership because, I mean, let's face it, if Paul Martin Jr., Sheila Copson, John Manley are the best that a country of 30 million can come up with. Well, God help us because there's something really wrong in the Canadian gene pool.

Before she created 22 minutes, Mary Walsh co-founded the Comedy Troop Codco, which put Newfoundland Comedy on the map and the rest of Canada. But the story of Mary Walsh's life goes well beyond her comedic and acting triumphs. Her new book is a collection of essays about the highs and the lows, which she calls her most humiliating and embarrassing situations and failures. That book is called Brassy Bit of Aging Crumpet, a memoir in Pieces. National Treasure Mary Walsh and I spoke in March. Here's our conversation.

I didn't remember any of those. I think a lot of Canadians do. You write in the preface to this book that you're, I guess, more than a bit ambivalent about telling some of these stories about your life. Why would you be ambivalent? Well, you know, here's the thing. You know, I know Mark Critch and Rick Mercer have written four or five. kind of memoirs about their lives and things. And, you know, there's sort of, I don't know, they have a very light touch, you know,

and it seems that their lives were lived in a way that was not, you know, for instance, none of them suffered from, you know, addiction, you know, alcoholism, you know, and it is a mental, spiritual, and physical disease. So there's a kind of stuff that comes with it. And so one of the aspects of your personality that comes with that is to see the dark, you know, to always see the glass half empty or no glass at all, really, is how I saw it. And so no matter how good things were going, I always found myself in a situation like, you know, when I talked about writing this memoir, first I went, oh yeah, so everybody was in Codco and everybody was really happy. It was going really well. We're getting a lot of national and international attention.

And I was really unhappy. And, you know, this hour is 22 minutes. I started that and everybody was really, you know, went really well and everybody loved it and I was really unhappy. So I thought, well, you can't, that gets pretty boring after a while, Matt. Anyway, doing the exercise, I mean, doing the exercise, writing the book was really an interesting exercise, I guess, for me. Because I realized that a lot of that is in the past and that things have changed profoundly for me in my life. And I am no longer that person. And so there's a certain compassion I can feel for that person.

So it made it easier to write about Codco or This Hour is 22 Minutes or Mom. And I think that what, you know, a brassy bit of aging crumpet ends with, you know, when I realize that like so many other older people in the world, my life has become I'm a happier person now that I'm old, that I never. had that, and there is a you bend towards a happier old age, and it's quite common not just in Western cultures, but in all cultures, that old people are happier people. Isn't that weird? Because that's not what we were told at all. That's all we could wish for in some ways, right?

Yeah, I know. I just want to get the message out. You wonder whether you could have wished for that. I mean, there are remarkable things that have happened over the course of your life, one of which is it eight months old when you, tell me what happened here. banished from your house, right? Yes, well, according to my sister, who has been known to lie, forgive me, law, that I had pneumonia and I was in the hospital. And when I came back, my parents lived at number seven Carter's Hill, and it was a damper place than number nine Carter's Hill, which is where my two-maid, Nancy, and an uncle lived. And so they thought,

when I came out of the hospital, it would be better for me to be in a drier environment. So I went to live with Aunt May and Feene and Uncle Jack next door. And, uh, there's a, and I, Then I was supposed to go back. And then, I don't know, did they forget? I was there. I was just next door, for Christ's sake. But then they never did. And then when I was about 11, they moved up around the bay.

So I stopped being the little girl who was growing up next door to her family. So it was an interesting to have everybody right next door and to have to be like, this is very simplistic. But we were kind of Aunt May and Fian and Uncle Jack were kind of lace curtain Irish. and mom and dad and the family were more like shanty Irish, like there was a lot of drinking and black rice. You said they're drinking and fornicating and fighting and yelling and screeching and breaking furniture. That's right. That was always going on and the crowd upstairs were always going. The crowd next door were always going to that crowd next door.

And I knew all the time that that crowd next door was really my crowds, but yet I still went, I tut-tut-tut-tend along with the best of them. It's like that haunted me. and I held on to that for so long. And I realized now that I didn't have to, that it was over. And so so many good things happened to me that I didn't realize at the time. But at that point you said, you were always on the outside looking in. As you said, you felt like a child looking through the glass darkly.

Yes, yes, yes. I was always, like I longed to be with them. At the same time, I was really out of my depth when I was with them, you know, because I was like a miss goody two shoes. And I think there was always a sense that my family knew that I was next door, tutting at them and looking down my nose. But that was then. And, of course, then, so many, so many good things.

And then at some point, you know, because I never wanted, and May, and Fian and Uncle Jack really loved me and took care of me and stuff, but I never wanted their love. I wanted mom's love. And so that set a pattern in my whole. life of never wanting what I have, always wanting what I didn't have, which, you know, is common enough, right? But at some point, I realized the great gift that I'd been given. And a lot of the bad things that I would say were bad things in my life turned out to be, you know, gift.

Describe the Newfoundland that you grew up in and its relationship to Canada. Newfoundland becomes a character in a lot of these pieces in the book. Yes. Well, you know, I was born in 1952, we didn't join until 1949. The vote was very, very close. 51% voted to join Canada and 49% voted for other things, you know, to go back

to responsible government. I grew up in St. John's. Pretty well, everyone in St. John's voted to return to be the dominion of Newfoundland because we had been under a kind of a dictatorship from England. We made the choice

ourselves back when everybody was kind of making that choice when to think that we couldn't self-govern. And commission of government came in and we were run by four or five commissioners from London. Then when that was over, some people felt, well, it's time for us to get back to running ourselves, but other people felt that it was time that it would be a good thing for us to join up with Canada. You know, they say that familiarity breeds contempt, but that has not been my experience at all. the more I get to know Canada and Canadians, the more I am so grateful that 51% voted for that, that it's such an extraordinary country.

It's just so beautiful in every part. And I used to think we were a dull people, but we're not. I sort of thought it would be better to be like the Americans. Boy, was I ever wrong about so many things? Dear God in heaven, you know, you think about the very Canadianness of the prime minister now, Mr. Carney, as opposed to the very Americanness of their president, that kind of thoughtful, what would be the best way forward, let's not do anything rash, let's think about this. You know what I mean?

It's so amazing. I'm so happy we made that decision. One of the neat things about Codco, when it started, this was a live comedy troupe. And you spent a bunch of time traveling across Newfoundland, right? And going into communities, these are communities that, what, had just been connected through roads. Yeah. You know, very recently, you know, we drove, there were places down on the south coast that had only been accessible by boat. And certainly going up the northern peninsula, as far as St. Anthony, it was a very, very bad dirt road at that time.

And so it was amazing to do that, to get to know our. province in quite that way, you know, it was fascinating. You say that that's a time when you finally got a sense of who you might be. Yeah, because I always wanted to be a journalist, but I never had the marks to get into Carlton or anywhere. And I kind of had been doing this Newfoundland Traveling Theatre Company thing, and everybody was going to Toronto, so I auditioned quite badly for Ryerson, no idea why I got in. So I ended up there, and we, you know, ended up starting Codco. and something about Codco's success, which I really didn't feel that I was contributing very much to at that time

because I was so terrified and so fearful and had so little belief in myself. But something about being part of them gave me some sense that I might be worth something. What about in Toronto? I mean, again, there's a long tradition of people coming to Toronto. people think it's just, you know, you have to go there. That's the center of the universe.

This is where you're going to be made in some ways. When you got to Toronto, how were you received? Oh, my God. Well, it was like 1972, 1973. I mean, if you just said you were from Newfoundland, people would fall down laughing. It was such a ludicrous thing. And people in Toronto were very different than people in St. John's. There was a whole different culture, right?

And so, and we felt very much not a part of it. When we were doing our show, I remember going to the horseshoe to hand out, you know, little flyers to tell. And Diane Olson, who was an original member of Codco, tells the story of coming up to this guy and saying, we're doing this show down at Sherbourne Street. It's about Newfoundland. And but he said, oh, yeah. And she said, are you from Newfoundland? He said, no, no, my dear.

I'm from, you know, torn hell. And Diane said, oh, we're all from Newfoundland. And he said, oh, yes. He said, I'm from Bonavista. He said, but you don't like to say to people because, you know, they laugh at you, right? Our first show, Codden a stick, was trying to turn that Nuffie joke on his head. And, of course, one of our first reviews said, Newfie troops turns Nufi joke on its head or something like that, you know. What did you want the rest of the country to know about Newfoundland?

But who we were, you know, I mean, not some, you know, horny-handed stupid fisher folk. You know, we didn't know the things that maybe people who grew up in the center of Toronto knew. But then the people who grew up in the center of Toronto didn't know the things that we knew. Okay, three songs. You guess who thereby. Three little birds, one love, and jamming. Yeah, that was a really hard quiz. These are all, of course, by Bob Marley. A whole lot of the world felt close to Bob and his music before and after his passing.

But the guy who really knew him best was his son, Ziggy. On Q, Ziggy Marley will tell you about his new record and about the song he says, connect him to his late father, Bob Marley. You can hear that conversation now. Just search Q with Tom Power wherever you get your podcasts. After you created,

helped create Codco, you created this hour's 22 minutes. You went and we're knocking on people's doors and saying, I've got this idea, come and sign up. What was your goal? What did you want the show to be? I wanted the show to make a difference.

I wanted the show to speak truth to power. What do you mean? Make a difference. Somehow or other, let the people in charge know what the people thought. You know what I mean? I thought that we could do that by speaking directly to, you know, politicians, et cetera, right? And, you know, Rick had just done a brilliant show. People in the Globe Mail were constantly writing the most ridiculous things about Newfoundland

and saying, why don't they just move? You know, there's no reason for them to be there. And Charles Lynch must die, was the half of the name of Rick Show. And it kind of, in the same way that Codco had, in the same way that we just wanted to deal with the truth in some way. And not, and of course, you know, later on, of course, you realize that your truth is not necessarily the truth. it is just your truth. But so we wanted our truth to get out. And we were, you know, I was 40, I think.

Rick was 16 years younger than me. So he may have been 24. To me was younger. Kathy was, you know, and we went in. We had just the four of us. We had no risers at the beginning. We only had one blonde wig. And we went at it, you know.

And yeah, it was heady times. Where did Mark Delahunty come from? Mark Delahunty came from a CBC radio thing that I did. when Kim Campbell was running to lead the conservative party, I, you know, I did a thing of like that Marg was running against Kim Campbell. People think that you going as Mark or as Princess Warrior to, I'm not going to say ambush, but certainly approach politicians. Ambush, that's what we always said.

But people thought that it must have been a lot of fun, and you say it was deeply terrifying. Deeply, deeply terrifying. Why? Plus, embarrassing and shaming. Well, because, you know, you only had one shot. It wasn't like you could do it again. You were just there in the scrum. And so when the real journalists had asked their questions, then as the prime minister

or the minister of, you know, public works or whatever was walking away, you would ambush them, you know, from the thing. And first of all, everybody else was dressed appropriately. And I was there in a few bits of red felt with gold glue around my breasts, brandishing a plastic sword from Toys R Us. So I felt like, but it was good. It was good that that happened because I would just feel so embarrassed and ashamed. I would think, well, shag it.

I've got nothing to lose, certainly not any shred of human dignity. And, you know, I'd just go for us, right? But when it was over, it was like such a great relief for it to be over. But it was hard, you know, because if I screwed up, like I screwed up with Ralph Klein in the Edmonton legislature, in the Alberta legislature. And I had gotten my friend Patty Parsons, the best and the most wonderful costume mistress in the whole world who was sadly no longer with us to make me a cowgirl suit. Yes. Because I always wanted a cowgirl suit when I was little. And so I had sidearms that were just like those plastic guns that shoot those paper.

Like a cap gun. Cap guns, yeah. And so I had those. And I was saying to Ralph Klein, you know, that he was amazing, like he was even more villainous than the greatest villainous. than the greatest villains in literature. Like even Scrooge had only said, are there no poorhouses? He didn't, you know, get drunk on Christmas Eve and make his driver take him down to a poorhouse so he could, you know, mock and jeer at the poor. And as I said that, and I don't know what Premier Klein said to me, but whatever it was, it wasn't very nice, I don't think.

And I just completely lost, and I, you know, and I was in a kind of, we'd come all the way out to Edmonton. We had to go back with something. And I was just in a desperate state and didn't think and took out the cap guns and started banging them off in the middle of the legislature. Well, I mean, what an awful thing to do. And everybody said, you know, conservative papers went mad. And they were right. I mean, I should never have done that. But it did prove to me that you must not have a gun at hand because if things go wrong, you will use it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about Stephen Harper? You kissed Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Yes. There are some who say that you French kissed him. Oh, yeah, but that isn't true. Oh, my God, no. Yuck.

You also say in the book that it was like kissing a stick of wood. Yes, like kissing a fence post. Very, very bad kiss. Like kissing a fence post. Yes, yes, yes. Whatever you think of Stephen Harper, he's definitely not a good kisser. And yet, there are politicians that played along. I mean, I think now you would never even get close to him.

But most politicians kind of played along. Why do you think that was? We started, just as the liberal government was coming in in 92, and, you know, they were very, in that place in Edmonton, when we came to the legislature, all the security said was, you know, closed the door, we're not heaten Edmonton, you know. But things changed radically with 9-11, of course. And the world has moved to the right.

And the world has moved to politicians simply saying what it is that they are rehearsed to say and nothing else, right? But Jean-Cartienne was not like that. Even Stephen Harper, the only reason I got next to Stephen Harper was because he was running for the head of the crap party. Remember, it was called the conservative reform something, you know, party. But they changed the name after when they realized it spelled crap. So he wanted to be seen as Halefellow well met by their country.

But then he just shut down the whole thing. Even real journalists had to stand thousands of feet. And then they arrested that girl who was on this hour because she asked him a question at a scrum. And so things are just very, very different. But, you know, Mark would often talk to Prime Minister Trudeau. And they became quite good friends, I think, in a way. Mark Rich. Mark Rich, yeah.

So it hasn't changed entirely. And then you wonder, did we contribute to politics? Oh, I don't know. You know, sometimes you think, did we contribute to the dark side where politics is just a joke? And did we make things, you know, too funny? No, Mary, you definitely did not make things too funny. You say you weren't happy when you were on 22 minutes. You were never happy.

I'm never happy anyway. You know what I mean? I am happy now, for sure. But at the time, I wanted us to make the decisions as to what was going in the show. but I missed the first couple of shows because I was in the hospital having back surgery. And so by the time I got back, nobody even wanted me to come back. I don't think I was supposed to be. I lost my job as head writer and decisions had already been made and things have been working really well.

So, you know, I tried to lead the revolution, but it's hard to lead even four people into revolt when everybody's pretty happy with the way things are right now. So it took me a long time. But in the end, I did have a lot of good times. And the people we worked with on this hour, is 22 minutes, were just extraordinary. Can I ask you, there's an essay in here about drinking, about alcohol. And you say that you started drinking when you were 15. And there are a lot of people who were afraid of dying and you were afraid of living.

What does that mean in terms of your relationship with alcohol? Well, you know, I just wanted to disappear. I'm not sure how many years it was, but I only drank with one end in sight, total obliteration. I didn't understand it until I was sober for years that people would talk about, you know, wanting to die. And I would think, oh, I never felt that. But I did. But I just didn't take it that far. I just wanted to be out of it.

By it, I mean the world and escape from it. You know, every situation I wanted to run away from, which is, you know, what alcohol and drugs do. You don't ever face up to the world as it really is. You run away. I mean, first, it seems like a good thing. And then, of course, you realize you're in a dark hole. And then, of course, you start digging deeper for some bizarre reason, because that's the way your kind of twisted mind works. And it took me 25 years of that kind of drinking to finally get sober.

What changed when you adopted Jesse, your son? I just kept on drinking even more, maybe, first. And then I realized, of course, that somebody had to do something. And for the first three years, I thought if I could get my partner to stop drinking, then I could keep drinking and he could take care of me and Jesse. And then that wasn't working. And then at some point, you know, I had a providential, you know, I just saw the truth. For some reason, I don't know why.

I'm just lucky, I guess, that I was going to have to give up drinking. Let me tell you it did not make me happy. I must have cried more than I ever did during the first year of my sobriety. You know, they say in some programs that it takes you five years to get your marbles back and then another five to learn how to play them. So it's a process, right? Getting sober is a process. It doesn't happen overnight.

A bit by bit by bit, you learn how to live life on life's terms, right? Well, and now you say you're happier than you ever have been. Ever, ever, ever in my whole life, even when I was five. What is life like now for you? Well, life is really good because, of course, what I never got, and some people had from birth, is that it isn't happiness doesn't come from the outside in. It's not circumstances, that it is some sense of yourself, some solid center that you have that decides how you're going to, it's not what happens to you,

it's how you react to what happens to you. And I always reacted to what happened to me with, oh my God, you know, this is the worst thing ever. Oh, no good will come of this. And now I feel differently. That's a good place to be. Yeah. It's a great place to be. And I'd just like to say to all the people who are late 40s, early 50s, you will get through that. That's just a slump. And then you'll just keep going on up on the other you bend of happiness. Keep going on up. Mary Walsh, this book, I was reading it in public places and was laughing out loud. I apologize to the people on the subway and to friends and family who I annoyed by laughing out loud about this. It's wonderful. It's very funny, but also, as you said, there's a lot of

really hard truths in it as well. And you are one of our best. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you, Matt. Mary Walsh, creator of this hour has 22 minutes in Codco. Her new book, is a collection of essays. It's called a brassy bit of aging crumpet, a memoir in pieces. We spoke in March. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name's Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.