Tomb

Steven Kerzner just might be the biggest Canadian star you've never heard of. Since getting his start at Newton Cable in Ontario at the age of 14 and taking the station over by 18, he's become a staple of MuchMusic and Citytv. He's hung out with and interviewed pretty much every celebrity to step into the country in the last 20 years. His critically acclaimed shows have blown Leno and Letterman out of the water in Canadian ratings and, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, he should be proud that he's even been ripped off by Conan O'Brien.

So why haven't you heard of him? Because the creator and voice of media icon Ed the Sock, the star of Ed & Red’s Night Party, wants it that way. “I don't like to draw a lot of attention to me,” he says. “Ed’s the star.”

His manner is casual, laid-back and a stark contrast to his alter-ego, the gravel-voiced, cigar-smoking sock that has spent the last 22 years ranting and raving on most major Canadian networks.

Earlier this summer, Fast Forward caught up with Kerzner and his wife and co-host, Liana K., in Canmore where they were kind enough to spend a few hours talking about the media, politics and Canada's most famous piece of dirty laundry.

How does an 18-year-old end up in charge of a cable station?

Well, the people running the station were basically lazy. They were content to let me take on more and more work until I was running the station.

We didn't have the budget to make any really polished shows and we could either fail by trying to look polished or we could succeed at what we could do well, which was spectacle — so I made it into a spectacle. We gave every lunatic that came in off the street a show. We had some guys pitch us an idea and be on air a half-hour later. It worked. People responded.

And Ed the Sock was a part of that spectacle?

Ed was like that. There was this friend of mine who was doing an entertainment talk show, but he was unfocused and he wanted a co-host. He asked me to do it and I didn't really want to say no, but I wanted to be careful because I was doing a lot of serious political programming. I didn't want my face prominent in a zany comedy show. So I went over to where we kept the props for the kids' shows and I grabbed a bunch of spare parts and just sort of made this sock puppet.

People [at the time] were dissuading me, you know, saying, “Don't let people know you do that” because I was doing political debate shows at the time and I was recruited to be a candidate in a provincial election. I had some standing in provincial politics and municipal politics.

For the Conservatives, right?

I was [Steven's emphasis] a Conservative. I'm the reverse path — most people are very liberal when they're younger and conservative when they're older. I was very conservative when I was young and I'm very liberal now.

You've left politics — conservative and liberal — behind since Ed got his start. What led you away from that sphere?

I got disenchanted. You hear that in Ed's disdain for authority structures. I saw how the stuff worked and I refused to participate. Instead, I was able to have a stronger voice through Ed.

There was a viral video element to your initial breakthrough, wasn't there?

Yeah. It was when Robert Vaughn, from The Man from UNCLE show from the ’60s, came in to Toronto to do dinner theatre and he came to do our show. He was trying to go along with it, but he was so clearly uncomfortable that people taped it and circulated it around and that built a sort of cult buzz around the show. And we wound up being syndicated across the country in major cities on cable stations Friday nights at 11:30. Then the CBC was having trouble with their late-night show and we wound up being compared to that late-night show, with people saying that our show was better and it only cost a quarter, whereas their show cost $1 million an episode or something... so that helped elevate the profile. Then Molson invested $50, 000 in an ad campaign to have Ed run for mayor — four different styles of posters, plastered all over the city.

CBC came to us first about going from cable to broadcast, then Moses [Znaimer, of CityTV and MuchMusic] stepped in and said, “No, no, no — you don't belong there — you belong at CHUM,” and at that time he was right.”

Suddenly you're on Citytv, MuchMusic — how did they differ and what effect did they have on Ed?

The Citytv experience and the MuchMusic experiences were very different things, because they were very different shows. Citytv was hard for the first few seasons, a bit of a struggle — TV's famous for “We love what you do, now let's change it!” — and it was a lot of work to maintain our integrity. With MuchMusic, it was an evolution. The channel was evolving, but so was Ed, becoming the contrary voice, criticizing the channel; and that became part of the channel.

There was some friction too, though, wasn't there?

There was a tremendous amount of disrespect at first. The first few years, we actually took the show outside of the building because we couldn't stand the disrespect in the building. And that didn't turn around until 2000, when they found out that the late-night show was beating Leno and Letterman; and not by a little, but by a lot. The numbers were huge. Fromage [MuchMusic's annual music-video roast], in terms of a numbers-to-cost ratio, was the most successful show on Much. Woodstock '99, when Ed was praised in Spin Magazine, made a difference. We always had credibility with the audience, but that's really when we started getting the credibility in the industry.

I understand you had occasional problems with some celebrities you interviewed.

To be fair, a lot of the time it's not the talent's fault. Publicists can be kind of coy sometimes — they're afraid that the artists won't do it, or that they'll get weird, so they don’t tell them they’ll be talking to a puppet. The agents just hope that once the stars get there, they'll go with it. And mostly they do. So I remember the few that didn’t.

The publicist for the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers didn't prepare them for the nature of the interview when we talked to them and they were really not into it. But no one warned them.

Then there are guys like Vanilla Ice. [He] came in and was really unaware of his status as a fallen icon and was acting as if he were still a star. He was muttering about the puppet, saying it was a gimmick, and I'm looking at him and I said, “You're one to talk about gimmicks — at least mine's still viable.” After the interview, he tried to stop it from airing, but it was too late. He could have stopped it before the interview, during the interview or immediately afterward — but once we leave the building… it's in the can. The record company publicist called us after it was done and thanked us for having him on.

He was a rarity. A lot of the bands were into it and they took it as a compliment when they got to come on the show or they were targeted on Fromage. It became a bit of an honour for them to get insulted by Ed.

Sock puppet aside, what do you think contributed to the initial disrespect?

Different things. Some people had trouble with it because they felt that because they saw themselves as ardent feminists, that they couldn't like Ed, or me personally, but then gradually they started to see that there was more to the puppet than they were anticipating.

Have celebrities' perceptions changed as well?

What's great is when people are expecting it to be stupid and they end up saying, “No, this isn't stupid. It isn't sophomoric. My dignity doesn't have to be insulted by doing this.” And part of that is journalistic ethic: If someone says that they don't want to talk about something, then we don't talk about it. It’s entertainment, not tabloid journalism. We're not there because “The public has a right to know,” because there are some things that the public has no right to know. These people have a right to be private citizens. They have a right not to talk about their children. They have a right not to talk about substance abuse problems that they may still be struggling with. I don't feel the need to humiliate anyone.

Like Christina Aguilera?

Exactly. We had a huge relationship with her and she's a big fan. She had Ed host her Canadian national press conference, which was brilliant for her, because Ed could shut people down if they asked questions she didn’t want to deal with. She'd start to answer and Ed would just say “No, don't answer that — the question was stupid,” and then slam the person who asked it as an idiot. The press weren’t happy because they were getting a dose of their own medicine, being shouted at at a press conference.

Has it helped that Ed's become more serious over time?

Ed has really evolved from a character that was just there to insult people to a character that has a conscience and a voice and has been called a social critic, a media critic. Being non-human, he has a licence to say more and a responsibility to do so.

We did these two documentaries for MuchMusic, both of which teachers ended up asking to use in schools and one of which was nominated for a gold ribbon in documentary programming by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. [Also], the “Ed-itorials” on MuchMusic about various social issues were very popular and we proved that the audience is not stupid. We were talking about very serious things and we generated huge dialogue.

I once had an executive at MuchMusic tell us that our audience was stupid and that they wanted shit and we were gonna give them shit — that was shortly before we quit — but we were getting this response from the audience via mail and e-mail and it proved that they weren't stupid. They were young and had limited life experience, but they were not stupid. Now, Ed may have called them morons a lot, but what we were trying to do, especially with something like Fromage, was to say, “Look at this media, look at the message in this video.” The point was to get people not to just consume media but to examine it.

Was there always the intention of making him a social commentator?

I don't think so. Now it's hard to remember, it was 22 years ago. Basically at the time, it was just a fun character to do on my cable station. I got into politics in order to make a difference, you know, change the world. But, I've found that I can make a much bigger impact doing what I'm doing with Ed.

I'm not sure when it became something very important, having Ed be a voice for the people, but you can see the evolution. Around Season 2 on Citytv, I said, we can do more of the dumb humour or we can go smarter. I got a very cool reception from my business partner at the time and from my contact at Citytv because it was starting to get controversial — the humour was getting pointed. I kept at it anyway, but it really started to take root at Much. We started to realize that this is a voice that people listen to and that needs to be treated with responsibility.

At this point, Ed is a national icon. He belongs to everyone who has ever done anything to facilitate his growth. Anyone who ever told a friend that they had to watch. Ed belongs to Canada now and we're just conservators of this cultural treasure, so to speak.

You're on hiatus right now, but already there are rumours of a movie and maybe a new show. What's next for Ed?

Well, we'd said all that we really had to say in late-night format, so it was time to move on. We've pulled out the screenplay and dusted it off and we've begun updating and polishing it. There are other projects on the go right now, offers that might just be what we're looking for — we may cut the hiatus much shorter than we originally intended. Keep watching our site [edthesock.com] and see what happens.