Aging & Wisdom Quote by Rick Mercer

Mercer smuggles a civic lecture into a punchline, which is exactly why it lands. "Do the unexpected" sounds like lifestyle advice, the kind of generic dare you’d hear in an ad. Then he swerves: the unexpected thing isn’t skydiving or quitting your job, it’s voting. The joke is that in a culture saturated with "be disruptive" rhetoric, the most genuinely countercultural move for many young adults is showing up for the boring, procedural work of democracy.

The "20 minutes" detail is doing heavy lifting. It shrinks the task until excuses look flimsy, turning apathy into something almost embarrassingly lazy. Mercer frames voting as a micro-commitment, not a grand moral identity, which is smart persuasion: it asks for time, not purity. That matters because youth political messaging often fails by demanding total ideological buy-in. He offers a low-stakes on-ramp.

"Young people all over the world are dying to do" is knowingly hyperbolic, and the exaggeration is the point. It pokes at the cliché that young people are inherently disengaged while also hinting at the darker global context: there are places where voting is dangerous, restricted, or purely symbolic. From a Canadian comedian steeped in public-broadcaster civics (and a culture that prides itself on not being too earnest), the line is a nudge wrapped in irony: your democracy is accessible; treat that access like it’s worth the inconvenience.