The way showrunner Ed Macdonald tells it, This Hour Has 22 Minutes is about telling the truth as politicians lie.

‘Our job is to deflate all that pompous windbaggery,’ Macdonald says offstage on the 22 Minutes Halifax set as series hosts Mark Critch, Gavin Crawford, Geri Hall and Cathy Jones complete their final studio run-through before a live audience taping takes place in a few hours.

Actually, 22 Minutes is about telling jokes, which points out the paradox and enduring purpose of the long-running CBC news parody and sketch comedy show, now in its 17th season.

Long before The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, 22 Minutes and its CBC predecessor CODCO developed unparalleled expertise in blending current events and humor.

’22 Minutes has to be funny. We have to succeed at that,’ Michael Donovan, CEO of Halifax Film and 22 Minutes’ executive producer, says of the series’ satiric authority.

Back in the CBC Halifax studio, there’s added tension in the air as new changes to the series’ format are introduced for the latest season: a new metallic-looking set, new camera angles, and only one or two anchors on the news desk, not all four hosts hitting their lines while seated in one long row.

The loss of the four-part harmony during news-desk segments is especially telling among the cast members.

‘What have you done with 22?’ Crawford cries out after flubbing a line from one end of the studio, before adding, ‘Macbeth has murdered 22!’

A smiling Michael Lewis, the veteran 22 Minutes floor director, ignores the gallows humor common among performing comics and signals for another take.

And for good reason: 22 Minutes is succeeding with Canadians, especially younger viewers.

Lots of them.

More Canadians currently watch 22 Minutes than watch The National, the CBC’s flagship newscast, which gives a sense of who TV viewers trust to tell them the news these days.

Of course, the joke is the cast members on 22 Minutes aren’t newscasters, even as they skewer politicians who dare stray into a TV camera frame.

‘There’s two masters being served: first is the funny and the second is the news parody,’ explains Stephen Reynolds, the veteran director of 22 Minutes and its predecessor CODCO. Reynolds says the new-look 22 Minutes will include more news-show parody after a focus on sketch comedy in recent years.

‘We should be looking more like a news show, to get the satire and make the creative juxtaposition in a more in-your-face kind of way,’ he adds.

When the taping starts, the anchors deliver a series of jokes about a cold and robotic Prime Minister Stephen Harper and an aloof and arrogant opposition leader Michael Ignatieff. In their mock indignation you gather that, worse than committing shenanigans and misdeeds, is for a politician to be dull.

And thin-skinned. The occasional ambush of a Canadian politician is the most risky part of 22 Minutes comedy, because cast members can’t be certain where the jokes will take them.

Hall was handcuffed last year after her ‘I Love Harper’ seduction stunt at a Halifax press conference by the Canadian prime minister was interrupted by security officials. And another attempt to mock Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty at one of his press conferences backfired as he was caught somberly answering questions about job layoffs.

‘It’s best when [politicians] don’t say anything, smile broadly and shift nervously on their feet,’ Halifax Films’ Donovan says of successful ambushes.

And as with all physical comedy, timing is everything. In the microsecond on the news desk when anchors recount a news headline and react with a joke, the cast members typically cock an eyebrow and mug for the camera before delivering a punch line and a frown.

Donovan says it’s all about pushing the envelope when it comes to Canadian political satire.

‘We’re always trying to go to the edge in getting to the political content,’ he explains.

It’s also about getting 22 Minutes back to its roots as it continues to evolve after the earlier departures of former hosts like Mary Walsh, Rick Mercer and Greg Thomey.

The series is back to Friday night audience tapings, which means each Monday the writers’ room starts turning news headlines into one-liners and by Tuesday into a script and sketches.

By late Tuesday, the 22 Minutes cast members do their first read-through, followed by a full production meeting in the bowels of the CBC building in Halifax to determine a shooting schedule.

On Wednesday, the cameras start capturing 22 Minutes news anchors commenting on news clips and footage, or taping cast members in character doing sketches on location or ambushing politicians.

And all the while from 22 Minutes’ Halifax base. This is a show that could hardly be made from Toronto, where The Rick Mercer Report pokes fun at politicians rather than pursuing them like piranhas as do 22 Minutes cast members – snap, snap, gobble, gobble, gobble.

In the process, the CBC series have become bellwethers of Canadian voter alienation.

‘No one in government can be trusted. All are targets,’ warns showrunner Macdonald, while conceding comic fodder for 22 Minutes doesn’t bode well for Canada as a whole.

‘The more incompetent [politicians] are, the more useful they are to us. But the more useful they are to us, the more useless they are to Canadians,’ Macdonald says ruefully.