Miner Not Amused By Daily Show Asbestos Spoof

TORONTO – Canadian miner Bernard Coulombe isn’t laughing after walking straight into what he calls The Daily Show’s “tacky parody” of the blue-collar town of Asbestos, Quebec.

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"It was already too late by the time I realized that this program was not a serious news show and that all the host wanted was to make fun of me and the town's representatives, to insult us and to deliver anti-asbestos propaganda,” Coulombe, head of the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, said in a statement after being outsmarted in a May 5 TV news spoof by comic Aasif Mandvi, entitled Ored To Death.

Mandvi visited Asbestos, Quebec, around 150 miles from Montreal, and compared the town with Small Pox, Minn., Strychnine, Ill., and Cholera, N.J.

"Does asbestos mean something different in French than it does in English?" Mandvi at one point asked Coulombe.

"Because in English, it means slow, hacking death,” the comic added.

Coulombe wasn't amused, then or now.

“Had we known what he had in store for us, obviously I never would have agreed to involve myself in something for which I and the entire chrysotile brief would unfairly end up paying the price," Coulombe, who insisted the asbestos mined in Quebec, chrysotile, is different from the asbestos linked to cancer and lung disease.