Leacock

Mr. Smith in front of Smith's Hotel

When I was a kid, I was crazy about Stephen Leacock. I borrowed and read every book they had by him at the Fraser-Hickson Library. They were in the adult section, so I had to smuggle them out using my mother’s library card. 

I recently re-read some of his stuff. No, it was not as funny as I remembered. I found the beginning of his “My Discovery of England” still laugh-out-loud funny. Sunshine Sketches is still wonderful. But a lot of the rest seemed a swing and a miss.

When I was a kid, I also thought Wayne and Schuster were brilliant. But when I see their stuff on YouTube now, they’re mostly not good at all. Corny. Hammy.

The problem is that comedy relies on a reversal of expectations. It requires surprise. This makes it more easily and quickly dated than other forms. Everything that is really good is going to look corny in a few years, because you heard it before, and because, if it is really good, it has been imitated. And so there is no longer any reversal of expectations.

There have to be periodic revolutions in humour to overcome this. Leacock looks stiff and predictable post-Python.

A friend complains that Leacock uses too many American references; as though he’s pandering for the wider audience.

I don’t have any problems with Leacock’s American references, and I don’t think he was selling out. There is a lot of that in My Discovery of England, and he was not writing for an American audience, but a British one. The truth is, we ARE Americans, indistinguishable from other North Americans to Europeans or Asians or South Americans, barely distinguishable to Yanks. It is artificial to ignore the similarities and stress the differences. I like Neil Young’s attitude, in his album “Americana.” Which he ends with “God Save the Queen.” We are British North America. This is the cultural background we legitimately grew up with, mostly the same as the US, cowboys and Indians and the frontier and the gold rush, with a few more things on top.

One thing we share with our southern neighbours is a heritage of innumerable small towns. But here Leacock illustrates the vital difference. I’ve read the classic US small town novels: Lewis’s Main Street and Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio. Very unlike Leacock’s Mariposa. The Mi-guk literary small town is a place of despair, a place you feel trapped and alienated, a dead end. The Canadian small town is remembered fondly, as real life as it ought to be lived; in Sunshine Sketches, in Munro’s short stories, in Anne’s Avonlea. The city is the place of exile.

Have you ever read Al Purdy’s “The Country North of Belleville”?