Literary Lapses
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Winnowed Wisdom
I'm not sure whether to write about this in one entry, or three entries. However, as the three books are all in one volume, I'll do just one entry. Stephen Leacock has been called by some the Canadian Mark Twain. It's not a bad
description, though Leacock was writing a little later, in the first half of the 20th Century. He's also gentler than Twain, which I suppose is
what you would expect from the Canadian Mark Twain.
On the CBC radio show "Vinyl Cafe," Stuart McLean talked about Leacock recently. My favorite story about him was that he wasn't very good on radio, because he tended to laugh at his own jokes. Laughing at your own material, how unprofessional! But most of it is funny stuff, even today.
To be honest, I'm always a little skeptical of old humor. It seems to me that it's tough for something from another era to seem funny decades later. I remember hearing English teachers in high school explain jokes from Shakespeare ("See, it's a fart joke. Don't you get it?") in order to convince us that Shakespeare was funny. That never worked, and I didn't really expect to laugh out loud when I read Leacock either. And yet I did.
I should start with his first book, "Literary Lapses," which is a collection of humor pieces. It was originally self-published, so you get the feeling Leacock would be all for the Internet now. It's an entertaining book, and many of the pieces "reminded" me of comedy that was written much later. For example, he does a whole story on the adventures of A, B, and C (those well known characters from math quizzes ) that felt like the types of jokes people were making about the SAT in 1980s teen comedies.
In "Winnowed Wisdom," the third book in the collection, there's a piece about how we are running out of all our natural resources, like gasoline, and it reads like something that could be written this month. Well, except for the complaint about "the rise of 2 cents a gallon in gasoline which hit us hard and shortened our investigations by about ten miles a day."
Nestled between the two humor collections is his most famous work, the novel "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town." In some ways, I think his fiction is better, though this may be because it's tough to read a 200-page book of humor pieces and still find the pieces equally as funny throughout. His columns are stand-alone pieces, and in many ways it's best not to read them too quickly, as I did.
"Sunshine Sketches" is similar to Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon" or "Winesburg, Ohio", by one of Leacock's contemporaries, Sherwood Anderson. "Sunshine Sketches" is about the inhabitants of a fictional town. In this case, it's Mariposa, Ontario. Like those others, there really isn't a plot in "Sunshine Sketches," just a series of chapters about all the quirky inhabitants of the town. This quiet innocent little town is home to maritime disaster, suicidal lovers, raging fires, financial speculating, bank robberies, crooked elections, and quite possibly insurance fraud. But, you know, in a good, wholesome way.
At times, Leacock's humor is so dry that I didn't realize I was in the middle of a joke until he hit me with the punchline. And sometimes it wasn't until well after the punchline that I figured out I had just read a joke.
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Winnowed Wisdom
I'm not sure whether to write about this in one entry, or three entries. However, as the three books are all in one volume, I'll do just one entry. Stephen Leacock has been called by some the Canadian Mark Twain. It's not a bad
description, though Leacock was writing a little later, in the first half of the 20th Century. He's also gentler than Twain, which I suppose is
what you would expect from the Canadian Mark Twain. On the CBC radio show "Vinyl Cafe," Stuart McLean talked about Leacock recently. My favorite story about him was that he wasn't very good on radio, because he tended to laugh at his own jokes. Laughing at your own material, how unprofessional! But most of it is funny stuff, even today.
To be honest, I'm always a little skeptical of old humor. It seems to me that it's tough for something from another era to seem funny decades later. I remember hearing English teachers in high school explain jokes from Shakespeare ("See, it's a fart joke. Don't you get it?") in order to convince us that Shakespeare was funny. That never worked, and I didn't really expect to laugh out loud when I read Leacock either. And yet I did.
I should start with his first book, "Literary Lapses," which is a collection of humor pieces. It was originally self-published, so you get the feeling Leacock would be all for the Internet now. It's an entertaining book, and many of the pieces "reminded" me of comedy that was written much later. For example, he does a whole story on the adventures of A, B, and C (those well known characters from math quizzes ) that felt like the types of jokes people were making about the SAT in 1980s teen comedies.
In "Winnowed Wisdom," the third book in the collection, there's a piece about how we are running out of all our natural resources, like gasoline, and it reads like something that could be written this month. Well, except for the complaint about "the rise of 2 cents a gallon in gasoline which hit us hard and shortened our investigations by about ten miles a day."
Nestled between the two humor collections is his most famous work, the novel "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town." In some ways, I think his fiction is better, though this may be because it's tough to read a 200-page book of humor pieces and still find the pieces equally as funny throughout. His columns are stand-alone pieces, and in many ways it's best not to read them too quickly, as I did.
"Sunshine Sketches" is similar to Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon" or "Winesburg, Ohio", by one of Leacock's contemporaries, Sherwood Anderson. "Sunshine Sketches" is about the inhabitants of a fictional town. In this case, it's Mariposa, Ontario. Like those others, there really isn't a plot in "Sunshine Sketches," just a series of chapters about all the quirky inhabitants of the town. This quiet innocent little town is home to maritime disaster, suicidal lovers, raging fires, financial speculating, bank robberies, crooked elections, and quite possibly insurance fraud. But, you know, in a good, wholesome way.
At times, Leacock's humor is so dry that I didn't realize I was in the middle of a joke until he hit me with the punchline. And sometimes it wasn't until well after the punchline that I figured out I had just read a joke.
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