What's So Funny?: Lessons from Canada's Leacock Medal for Humour Writing, by Dick Bourgeois Doyle AND Stephen Leacock: Selected and Introduced by Robertson Davies, by Stephen Leacock

Have you ever wondered about the first 67 winners of Canada's Stephen Leacock Award  for Humour? Me neither. Until, that is, I was presented with a delightful book on this very subject -- What's So Funny?:Lessons from Canada's Leacock Medal for Humour Writing  -- written by Dick Bourgeois-Doyle. Don't be put off by his Victorian-inspired name. He is really quite down to earth. And he is an expert on, among other subjects, the history of science and creativity in Canada. Besides writing quite prolifically -- "contributing to many books, articles, TV features and radio programs," as his biographical sketch states on page 253 -- Bourgeois-Doyle works full time in the federal government. He is currently the Secretary General of the National Research Council of Canada.

      You are probably wondering how an elevated public servant -- he was at one time chief of staff and director of communications to the minister of science and technology -- has managed to pull off such time-consuming extra-curricular publication feats. I know it was my first question when I met the author at a summer evening event at Carleton University's MacOdrum Library in 2015. Though the event was forgettable, his answer was not. It was actually his wife who replied, and I paraphrase: "People always ask this. He never uses government time for his outside activities. He is up late every night, writes all weekend and he is very organized and efficient at using his time."
Now that we are thoroughly reassured that our tax dollars in this case were never spent improperly, we can carefully assess his after-work work, or, if you'd rather, we can do a book review of his book reviews. I can say right off the bat that his writing work does not suffer from any kind of bureaucratic day-job-fatigue. What's So Funny? is well-researched, well written, exquisitely illustrated, interesting and, well, funny.
      "When you have a central character like toothless Percival Leary," writes Bourgeois-Doyle, describing the main character in King Leary --  the 1988 Leacock award book -- "who feels his body withering away, has outlived all of his friends and spends his nursing-home days watching a roommate gurgle and belch, the options for a dramatic story might seem limited." But author and winner Paul Quarrington apparently manages to pen an hilarious tale in King Leary, the only book in the list of 67 that focuses on hockey, a major Canadian national obsession, though, for some good reason, not Canada's national sport.
      The book is fiction, and it's written from the perspective of an octogenarian former hockey star, but King Leary, says the reviewer, transports the reader back to some exhilarating Canadian hockey years, those that included King Clancy, a defence-man with the Senators when they won the Stanley Cup twice in the 1920s.
      My second reaction after receiving What's So Funny? as a gift was to refresh my memory about Stephen Leacock's humour. I had an old paperback copy of Penguin Books 1980 compilation of his short stories -- which is essentially all the fiction he ever wrote -- called simply Stephen Leacock: Selected and Introduced by Robertson Davies. Leacock did write a couple of dozen non-fiction books, including on humour, history, biography  and political science. Robertson Davies, a winner of the Leacock award in 1955 for the Canadian classic Leaven of Malice, tells us in the Leacock introduction how the famous humorist, who was born in 1869 in England and died in 1944 in Canada, lived right through the middle of Queen Victoria's reign. This no doubt influenced his haughty attitude and his dry, ironic, sarcastic and mocking sense of humour.
      Born into wealth on both sides of his family, Leacock nevertheless experienced poverty, according to Davies, probably after his father abandoned the family of 11 children around 1888. This forced the young Leacock to quit his classes at the University of Toronto and enrol in college to become a high school teacher. As an adult Leacock was temperamental, which made it difficult for him to take orders from bosses. Luckily for him he was accepted as a professor at McGill University and subsequently, wrote Davies, he became "one of the most popular comic writers in the English-speaking world."

       Is he still so popular? Probably not. Even today's most highly literate readers hold an insatiable demand for instantaneous emotion, including laughter. Indeed, so many once delicate appetites for humour have become for the crude and obscene. Leacock's subtle and tasteful irony, cynicism and wit -- especially when discussing politicians, bankers, wealthy businessmen and professors, and even potential sex -- require patience, and an appreciation of what makes Canada unique to laugh at. This should not be interpreted as anything negative about of Leacock; it would be wrong to say his brilliant work ever got old.

      In Leacock's longish story, the acclaimed 114-year-old Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, this is how the author described a man requesting from recently-elected local politician Edward Drone -- of the fictional and adorable Canadian village of Mariposa -- a job for his son: "Erasmus Archer asked [Drone] if he could get his boy Pete into one of the departments in Ottawa, and made a strong case of it by explaining that he had tried his cussedest to get Pete a job anywhere else and it was simply impossible. Not that Pete wasn't a willing boy, but he was slow -- even his father admitted it -- slow as the devil, blast him, and with no head for figures and unfortunately he'd never had the schooling to bring him on. But if Drone could get him in Ottawa, his father truly believed it would be the very place for him. Surely the Indian Department or in the Astronomical Branch of in the New Canadian Navy there must be any amount of opening for a boy like this?"
      What's So Funny's? reviews all are short, an  average two pages each, so it is true some of them leave you wanting more. Which I guess is somehow the point, to prompt the reader to get and read the original for complete satisfaction. Having myself read only two or three of the reviewed books -- Canadian novels are not my first choice for reading -- still, because I do love humour (I did amateur stand up comedy from 2008 to 20014) I may someday scour the library for some of the others. Among the 67 reviews, there are some of virtually unheard of writers, such as Harry Symons, Angeline Hango and Jan Hiliard; and some of famously hilarious authors, including Sondra Gotlieb, Gary Lautens, Mordechai Richler, Arthur Black, W.O. Mitchell and Stuart Maclean. There is at least one review of a discredited activist, the indomitable, prolific and controversial Farley Mowat, who is funny yes though also dishonest. (I think he liked to quote Mark Twain: Why let the truth ruin a good story.)
      Most gratifyingly, Bourgeois-Doyle reviews the odd less well known writer, including Ernest Buckler, who I would never have thought of as a humorist. As a teen, I read and totally fell in love with Buckler's 1952 novel The Mountain and the Valley, the furthest thing, as I recall, from humour that a person could possibly get. Though, according to Bourgeois-Doyle, The Mountain is "consistently ranked as one of the best novels in Canadian literature," I could never find, and believe me I tried, another person who liked the book. Even my well-read mother could not finish it. Given to me by my best friend in 1975, the book's overly verbose descriptions of Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley enchanted me, perhaps because I was a teen, or maybe because I was reminded of the rural and bucolic upbringing of my father in that same province. Whatever the reason, I will never forget the profound joy Ernest Buckler brought me at 16 years old.
      But as winner of the 1978 Leacock Medal, Buckler's Whirligig does not get strong accolades from Bourgeois-Doyle, who is clearly enthusiastic about most of the books he reviews. About Whirligig, he states, the content might actually belong in a Bad Poetry Contest.
      Try as I might I could not find any reference to the intriguing pair of sketches in every chapter, a drawing of the book being reviewed and one of the author. My conclusion is that Bourgeois-Doyle himself did them. These rough illustrations are every bit as charming as six-day-old puppies. It is worth the price of the book ($20) just to enjoy these jagged diagrams.
      One final point. Bourgeois-Doyle clearly hopes his book will make it into Canadian classrooms: every chapter is called a lesson and ends with a writing exercise. For example, "Explain how you could get a raise from being fired from your current job." My gleaning of these interesting and simple exercises brought me to the inescapable conclusion that one does not have to read the preceding chapter to complete them. Which makes them perfect for a classroom creative writing activity!

As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.