Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

no hype. i couldn't stop laughing as i was reading this. and i mean laughing out loud. in a cafe. with everyone staring at me. but i didn't care. and i couldn't help it if i did. it's just too hilarious.

There is at least one author who may remind you of Stephen Leacock, namely Garrison Keillor of Lake Wobegon fame, but Leacock should be recognized as the ultimate master of quaint, bucolic humor. Leacock, who died in 1944, became arguably the most prominent Canadian humorist of his day (and probably of all time). What is ironic about that claim is that Leacock worked for most of his life as a professor of economics. We do not usually equate economics with humor, preferring to think of that profession as one of bow ties and supply and demand charts. Throw that presumption out the window and pick up a copy of "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town," Leacock's best known work available through the New Canadian Library series.For me, one of the funniest sections of the book was the introduction written by Leacock, where he gives you some background about himself and his profession. This short piece of writing quickly gives you an idea of the type of humor you will find in the actual sketches: a very sly, very quiet and clever type of humor that often takes a while to sink in. Leacock does not rely on rim shot jokes or manic posturing in his writings. Instead, he creates the fictional Canadian town of Mariposa and populates it with small town archetypes that are wonders to behold.All of the characters are hilarious in their own way: Mr. Smith, the proprietor of the local hotel and bar, full of schemes to earn money while trying to get his liquor license back. Then there is Jefferson Thorpe, the barber involved in financial schemes that may put him on the level of the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The Reverend Mr. Drone presides over the local Church of England in Mariposa, a man who reads Greek as easy as can be but laments his lack of knowledge about logarithms and balancing the financial books of the church. Peter Pupkin, the teller at the local bank, has a secret he wants no one to know about, but which eventually comes out while he is courting the daughter of the town judge. All of these characters, and several others, interact throughout the sketches.Leacock has the ability to turn a story, to make it take a crazy, unexpected twist even when you are looking for such a maneuver. That he accomplishes this in stories that rarely run longer than twenty pages is certainly a sign of great talent. By the time you reach the end of the book, you know these people as though you lived in the town yourself, and you know what makes them tick. Despite all of the crazy antics in Mariposa, Leacock never lets the reader lose sight of the fact that these are basically good people living good lives. There seems to be a lot of feeling for the citizens of Mariposa on the part of Leacock, which comes to a head in the final sketch in the collection, "L'Envoi. The Train to Mariposa," where he recounts traveling back to the town after being away for years, with all of the attendant emotions that brings as recognizable landmarks come into view and the traveler realizes that

Perhaps the finest comment about Stephen Leacock in the last half century is that "he is a Will Rogers for the 90's." Rogers, of course, is one of the most beloved of American humorists -- he was killed in 1935 when his plane crashed near Point Barrow, Alaska. Leacock died on March 28, 1944. Like Rogers, he had been Canada's favorite humorist for decades. Sunshine Sketches is about Orillia, Ontario, Canada, where Leacock had his summer home on Brewery Bay (he once wrote, "I have known that name, the old Brewery Bay, to make people feel thirsty by correspondence as far away as Nevada.") His home is now maintained as a historic site by the town of Orillia. I lived there for almost 30 years, and the people of Orillia are still much the same as Leacock portrayed them in 1912. These stories about various personalities in town were printed in the local newspaper in the 1910 - 1912 era, before being compiled into this book which established Leacock's literary fame. The people portrayed really lived, though some are composites; the events are of a kindly humorist looking at the foibles of small town life. Once they came out in book form and soared to national popularity, everyone in town figured the rest of the country was laughing at them because of Leacock's book and he was royally hated in Orillia to the end of his life. Gradually, and this took decades, Orillians came to recognize that genius had walked amongst them for several decades. (It's hard to recognize genius when your own ego is so inflated.) Orillia now awards the annual "Leacock Medal for Humor" -- Canada's top literary prize for the best book of humour for the preceding year. Leacock died when I was six, but I did know his son, who still lived in town. I delivered papers to the editor of the "Newspacket," Leacock's name for the Orillia Packet and Times (where I worked) and the rival Newsletter. The Packet had the same editor in the 1940's as when Leacock wrote about him in 1910. But the book is more than Orillia; it is a wonderfully kind and humorous description of life in many small towns. The American artist Norman Rockwell painted the same kinds of scenes; it is the type of idyllic urban life so many of us keep longing to find again in our hectic urban world. Leacock realized the book was universal in its description of small towns, and in the preface he wrote "Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of

This 1912 work uses sketches about the residents of a small Ontario lake town. The tone is mock-boosterish, giving rise to some sly comic moments. This is a wonderful parody of that can-do mentality that seems to infect us in North America. The work anticipates Lake Woebegone by some years, but has a distinctly Canadian feel. We've seen lots of works take mythical townspeople one by one, but I can think of few that do it as well and as simply as this one. This is a must read.

Leacock's observations about people and community are devastatingly accurate and wonderfully recognizeable. The narrator captures the posturings and cozy delusions of small town life with the deadpan wit and irony of a Will Rogers for the nineties. The emperor stands there completely undressed and yet just as we turn to gloat with our fellow bystanders we feel the draft that alerts us to our own nakedness. Stephen Leacock, where have you been all my life?