D. Discuss. Stephen Leacock creates humour in the story through a timid character whose nervousness makes him look like a fool in the end.' Would you agree with this analysis? Does Leacock want us to laugh at the main charact Give examples from the story to support your answer.
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Answer:
“Gentlemen,” said Mark Twain’s contemporary, Artemus Ward, rising at a banquet with his glass held aloft, “I give you Upper Canada!”; then he added mournfully,“because I don’t want it myself.”
StephenLeacock, “Mark Twain and Canada,” Queen’s Quarterly 42
1The study of humour is a fascinating, complex, truly interdisciplinary pursuit, which engages a great many critical thinkers from various disciplines. The point of view of this essay is necessarily limited, but it is one which Leacock and his early twentieth-century audience would have approved and one which is loosely faithful to the socio-literary approach of some modern writers on humour; their point of intellectual departure being that humour is often an expression of culture or, in nineteenth-century terms, of nation. Just as literary reviewers of Leacock’s time liked to speculate about the national biases of his humour, some of the classic studies in American humour, such as Constance Rourke’s American Humor and Norris Yates’ The American Humorist, investigate American humorists and their humour as articulations of their society.
2The society that Leacock inhabits in his humour is rarely, as a Canadian audience might expect, overtly Canadian. Leacock’s Canada was a colonial society; unrealized both psychologically and economically, it afforded him little inspiration or market for his humour. He preferred to define himself as an American writer and humorist in the continental sense. In 1936 he declared that “there is no such thing as Canadian literature today, meaning books written by Canadians in a Canadian way,”1 just as much earlier, in 1916, he had dissolved the 49th parallel for Canadian authors, insisting that “Canadian literature—as far as there is such a thing—Canadian journalism, and the education and culture of the mass of the people approximates more nearly to the type and standard of Canada than to those of Great Britain.”2 Leacock was able to exploit this common cultural experience in books such as Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy and Further Foolishness where his humorous sketches on such timely topics as movies, politics, literature, and education seemed to make him successful in the American market-place.