Word: leacock
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sondra K. Gotlieb is a novelist and winner of the 1979 Stephen Leacock Prize for Humour. Her work includes parodies of Washington diplomatic life...
...this rich compendium, Novelist Mordecai Richler attempts to lift humorists out of the high chair and onto the Louis Quinze. He ransacks old collections and ranges through the century, from Stephen Leacock to Fran Lebowitz. Anything that smacks of adolescence is jettisoned: "You will meet with no Dorothy Parker here... I found her comic stories brittle, short on substance." And nothing mild is allowed: to go through Robert Benchley's work is "to discover a good many of his sketches astonishingly bland, disarmingly gentle." The 65 pieces that pass Richler's scrutiny are trenchant, acrimonious and sharp. Most...
Take the first entry, Leacock's Gertrude the Governess: "It was a wild and stormy night on the West Coast of Scotland. This, however, is immaterial to the present story, as the scene is not laid in the West of Scotland." That kind of screwball is still pitched effectively by Monty Python, but it is not a sign of seniority. Virginia Woolf believed that Ring Lardner had "talents of a remarkable order." And so he had. But the episode from You Know Me Al leans hard on misspelling and false naiveté, favorite devices of the novice: "Florrie thinks...