(1974)
Women do not tend to find sexist jokes funny, cripples don’t respond well to “sick” jokes about cripples, Blacks don’t like “nigger” jokes, and Jews aren’t fond of anti-semitic jokes. There is no such thing as universal humour, a joke that everyone will find amusing all the time. The funnybone, like other personality traits, is related to class, sex, colour, nationality and even age, as well as to individual character. Without banishing the other variables to outer darkness for all time, I would like at this time to ask one simple question: What do Canadians laugh at?
Instead of using a theory that assumes a quality called “humour” intrinsic to a piece of writing, imperishable and universal, I’ll propose a model which has to do with the triangular relationship between the person telling the joke, the person listening to it and the person laughed at. I’ll call the first of these the “laugher,” the second the “audience,” and the third the “laughee.” In any given piece of humour, what designs does the laugher have upon the audience? What response does he want? Just as importantly, who does he assume the audience to be? What do both laugher and audience think of the laughee, and —a question seldom asked —what does he think of them? If the joke is made at his expense, can we assume that he resents it? Is he in a position to display his resentment?
There are, of course, many kinds of laughter. There’s the laughter of recognition and identity, in which the laugher’s response is essentially, “I am like that.” There’s the laughter of derision and distancing, in which the laugher is laughing at, not with his laughter makes him feel superior to the butt of the joke, and he can say to himself smugly, “That person is stupid, or crude, or absurd; I am not like that.” There is also survival laughter, born from conditions so awful that you either have to laugh or stick your head in the oven: ghetto humour of many kinds, certain varieties of war and hospital humour, the hysterical laughter of women in the Depression-time kitchen in Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House. And there is the laughter of satire, laughter used as a weapon, scathing and destructive, in which the laugher assumes that the object is not feeble and silly, but evil and dangerous: F. R. Scott’s social satires, Milton Acorn’s “old depression workman, jokes all the time, jokes loaded with hate,” Klein’s Hitleriad:
“Let anger take me in its grasp, let hate,
Hatred of evil prompt me, and dictate!”
Before turning to Canadian humour, I’d like to try this model on something distant in time and place.
If you thumb through the pages of the nineteenth century Punch, one of the first “humour” magazines, you’ll be surprised at the parade of Fagin-like Jews, banjo-eyed Blacks in funny costumes, effete Frenchmen and, especially, Neanderthal-browed, dirty, drunken Irishmen (the Irish were more of a threat). Also the Cockneys with their improper accents, the garrulous and silly females, the nouveaux riches with their pretensions. What can we deduce about the writers and readers of Punch, apart from the fact that they were not Blacks, Irishmen, women or Jews or “lower-class?” The laugher and the audience apparently share the assumption that there is a “correct” way of being human, and that all other ways render one an object of ridicule. The “correct” way involves being white, English, male, and of a certain class, not financially (much scorn is reserved for those who have only money) but, somehow, spiritually. Laugher and audience are English gentlemen; they subscribe to a code of thought and behaviour which, though not necessarily linked to birth and breeding, simply rules out the lesser breeds without the law. Rich lords and ladies come in for a certain amount of joshing, but only when they render themselves absurd by somehow violating the code by being eccentric or affected or dumb. The code itself is not absurd. The laugher flatters the audience by taking it for granted that both laugher and audience are members of the elect. In reality, of course, they were not the elect at all: they were merely aspirants, “snobs,” like Dickens’ Veneerings, defining themselves as at least potential members of the elect by disparaging those who had no hope: “I am not like them.” Gentlemen of the Tennysonian or even the Chaucerian variety would not have indulged in this type of joke, partly because they would not have needed to. One function of sex, class and race jokes is that they bolster the shakily held notions of superiority of laugher and audience alike.
What of the laughees? We do not know what the objects of Punch’s numerous sallies thought of them, as they did not have access to the means of retaliation or reply. In fact, many of them probably never saw the magazine, as they were poor or illiterate.
As contrast to what I propose to say about Canadian humour in English, I’d like to put forward a version of “typical” English humour and a version of “typical” American humour.
Our comments about Punch provide a key to English humour. Most English humour, like English writing in general from Chaucer and Spenser through Shakespeare to Dickens, Austen, Thackeray and Eliot, is inextricably connected with class consciousness of one kind or another. This is hardly escapable, since class was historically, and still is, such a determining factor in the life of the individual within society. Accent is of paramount importance; generally, the more “correct” the accent and manners the less funny the individual is held to be. Thus the Wife of Bath is funny, the Knight (who approaches the pattern of “gentleman”) is not. The Gravedigger is intended to be funny, Hamlet is not. The Fool is comical and ironic, Lear is tragic. Shaw’s Pygmalion makes the point perfectly. How many comic turns of the screw have been twisted out of that classic situation, master and mistress masquerading as servants and vice versa? All England loves a Lord, as the saying used to go; and even Bertie Wooster, that inept and languid upper-class creation of P. G. Wodehouse, is funny because he is played off against the pattern of what a gentleman ought to be.
Very generally, the laugher in English humour poses as one with the “correct” gentlemanly tastes and accent; he flatters the audience by implying that the audience, too, possesses these attributes. The real audience, however, is the snob within, and the real accomplishment of laughter is reassurance: “I am not like them. I am classier.”
American humour is a different kettle of fish. Classically, it has been Tall Tale or Wooden Nutmeg humour. The three roles available are the con-man or sharpie, sucker or dupe, and audience, and the idea is for the sharpie to put one over on the dupe, with the audience admiring the con-man’s superior cunning and laughing at the dupe’s gullibility. In Tall Tale, the audience itself plays dupe until the tallness of the tale is finally revealed. A simple con-man story is Mark Twain’s famous Jumping Frog tale; a more complicated rendition is the episode in Owen Wister’s Virginian, where the cowboy hero wins his duel, not with pistols but by telling an absurd story and sucking the villain into believing it. The “audience” is both the reading audience and an audience of “cultivated” easterners who have gathered to listen. Both audiences are flattered by being able to perceive themselves as more astute than the dupe. Then there’s the King and the Duke and their Royal Nonesuch in Huckleberry Finn, with the audience in the book playing dupe and the reading audience laughing; and the Connecticut Yankee, putting things over on the “gentlemen” of King Arthur’s Court. “Gentlemen” get short shrift in American humour; in fact they are distrusted as generally as they are in the rest of American literature, and are likely to be exposed as fakes, pretenders, snobs or ninnies. Real admiration is reserved for the con-men, who are just as likely to have a “regional” accent and play their tricks on city slickers as they are to be travelling salesmen pulling a fast one on the farmer’s daughter (a wonderful variation occurs in Flannery O’Connor’s story of the Bible salesman who steals the crippled woman’s wooden leg.) Faulkner’s Compsons are Southern Gentlemen and have a kind of crumbling nobility, but it’s the lowbrow Snopeses who make the sharp horse trades and end up with the money.
One of the charms of James Thurber is that he reverses the roles: in “Sitting in the Catbird Seat,” the potential dupe turns the tables on the con-lady, and time and again the ineffectual Walter Mittys end up, if not top dog, at least unduped.
In American humour the desired pattern is not one of right, correct, “gentlemanly” behaviour; instead it is a pattern suited to a highly competitive, individualistic society: you have to be smart enough to take care of yourself and not let the other guy outsmart you. Better still, you should have the wit to do it to him.
What about Canadian humour? It would be possible to deny the existence of such a thing, as the existence of a Canadian literature distinct from European and American literature was denied for many years (and still is, in some quarters). To set up such a denial, all you’d have to do would be to talk a lot about “regionalism,” considering Canada as a “region” of the U.S. or of England. You can find “gentleman” assumptions in Canadian humour, I’m sure, just as you can find con-men and dupes. Once you’ve denied that Canadian literature is in any way different, that it is merely an inferior kind of subspecies, you’ll have a perfect excuse for ignoring it in favour of other, presumably more accomplished specimens. This strategy has worked for many years in high schools and colleges across the land.
I propose to demonstrate that Canadian humour is indeed different in kind from these other varieties; not necessarily in overt content or genre, but in the assumptions the laugher makes about the audience, and in the kinds of satisfaction or reassurance the audience is intended to derive.
I’d like to examine three different genres of written humour, the parody, the satire and the kind of writing usually described as “humour.” My main examples will be Hiebert’s Sarah Binks, Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk and Cocksure, and Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. To avoid misconceptions, I’ll say at the outset that I have a good deal of affection for all the pieces; I am not attempting to diminish or demolish them, merely to examine them in the light of my model.
Sarah Binks is a literary parody.
I was first exposed to parody through the Rawhide Little Theatre’s rendition of Wuthering Heights in which an obnoxious Heathcliff chanted,
I must go out on the moors again
To the lonely moors and the sky,
And all I want is a sharp stick
To poke in Edgar Linton’s eye.
The poem itself is a parody (a take-off on a specific piece of writing, using the same rhythms but exploding the form by altering the content in the direction of the absurd). The entire playlet is a burlesque of the romantic novel and of Bronte in particular.
Parody habitually works in a double-edged way: by trivializing a specific work or style whose original has pretensions to profundity, it allows the audience an escape from the magical and mysterious in “art.” Laugher and audience are not sucked in by the artist, they see through him, they refuse to be moved by high seriousness. But in trivializing the artist and his work, laugher and audience diminish themselves as well. They aren’t up to the idealistic poses of Don Quixote; for them it’s Sancho, practical and stolid. Contrast the following well-known parody with its original and you will see what I mean:
The Working Class can kiss my ass,
I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.
Parody and burlesque are, it seems to me, inherently cynical, albeit in a mild way.
Thus Sarah Binks. Sarah herself is a fictitious poetess, the “Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan.” Hiebert’s biography of her is itself a takeoff of those ponderous, doleful and ultra-serious literary biographies which proliferate like guppies on the fringes of the literary scene; and like such biographies, it quotes extensively from Sarah’s own work, most of which proves to be parody of various nineteenth and twentieth century modes, styles and individual poems.
To get the full joy of Sarah it’s necessary to have a fairly extensive literary education, which the laugher assumes the audience possesses. Sarah’s translations of Heine take some of the wind out of the sails of German Romanticism, and her milking song quite properly diminishes Longfellow. But much of the humour in the biography itself is based on the assumption that there is something intrinsically unpoetic about Saskatchewan and especially about farms and Regina, (“the Athens of Saskatchewan”), and that a poet from Saskatchewan is a contradiction in terms. Laugher and audience are, we assume, from other, more cultured places.
Sarah Binks has raised her home province of Saskatchewan to its highest prairie level. Unschooled, but unspoiled, this simple country girl has captured in her net of poesy the flatness of that great province…. No other poet has so expressed the Saskatchewan soul. No other poet has caught in deathless lines so much of its elusive spirit, the baldness of its prairies, the alkalinity of its soil, the richness of its insect life.
Throughout the book Saskatchewan (and by extension Canada: Sarah is a “great Canadian” is treated as funny per se. Time and again references to other, real cultural centres are juxtaposed with Sarah’s milieu, with a diminishing effect on the latter. What is so funny about Saskatchewan? In a word, it is viewed as overwhelmingly provincial, prohibitively lacking in “culture.” Sarah is the best Saskatchewan can do, the Wheat Pool Medal and an honourary degree from St. Midget’s the highest honours bestowed on her. She is not only Saskatchewan’s best poet; she is its only poet, and her tombstone bears the word ALONE.
Sarah Binks pokes fun at a number of things, but foremost among them is the mere idea of anything “cultural” coming out of Saskatchewan (and Canada; in passing, it may be noted that Sarah’s poems take off just about every “Canadian” theme, including the depredations of Nature, the lives and deaths of animals, community life and effort, the Indian.) To return to my model, laugher and audience are assumed to be different from and superior to the denizens of Saskatchewan. Laugher and audience are educated, they are from somewhere else, they are not provincial. A reassuring thought, except, of course, for those in Saskatchewan….
Satire, unlike parody, has traditionally had moral designs upon the reader. Humour is used as a weapon and directed at objects the laugher considers out of line with his ideas of reason and correct behaviour. The force of satire depends on laugher and audience holding roughly similar ideologies, and unlike the parodist, the satirist often wishes to arouse moral indignation with a view to reform. Thus Swift’s Modest Proposal, which advocates selling and eating babies as a solution to the population problem, will not be perceived as effectively scathing if in fact you believe in cannibalism and don’t care what happens to the surplus population.
Much Canadian political satire has been in verse form (see, for instance, The Blasted Pine, compiled by Smith and Scott), and much of it is severe indeed, so severe that a friend of mine who was compiling an anthology of Canadian humour decided to leave out poetry altogether because it was “too bitter.” Its targets are usually abuses within the body politic, its aims to expose, rebuke and correct. Satires like F. R. Scott’s imply that situations, however deplorable, can and should be remedied: Canada, although behaving badly at present, can do better. Satires like these take the country seriously.
The breakdown in generally-held moral values has made it more difficult to write traditional satire, and the term “black humour” has come into use, applied to that kind of writing which points out abuses by exaggerating and fantasizing but does not assume the possibility of correcting them. Mordecai Richlers’s two prose satires, The Incomparable Atuk and Cocksure, fall somewhere between traditional satire and “black humour.” On one hand, Richler has made it clear that he considers the writer to be a moralist; on the other, neither of his satires provide many clues for the reformation of the society attacked. Perhaps it is the reformation of the reader that is aimed at instead: go thou and do unlikewise. In any case, that these two books are satires rather than “novels” is evident from the beheading of the hero on a quiz show in the first, and the science-fiction “Star Maker” and artificial inflatable film stars in the second. This is Gulliver’s Travelogue, not sense and sensibility.
The laughee in Atuk is the Canadian Community, with its cultural pretensions, its “Canada’s Darling” swim-champion national heroine, its hypocritical media-men, its two-faced treatment of native peoples. Atuk himself is a con-man who ends up as a dupe, but the laugh isn’t on him. Atuk, after he has been arrested for having eaten a U.S. Army colonel in the arctic, becomes the focus in a wave of anti-American feeling, inspired, we are led to understand, mainly by envy, disappointment and pique:
A mechanic who had been fired by General Motors… a widow who had bought oil shares in a Texas swamp; another whose most unforgettable character had been rejected by the Readers’ Digest… some who recall Senator McCarthy… a politician who had never made the Canadian section of Time; and more, many more….
The nationalism of the intellectuals is perceived as equally fatuous:
“This is not a banana republic,” an important novelist said. A University of Toronto psychologist pointed out, “Atuk’s act was one of symbolic revenge. Culturally, economically, the Americans are eating our whole country alive.”
(Richler assumed that his audience would find these remarks as hilarious as he did, and in 1963 he was probably right.) Public outrage at Atuk’s arrest is skilfully manipulated by tycoon Buck Twentyman for his own ends, and Atuk dies as the final touch in his efforts to undermine a rival American food chain. Twentyman is the real con-man and Canada is the dupe. What of the audience? If non-Canadian, its members can laugh at Canada’s provinciality and stupidity. But if Canadian, their laughter will surely be less single-minded, more complex.
Complexity reigns in Richler’s later satire Cocksure. On one level, its hero is an embodiment of Richler’s oft-repeated contention that Canadians are the world’s elected squares. Mortimer Griffen is Canadian, white, Anglo-Saxon, and Anglican, was educated at Upper Canada College, and reads The Best of Leacock in bed while his wife is reading The Story of O. He finds hockey games sexually stimulating, and used to take the Boys’ Own Paper, from which he has memorized the motto: “Fear God, honour the crown, shoot straight and keep clean.” He has been awarded a Victoria Cross. In swinging London he’s everybody’s scapegoat, because he still has old-fashioned “moral” attitudes.
Laugher and audience join with the swingers in mocking Mortimer, but they are also expected to laugh at the modernist inanities of the swingers. Mortimer is a sane man in a society of amoral cosmopolitan loonies, but his brand of sanity is old-fashioned, provincial.
Read as a Canadian fable-of-identity, Cocksure can be seen as Richler’s map of the national inferiority complex. Mortimer is obsessed with what he considers the small size of his cock, and he swiftly becomes impotent. He is hounded by a Jewish editor who insists that Mortimer is really Jewish, and finally tells him why:
“Griffen, the scapegoat…. A Jew is an idea.
Today you’re my idea of a Jew.”
Because of his moral principles, which he can’t get rid of, he refuses to work for the Star Maker, a purveyor of plastic cinema images to the American public, and a wielder of enormous American capital power. The Star Maker, in addition to being immortal and a murderer, has become double-sexed and is pregnant by himself at the end of the book; he has absorbed Mortimer’s missing sexuality. In the face of the omnipotent American mogul, Mortimer the Canadian “scapegoat” is powerless, and his fate is similar to Atuk’s: he is to be killed as a publicity gimmick.
It’s difficult at first to place the laugher’s attitude to the audience. Presumably laugher and audience are detached enough from Mortimer’s “Canadian” values to find them archaic, but detached also from the extremes of hip London and mad Hollywood-America. Laugher and audience exist somewhere in mid-Atlantic, and the laughter is uneasy partly because of a lack of moral focus. We can see all the things Richler the moralist thinks are wrong, but we aren’t sure exactly what alternatives he is offering, what modes of behaviour he would approve.
Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is neither satire nor parody. It’s usually classed as “humour,” and intends to be funny without either literary parody (a Leacock specialty in other books, such as Literary Lapses and Nonsense Novels) or satirical attack. Nevertheless, the assumptions about the audience and the things held up for chuckles are similar to those in the Hiebert and Richler books.
Leacock makes it clear in his introduction that Mariposa is not just one small town. It is the representative Canadian small town: “… if you know Canada at all, you are probably acquainted with a dozen small towns just like it.” Much of the humour is created by the contrasts between the inhabitants’ point of view —for them, Mariposa is a large and important place —and that of the narrator, who has been somewhere else and takes it for granted that the reader has also:
Of course if you come to the place fresh from New York, you are deceived. Your standard of vision is all astray. You do think the place is quiet. You do imagine that Mr Smith is asleep merely because he closes his eyes as he stands. But live in Mariposa for six months or a year and then you will begin to understand it better….
One amusing thing about the inhabitants of Mariposa is that they think they are important. They take themselves seriously, and the narrator pretends to do so too. Leacock’s method is to make mock-epics out of trivia, thus deflating both the epic manner and the trivial events. The typical Mariposa event is the anti-climax: the Mariposa Belle sinks while the excursionists are singing O CANADA, but unlike the Titanic it lands on a sandbank. Peter Pupkin plans to kill himself for love, but unlike Werther he can’t work up to it. It is a place where pathos is possible but nothing really tragic is allowed to happen. It is silly, muddle-headed and harmless. Even politics, although taken seriously by the inhabitants, is a laughing matter for Leacock: Smith the con-man rigs the election by circulating the rumour that he has won, and Mariposa, ever sensitive to majority opinion, votes for him en bloc. The British connection is saved by chicanery. Not that Leacock cares much about the issues:
Don’t ask me what election it was, whether Dominion or Provincial or Imperial or Universal, for I scarcely know…. I only know that it was a huge election and that on it turned issues of the most tremendous importance, such as whether or not Mariposa should become part of the United States, and whether the flag that had waved over the school house at Tecumseh Township for ten centuries should be trampled under the hoof of an alien invader, and whether Britons should be slaves, and whether Canadians should be Britons, and whether the farming class would prove themselves Canadians, and tremendous questions of that kind.
Leacock makes his own position as laugher clearer than either Richler or Hiebert. Hiebert poses as a literary biographer, Richler does not address the audience directly. But Leacock is an ex-Mariposan who has gone on to more cosmopolitan haunts, and in the nostalgic Envoi he places the audience as a member of the same group. The Envoi is an imaginary train journey undertaken by a man who has left Mariposa to become successful in the big city. He recognizes the Mariposa people on the train by their quaintness: “…those people with the clothes that are perfectly all right and yet look odd in some way, the women with the peculiar hats and the—what do you say? —last year’s fashions?” The object of fun in Sunshine Sketches is the same as that in the Richler and Hiebert books: provinciality. The reader, being Canadian, is invited to recognize part of himself and his background in the sketches, but only part. The laugher implies that the audience now knows better.
If laugher and audience in English humour are saying, “I am not like them, I am a gentleman,” and if their American counterparts are saying, “I am not like them, I am not a dupe,” Canadian laughers and audiences—or those examined here, at any rate —seem to be saying, “I am not like them. I am not provincial, I am cosmopolitan.” But as provinciality is seen as something irrevocably connected with being Canadian, the audience can renounce its provinciality only by disavowing its Canadianism as well.
The concealed self-deprecation, even self-hatred, involved in such disavowal, the eagerness to embrace the values of classes and cultures held superior, the wish to conciliate the members of those other groups by deriding one’s own —these are usually attitudes displayed by people from oppressed classes or ethnic groups who have managed to make their way out of the group, alienating themselves in the process. “Yes, they are awful,” such jokes seem to be saying, “But look, I am laughing at them. I am no longer one of them.” Much of Canadian humour is like an extended Newfie joke, told by a Newfie who has made it for the amusement of a number of other succesful Newfies, as well as for that of the external British and American audience. Current examples are the “Canadian” jokes in the National Lampoon, written, of course by Canadians.
Who then are these cosmopolitan Canadians, uneasily laughing at their country, their countrymen and to a lesser extent at themselves? Certainly a large number of them are members of the educated middle class, conditioned through many years of schooling to depreciate things Canadian. Is Canada really such a joke? Or is the absurdity in the eyes of the beholder?