Stephen Leacock enjoyed the privilege of studying economics under the tutelage of the most prescient and greatest economist America has yet—and likely will ever—produce: Thornstein Veblen. Vebelen’s writings are notorious dense and aesthetic; he writes like a novelist, not a math guy. Veblen can be quite funny but it is not the kind of humor that sits there on the surface with comic intention. That is exactly the kind of writing for which his student Leacock is most noted. To steal a line from a popular gangster film, Leacock is a funny guy.
Weirdly, though, the funny stuff only represents a portion of his overall output, much of which is not intended for comic effect and, indeed, isn’t funny. Leacock’s biographer, Peter McArthur put situation of the reader faced with the task of making his way through voluminous output of his subject best, nothing that over the course that body of work (which still had a couple of decades left ahead before its end), he already “expressed opinions on every conceivable subject, and has expressed them with impetuous vigor.”
Among the treasure trove of subjects covered in the short writings of Leacock’s career are, for example, the celebration of the recently invented Mother’s Day, unsolicited advice to the newly created League of Nations, the tendency of people to lie about their familiarity and enjoyment of ancient literary classics, the peculiarities of the golfing fanatic, and “The Amazing Genius of O.Henry.” (The latter is another example of his humor as it is, in its entirety, and example of irony which is, of course, is transformed into art by virtue of O. Henry being a writer whose stock-in-trade was the ironic reversal at the conclusion of his stories.)
That the title of his critique of O. Henry’s stories is actually intended to be taken ironically reveals the inherent problem of reading a writer like Stephen Leacock. Taken out of context and excised from any familiarity with the writer’s own personal views and opinions, it is entirely possible to interpret that selection sincerely; that, in other words, the praise heaped upon O. Henry is genuine admiration. The same holds true for much of Leacock’s works, including “The Woman Question.” This is an “essay” presented in a form that looks like it could be a short story or merely a genuine recollection. The opening scene initiates the set-up: the narrator is sitting in a bar with another man when a woman begins declaiming loudly that if women were only allowed to vote, the war that would come to be known as World War I would never have happened. The narrator identifies her as example of what men like himself to call, before they began losing the courage to do so, an Awful Woman. Or, as she could be called today by actual men like the narrator: a femi-nazi. Without the contextual clues necessary to know that Leacock was himself politically a progressive, it would again be easy to assume the piece is not an example of satire, but an expression of genuine views on the subject at hand.
This engagement with irony is the defining literary trait of Leacock’s humorous writing and even manages to creep in occasionally into more serious works rather than act as the dominant tone of the piece. His legacy rests mostly upon his humor rather than his serious offerings. The Stephen Leacock Award was created in 1947 to honor the best examples of humor writing in Canada. So popular has Leacock remained that throughout Canada one finds commemorative buildings named in his honor and he even attained what some view as the single greatest honor possible for anyone: getting his face on a stamp.
