Leacock Medal and Women Writers

See a recent shot at the issue by Jennifer Villamere 

2015 Leacock Finalist - Zarqa Nawaz, Laughing All the Way to the Mosque

In October 2013, I spent a few days surrounded by thousands of interesting and excited women in Baltimore. It seemed like an okay way to pass the time. My expenses were paid by my hosts, I had extra holidays to burn, and my wife kept her comments to a minimum as I left for the airport.

          The National Conference of the U.S. Society of Women Engineers invited me to speak on the history of gender equality because of a book I had written and because of experiences related to two sad events that bookended the 1980s, a decade when, for the second time, no women appeared on the list of Leacock Medal recipients. My brush with engineering issues frames my perspective on the meagre female representation on the humour-medal winners list.

          One of those sad events left Canada traumatized. On the evening of December 6, 1989, a gunman went through classrooms at l’École Polytechnique in Montreal shooting female engineering students. Two of the fourteen murder victims and several of those wounded worked during the day for my employer, which, like other organizations, responded to the tragedy with programs and a commitment to increase the representation of women in engineering.

          The other sad event, the November 1980 death of Elsie Gregory MacGill, relates to my book. The book tells Elsie’s life story recounting her experiences as the world’s first female aeronautical engineer and aircraft designer and the driving force on the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada.

          Polio hit Elsie on the eve of her graduation in 1929, put her in bed and a wheelchair for years, and forced her to pursue a career in a male-dominated profession with a disability. She provided great material for a book.

          In researching the biography and promoting the programs at work, I read enough to know that the issues around gender equality are complex and that the merits of specific responses are debatable. Some women see remedial actions as patronizing; and other measures can backfire by implying that women can’t compete and need help.

          After thinking about this stuff for a quarter of a century and in a big way for the past decade, I find myself certain of only one thing--the positive impact of role models like Elsie. Seeing or learning about someone whom you admire and whom you resemble doing well in a field motivates you with the image of possibility.

          Perversely, female enrollment in engineering schools doubled in the 1990s partly because of the profile women in engineering received after the Montreal tragedy. It caused young women to think about such a career.

          I’m not sure why the Leacock Medal has not been awarded to more women over the years. Some people have ideas. You don’t have to Google too long or scratch too deep to find musings about how tough women in comedy have it or to find flat statements, such as in a 2007 Vanity Fair piece by Christopher Hitchens,^[1] to the effect that women are just “not funny.”

          But the Leacock award has a particular context and feels forces beyond what might be explained by broader gender issues or by the brutality of comedy performed on stage. Female writers, excellent ones, abound in Canada, and you could even suggest that women have interests that align well with Leacockian humour.

          You might also feel awkward arguing an inherent bias in the Leacock Medal, given the number of family-oriented themes and the three women among the early winners of the award. But something happened after this initial spurt. A quarter century passed before Sondra Gotlieb expanded the list of women by one, and only two other women have won the medal since: Marsha Boulton in 1996 and Cassie Stocks in 2013. Six out of (the now) sixty-eight in total, something less than a tenth, is certainly statistically significant of something--of what exactly, aside from the pervasiveness of gender bias, though, I’m not sure.^[2]

          But I am certain that there have been other funny female writers, and if more women emulated people like Boulton and Stocks, Canada would benefit. I think that the Leacock Medal program would risk little and gain a lot by making a special effort to promote its female winners, maybe by naming one of its awards for student writers in their honour. The competition would be open to both genders, but the message in the award name would be that women should compete and can be funny, too.

          I know that women can be funny--because of the look on my wife’s face when I first told her about the invitation to Baltimore.^[3]

         

---

[1] Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair, January 2007, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/01/hitchens200701 (accessed January 2, 2014).

[2] Even now, a significant majority of entrants in the annual Leacock Medal competition are male (Leacock Associates President Michael Hill, email to DBD March 14, 2014).  In 2015, one woman was short listed Zarqa Nawaz, author of Laughing All the Way to the Mosque: she didn't win.

[3] “So, you’re the only Dick at this event” was her first response.

Richard J. Trivia

 Sex, Liquor, and Gambling with the Nation’s Youth

 

In the late 1960s, I was a high school student in Port Perry, a small Southern Ontario town just north of Oshawa.  My buddies and I liked to think we were soaked in the sixties culture; we soaked up the new rock music on the radio; and some sucked up the fumes from burning marijuana leaves.   

But for the most part, we regarded the other features of the times, the protest movements, the student activism, peace marches, civil rights demonstrations, and sit-ins, as remote grainy TV images, weird and unrelated to our semi-rural, sort-of-bucolic Canadian life.

For this reason, we were all amused in late April 1967 by the news that students had staged a protest and sit-in at Henry Street High School just down the road in Whitby.  The specific reason for the protest was vague.  Something about disciplinary action against a student or unfair tests.

My friends and I all thought “oh, wow ... cool.”  That was about it.  The whole thing passed without too much fuss.  We turned back to our other interests: cars, girls, avoiding homework, fixing cars, and avoiding awkward interactions with girls.    

Maybe the Henry Street sit-in was not a big deal in the battle for student rights, but I have now learned that it was a bigger deal for adults in our area than I realized at the time. This is because the key instigator of the protest was identified as Toronto Globe and Mail columnist and then newly anointed Leacock Medal winner Richard J. Needham.[i]

Needham had been invited to the school to address the students at an event launching “School Spirit Week.”  Three hundred fresh-faced Henry Street students were herded into the auditorium to listen to the esteemed newspaperman speak.   I imagine most of them were like me and would not have known much if anything about Needham and the Globe back then.  But I wish I was in that auditorium.  Those there no doubt remember his words to this day.

In reporting on the speech, the Oshawa Times, the local daily, said that Needham was awe-inspiring in a rant that “advocated freedom of drink, freedom of sex, voluntary education and the abolishment of all laws except those restraining murder and property damage.”[ii]

Other tidbits from his address to the young forming minds included:

 

• "Sex, liquor and gambling laws are not worth observing

• and I break them every chance I get.”
 
• “Stupid crutty laws ... are subjecting people to stupid persecution.”
 
•  “The only way to change them is to refuse to obey them.”

 

He reportedly told the students that they should be allowed to stay away from classes at will - because it was their loss if they did and they should not be there if they did not want to be.

The Henry Street student protest took place the very next day.

It not only startled the country cousins up in my school.  It also agitated teachers, partners, and Christian groups.  Needham was denounced by all.   I am sure he loved it.

The protest and the freedom for everything speech were not inconsistent with Needham’s newspaper rants and well known Libertarian position on social and political issues.   But he may have been fired up with extra conviction and confidence that spring as the Henry Street “School Spirit Week” came just a few weeks after Needham was named the 1967 Leacock Medalist.   He may have been feeling his oats.  
 

A decade after the student protest, in 1977, Needham officially retired from the Globe and Mail.  He still wrote periodic columns though, sharing random thoughts on things like “cruddy laws” and “stupid” governments.
 

The son of a British army officer, Richard John Needham was born in Gibraltar on May 17, 1912 and lived with his family to India, Ireland, and Britain.
 

He immigrated to Canada from England when he was 16.  Like many British youths coming to this country during those years, the Needham worked a hired man on a farm.  But, unlike others with limited education, he landed a job a reporter with a major daily newspaper, the Toronto Star, while still a teenager.  He was fired from the Star in 1935 and floated around other papers before ending up at the Globe and Mail in the early 1950s.  He would spend the rest of his career there, working as the chief editorial writer from 1960 to 1964.  
 

He wrote the odd humour column during this period, and eventually the paper gave him the humorist assignment full time.

For many years after his 1977 retirement, Needham continued to drop by the Globe and pick up his mail.  He told people that his Obituary should state: "Richard Needham's tiresome and repetitious column will no longer appear because he is dead."   

 

When he passed away in 1992 leaving his wife Mavis, his daughter, two sons, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, the Globe and Mail printed that sentence at the end of its official Obit, giving him the last word forever.

 Needhams' Inferno - 1967 Leacock Medal Winner

---

[i] “Principal feels strike sparked by Needham,” Globe and Mail, Friday April 28, 1967, p. 51

[ii] The Youth’s Instructor (The Seventh Day Adventists) September 19, 1967, p.5, Trends by Walter T. Crandall

George Bain (1920 - 2006)

George Charles Stewart Bain wrote newspaper columns that drew the admiration of other journalists and kudos even from his political targets because of his elegant, urbane and incisive style. National Award winning journalist Val Sears once said that Bain “wrote the most important column in Canada ... (and) was the most stylish of people writing about Canadian politics.”

Ironically, Bain’s gained greatest recognition as a writer for using the “F... word” in print.

In 1968 when the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau swore at an opposition member in the House of Commons, most of the national media corps reported with pursed lips and respectful tenor that Trudeau had used an unspecified obscenity - or quoted the Prime Minister as claiming he had mumbled the words “fuddle duddle.” Bain set the record straight, using the notorious four letters in sequence for the first time in a major Canadian publication via his Globe and Mail column.

Although known primarily as a political journalist, George Bain did not restrict his humour to side projects like his Leacock Medal Book, Nursery Rhymes to be read aloud by young parents with old children. He injected humour and wit into his regular columns and mock newspaper reports, like his pretend Letters from Lilac, Saskatchewan . The popular writer Allan Fotheringham called Bain "the wittiest columnist ever to grace Ottawa."

A Toronto native, George Bain quit school at age 16, in 1936, to work as a copy boy at the Toronto Star during the Depression. Later, he worked at the Toronto Telegram until joining the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II.

Bain served as a bomber pilot in Britain, North Africa, and Italy during the War despite a fear of flying that lasted his whole life.

In 1957, Bain opened the Globe and Mail's first London bureau, where he covered Europe, Africa and the Middle East. From 1960 to 1964 he was posted to Washington and reported on the civil rights movement, the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Bain was known to be a "perfectionist" who would regularly rewrite his opening paragraph 30 times.

In addition to the Leacock Medal winner, Nursery Rhymes, Bain authored other books known for their with and humour including I've Been Around and Around and Around, Letters from Lilac, Champagne is for Breakfast, and Gotcha.

In 1982, Bain and his wife Marion moved to Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia where they designed and built a home with a full wine cellar to house George’s vintage collection. He spent his final years writing about wine and serving as dean of journalism at King's College in Halifax.

The couple had a son, Christopher, who presumably benefited from the Nursery Rhymes.

Review of Leacock Medal Book
Nursery Rhymes to be read aloud by young parents with old children

Parody - The National Nursery Rhyme

Review of Leacock Medal Book Nursery Rhymes to be read aloud by young parents with old children

Parody - The National Nursery Rhyme