Ottawa Public Library Blog Bits
The Rule of Threes
Metaphors and Similes
Well-crafted similes will immediately strike you as apt and
reveal a truth, and yet they’re unexpected, musical, and literate. In the 1973 Leacock Medal book The Outside
Chance of Maximillian Glick master storyteller Morley Torgov invokes such
imagery to describe young Max’s home town dominated by a steel mill: it “sprawled
like a gathering of dragons, belching smoke and fire” and Max’s growing
interest in the opposite sex: “on-again-off-again manhood . . . constantly
trailed Max like an uninvited pet, usually a few paces behind, sometimes
drawing alongside, sometimes even a pace or two ahead.” It’s not easy. A metaphor that is merely unusual can take
too much work to understand or too much humour-crushing explanation. Again, try to study the masters like Torgov.
Big Incongruity
If you want to underpin a whole story or presentation with a
humorous feel, you might consider framing it with a pervasive incongruity. The
second book win the Leacock Medal Sarah Binks (1948 –author Paul Hiebert) presents
the modest life story of an early 20th century poetess along with samples of
her bad poetry. It is funny because it
is cloaked in an over-the-top effusive literary biography that seems absurd at
every turn. The narrator describes
Sarah’s major award, the Wheat Pool Medal which recognizes increased
production, as among “the highest awards . . . ever . . . bestowed upon one of
Saskatchewan’s Daughters” and the “highest award in the bestowal of
Saskatchewan people.” A comparable
approach to a speech presentation might be to do it in costume or with a funny
backdrop throughout.
Good intentions go wrong
Canadian humour seems to have a soft spot for
well-intentioned hosers. It becomes
funny when we recognize how it can all go wrong. In his 1969 Leacock Medal book You’re Only
as Old as You Act, New Brunswick journalist Stuart Trueman tells the story of
his friend Roly who has his head turned one Christmas by exposure to four
speeches on keeping up “the goodwill of Yuletide . . . all the year.” When Roly
decides to leave his Christmas tree and decorations up, neighbours brand him a
tightwad “trying to make one tree last two Christmases.” His persistent
goodwill wishing causes friends to assume he has something to sell and then
“the rumour flew around that Roly was going into politics !!! and shouldn’t be trusted.”
Comparisons in a
Series
While many speeches and writings follow a logical
cause-and-effect story format, some information requires the presentation of a
series of facts or policy elements.
This can be done in a humorous way by comparing each element to how it
might be perceived from another perspective like that of a client, a taxpayer,
or a competitor. The 1965 Leacock Medal
Book by Globe and Mail columnist George Bain (Nursery Rhymes to be read aloud
by Young Parents of Old Children) appears at first like a children’s book with
colourful illustrations and verse laid out in the abecedarium (A is for ape, B
is for beaver) style for kids on every other page. The book as a whole becomes funny because each
of these pages sits opposite one of prose, biological information, and facts that
are meant to be cheat sheets for parents who have to deal with the awkward
questions that the pages for kids will induce.
Physical Descriptions
Try to describe the physical or technical features of a
policy, a project or friend in a way that comments on the essential character
you want to mock or emphasize. In Donald
Jack’s third Leacock Medal winner, Me Bandy You Cissie, the hero describes his
first meeting with his girlfriend’s father by inventorying the great man’s
features: “At the top end of a pair of heavy, sloping shoulders stood a boulder
of a head, on which a thrusting face had been carved . . . with its expanse of
pallid brow below a mat of uncombed graying hair, its domineering nose and
wide, stubborn mouth … (his eyes) …were positively alarming . . . when they
were fixed on you, you could actually feel your own personality draining away
into your sweaty socks.”
Unrelated Story
If you are struggling to find something funny in the writing
project before you, stand back and think of a totally unrelated story that has
made you laugh in the past; it can be a joke or a personal experience. Then
think of the fundamental human concerns that made it funny and see if there is a
way to tie it into some aspect of the underlying interests at play in the
subject of your current writing. John
Levesque, author of the 1993 Leacock Medal winner Waiting for Aquarius, often
began his columns with reminiscences drawn from his childhood and teen years. In reporting on changing demographics, he led
with the story of a six-year-old friend who had to keep a back-pocket list to
remember the names of his sixteen siblings; he explored office politics by
recalling a grade school exchange of Valentines; and he tied Descartes to his
dog, physics to sentient trees, diapers to inventions.
Dramatize the Ordinary
Another way to use incongruity to present seemingly dull
information is to dramatize the seriousness in a satirical or ironic way. The celebrated Vancouver humorist and multiple
Leacock Medalist Eric Nicol applied this approach to great effect in his book, Girdle
Me a Globe, which reports on a year-long, round-the-world honeymoon trip. He complains a lot, details the aggravation
of packing clothes, and fusses over dinner jackets and satin pants. Nicol
describes foreign laundries in epic terms, shudders over the ordeal of standing
on marble floors, and talks of the multi-gauge Australian railway with terror -
all to mock travel writers who dramatize their adventures for personal puffery
and to, at the same time, make readers
recognize the common features of life everywhere.
Ridicule the fearsome
It is cathartic to mock the things that scare us
individually or as communities and organizations. By making it sound silly, it minimizes it and
makes it seem manageable. In W.O.
Mitchell’s Jake and the Kid, the hired man Jake and other yarn-spinners all say
they have “the deepest snow, the worst dust storms, the biggest hailstones . .
. Rust and dust and hail and sawfly and cutworm and drought.” Their tall tales are explained by a character
who says “These men lie about the things that hurt them most . . . If a man can
laugh at them he’s won half the battle . . . When he exaggerates things he
isn’t lying really; it’s a defense . . . He can either do that or squeal.”
Make fun of yourself
Unless overdone or insincere, self-deprecating humour is
usually a pretty safe and effective fall back in any setting and any form of
writing. Again, it always helps to stand
back and look at yourself and your work from a different perspective. In his book, Mice in the Beer (1963 Leacock
Medal winner) the author Norman Ward, a political scientist and academic, explains
to a passing workman that musing over an academic article with eyes closed
while sitting under a tree is considered work for a university professor. “When I write articles, my wife calls it
loafing,” says the man, who then tries to make amends saying “For a fellow who
never does anything but read books . . . you seem to know a lot.”
From:
What’s So Funny ?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal
for Humour Writing
Dick Bourgeois-Doyle
General Store Publishing House, 2015