“As a teen in 1960s
Ontario, I fantasized that some heavenly intervention might allow me to pass
high school French so I could go off to Paris and hang out with someone who
might be named Collette, Michèle, or something like that. Ernest Hemingway’s
death, image, and aftermath loomed large in pop culture and in young male minds
at that time.
He told us, ‘If you’re lucky enough
to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your
life, it stays with you,’ adding that celebrated comment: ‘for Paris is a
moveable feast’…”
Except from: What’s So Funny?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing
The
tone of the book and many of its observations may seem quaint in an Internet
world. Yet some passages could have been written yesterday, and pretty much all
of it remains funny. This is because Nicol describes the walks through the
streets of the everyday with weird words and silly detail--as he did on his day
at the bibliothèque: “A little man
saved from midgetdom only by his bowler. With hands resting on his behind, he
fluffs out the wings of his swallowtail coat (circa 1885), like a nervous
blowfly.”
The book gives readers a chance to reflect on their own touchstone, early life experiences and how they have framed all that has followed.
For More: What’s So Funny?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing
In my book on the Leacock Medal,
I opened the review of the 1951 winner with a personal reference to the
somewhat obvious links between Hemingway and Paris and young male imaginings.
I couldn’t help it.
Eric
Nicol’s book The Roving I, the first
of three to win the Leacock Medal for him,
tells of ordinary things: a
visit to the library, a ride on a train, and a walk through city streets.
There’s not much interaction with other people. Yet the book holds your
interest because those streets run through Paris, and the train takes you
across the French countryside. Nicol wrote the book during his time as a
graduate student at the Sorbonne in the late 1940s. He assembled The Roving I as a travel narrative aimed
at a Canadian audience, drawing it from the columns that helped pay his
expenses abroad. Eric Nicol’s later books also repackaged
newspaper columns, but those collections often lacked any unifying theme. The Roving I had the story-like
framework of his year in Paris, and this makes it an easier read.
The
tone of the book and many of its observations may seem quaint in an Internet
world. Yet some passages could have been written yesterday, and pretty much all
of it remains funny. This is because Nicol describes the walks through the
streets of the everyday with weird words and silly detail--as he did on his day
at the bibliothèque: “A little man
saved from midgetdom only by his bowler. With hands resting on his behind, he
fluffs out the wings of his swallowtail coat (circa 1885), like a nervous
blowfly.”
The book, like all of Nicol’s
work, is fun and funny, but I found this one intriguing because it was clear
that as much as he liked Parisian life, the City of Light was not destined to
be his Moveable Feast.
For him, it was
and would always be Vancouver.
The book gives readers a chance to reflect on their own touchstone, early life experiences and how they have framed all that has followed.
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing
Nicol and His Brush with Me