Lesson 13
Why someone would abandon
humour writing
humour writing
Like that of many Canadians, my last memory of Pierre
Berton[1]
comes from his appearance on the CBC’s Rick Mercer Report in 2004. Eighty-four-years-old at the time and fated
to die later that year, Berton took part in the TV program to demonstrate how to roll a joint.
The image made people laugh because most Canadians
knew Berton as a literary icon and as part of a generation not tied to
notorious marijuana use. I’m grateful
for the scene because it will remind me forever of just how damn funny Pierre Berton
could be.
Despite all the achievements that marked his life, the
television vignette purposely celebrated his funny side and stressed it by
highlighting Berton’s Leacock Medal for Humour.
However, setting aside the joint-rolling lesson, he had, arguably,
reached his peak as a humorist in Just
add Water and Stir, the book that earned him that 1960 Leacock Medal.[2]
Berton devoted his subsequent writing and achieved
most of his literary success working on history and other serious
subjects. In 1960, his career was
taking him away from magazines and newspapers into television and radio. This gave him different opportunities to
indulge his personality and to poke at politics and culture, and he decided to
direct his writing to ambitions that required research and respect.
As someone who aspired to make Canada’s history
accessible, Berton had a challenge. He needed to link the fact-laden,
pursed-lipped world of academia to the language and the imagery that make books
interesting. Perhaps, he didn’t want to
risk eroding his reputation with the brand of humorist, which some writers
think marks you for a spot at the children’s table and the basement of the
CanLit outhouse.
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| Crude Drawing |
Too bad. I
think Just add Water and Stir pulls
it off, fluctuating between humour and the deadly serious in a way that make a
coherent sounding whole. It leaves you
smiling, but it also includes pieces that are grim. Berton struggled to
describe the book calling it “a random
collection of satirical essays, rude remarks, used anecdotes, thumbnail
sketches, ancient wheezes, old nostalgias, wry comments, limp doggerel,
intemperate recipes, vagrant opinions, and crude drawings...”
Although officially an editor and journalist, Berton
admired parody and satire and imbeds his editorial comments on education in
episodes entitled “Fun with Dick and Jane” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” His observations on the changing Canadian
society includes essays on the size-of-your-office corporate culture and his “Modest
Proposal for a Divorce Ceremony.”[3] In critiques on popular periodicals, he
attacks Time, Vogue, and Mayfair, but lauds Mad Magazine.[4]
You recognize the outrage in Berton’s humorous pieces
because it echoes the opinions in the accompanying somber ones on social
reform, racial profiling, capital punishment, wiretapping, and torture in
Canadian prisons. He also rants over
commercialization, politics, and mass media. But, surprisingly at first
reading, his harshest words fall on food recipes - the issue behind the title
of the book.
Berton calls “Just Add Water and Stir” the “most
hideous phrase to enter the language ... (adding that) ...the greatest and most
monstrous villainy foisted on the consuming public has been instant
coffee.” In the middle of the book, via
a pink paper insert, he tries to counter the 1950s version of fast food with
his own semi-serious recipes. They’re different. Rather than setting out an ordered
combination of ingredients and steps for preparation, they tell stories - the
story of making a soup, some baked beans, and a plate of corned beef hash.
Anticipation and the joy of food fill these
recipe-yarns.
The phrase “Just
Add Water and Stir” makes an ideal title for this book because it evokes a
bouillabaisse blend of different kinds of spices with meaty chunks, but it also
speaks directly to Berton’s overriding message and the notion that pulls the
mix together: that people should care about things.
“We live in a dehydrated age and we are in mortal
danger of having our souls dehydrated as well,” he says explaining that “in the
kitchen ... we will cheerfully eat sawdust, as long as it can be poured
straight from the package to the plate.”
For him, instant coffee reflects a society
increasingly coloured by “not caring” - in this case, not caring about the
effort taken to cultivate the coffee beans and not caring enough to honour your
guests with a decent beverage. We would
classify the recipes and food rants as humour, but many words - about people
not caring - could have been easily injected into his pieces on legalized
torture and capital punishment.
The book closes with some of those “Old Nostalgias,”
around his father, his childhood in the Depression, and early days in
journalism.[5] Berton was still in his thirties when this
book was produced, and I am not sure whether he really had the credentials for
quality nostalgia, but his words stimulated my own. I miss the funny Pierre Berton, Ben Wicks,
Barbara Frum, Peter Gzowski, Eric Nicol, Mordecai Richler, Gary Lautens, Bob
Johnstone, Max Ferguson, and all the others who, through a mix of humour and
caring, gave meaning to the word “Canadian” for most of my life.
Berton’s book amplifies this impulse for nostalgia
with profiles of Glenn Gould, Charles Templeton, Russ Baker, and others. But Just
add Water also admonishes people like me who become wistful over a past
that doesn’t seem to exist any longer. Berton says it “still exists ... as (it) always
did...You (just) do not see it any more, my friend.”
Perhaps, this jab makes a better reason to be grateful
for my last, joint-rolling memory of Berton.
It ties the history of Canadian humour to Mercer and his generation of
still-existing, Canadian personalities who still care, help define our country
today, and persist in doing it proudly branded as humorists.
Click for Pierre Berton Trivia
[1] Pierre Francis de
Marigny Berton was born on 12 July 1920 in Whitehorse in the Yukon. A comprehensive resource on Berton is the
2008 biography by historian A.B. McKillop, (Pierre
Berton: A biography).
[2] Although Berton had
started to dabble in other media by that time, he was still known primarily as
a newspaper columnist, and the book draws heavily from his pieces in the Toronto Star. He rarely drifted into humour writing
again. One exception came, however, not
long after he won the Leacock Medal.
This was The Secret World of Og,
which he wrote for his own children.
[4] In Just
Add Water and Stir, Berton also lampoons 1950s society in “Modern Fables”
that mock commercial enterprise (“The Great Detergent Premium Race,” “Goliath
Tobacco’s Big Comeback,” and “The Legend of (a Las Vegas-like) Healing
Mountain,” and in verse like “A Toast to (the) Woodbine (Racetrack in Toronto)”
and “The Sixty-Five Days of Christmas” as well as parodies of 1950s Television shows like Perry Mason and
Gunsmoke.
[5] In this book, he also celebrated the UBC
student paper (The Ubyssey -a training ground for a number of Leacock Medalists) and his work at the
defunct Vancouver News-Herald.