Needham Trivia and High School Sit-In
When
I was a teenager, we all knew about the Globe
and Mail columnist Richard J. Needham because he had caused a disturbance
down the road at Whitby’s Henry Street High.[i]
In
1967, the year Needham won the Leacock Medal for Humour, he made news in our
area not because of his award or his writing, but because of his address to the
Henry Street “School Spirit Week” assembly.
He told three hundred fresh faces in the gym that he was in favour of
“freedom of drink, freedom of sex, voluntary education and the abolishment of
all laws except those restraining murder and property damage.”[ii]
Needham
told the assembly that “Sex, liquor and gambling laws are not worth observing
and I break them every chance I get” adding that “The only way to change them
is to refuse to obey them.” The next day the students staged a sit-in protest,
and we wanted to read newspapers for the first time.[iii]
In life and in his writing, Richard J. Needham
seemed unrestrained.
He
could serve up one joke, one bit of nonsense, one sardonic shot after another
after another after another for pages and pages as he did throughout most of
his 1967 medal book Needham’s Inferno. Whereas other humorists take a breather once
in a while and devote several passages to deliver a bit of incongruity, Needham
jumps from one sentence to the next without letting up.
In
a single paragraph, he lists close to a dozen purposely irritating methods used
to deliver columns to his editor: “carved on tree in High Park, engraved on the
head of a pin, signalled with flags from a flotilla in the lake ... spelled out
by a circus elephant ... rhythmic clanking .. through the radiators in Morse
code ... 200-foot totem pole... (squirrels) each with a fortune cookie
between its teeth ... in Sanskrit or
maybe Australian.” Even when not being
funny in a specific way, he peppers his stories with gibberish and nonsense
names like “Fifi Farenheit,” “Claude Hopper,” “Earnest Consideration,” “Alice
Aforethought,” and his own alter ego, the booze-loving “Rudolph J.
Needleberry.”
In
his Globe and Mail columns and this
collection, he kept readers on edge with an energetic silliness that was biting
and unique. For no particular reason
beyond irreverence, he maligned his newspaper with epithets like “The Mop and
Pail” and “The Goat and Snail” that struck a chord, stuck, and persist to
today. In reference to the Managing Editor,[iv]
the man who gave Needham his column, the writer throws out adjectives like
“solitary, nasty, brutish, and short” adding that “when he pollutes the waters
of Lake Simcoe with his presence, he is often mistaken for a snapping
turtle.”
Needham
was not just flame-thrower ruthless, but sometimes crude and often lecherous.
Many ruminations poked across the boundaries of what is politically
correct. His columns, as captured in Inferno, were a reflection of those
other times. They echoed the Mad Men sexism and sexual revolution in derisive
commentaries on the Toronto dating scene and the presumed female obsession with
finding a “first-class man.”
Of
a woman who lowered her standards, Needham describes her desperations by
telling us that “She went out with men who wore hats, men who wore rimless
spectacles, and ... who wore sharply pointed shoes with paper-thin soles ...
who read Zane Grey ... who carefully studied and added up the restaurant bill
... who took her to Fort York (and) the
Royal Ontario Museum ... who sucked
Clorets just before they kissed ... who put their correct names and addresses
on LCBO purchase slips ...” and other similarly flawed beings.
Needham
was not a struggling single person using humour in frustration. With a long
marriage, grown children, and grandchildren, he was looking at the singles
scene with the same detached amusement he applied to politics, business, and
especially his own profession.
In
a Faustian tale, he makes a pact with the Devil and then reveals that “Daily
newspaper columnists don’t have any souls.”
He makes you feel sorry for poor naïve Satan.
If
Needham’s Inferno ended around the hundred-page mark, it could be filed away as
a string of comical, but random thoughts and quotable, but disconnected
comments. But the book shifts into
sub-collections of a different sort with essays on issues like education. Here, he hints at the libertarian themes that
would characterize his later life in a satire that predicts an institution to
fight obesity called the Food Control Board of Ontario (FCBO).
The
most striking parts of the last half of Inferno
explore morality and ethics. Needham was
from the generation of newspaper reporters who entered the field with little
formal education and came up in an apprenticeship way. For many journalists of the time, reading was
limited to the materials of their trade.
But Needham seems comfortable referencing Plato, Cervantes, Melville,
Faulkner, Balzac, Flaubert, Goethe, and particularly Albert Camus on writing
(“Art is the distance that time gives to suffering”) as well as characters and
concepts from opera and theatre.
There
is a depth to his madness that’s easier to feel than to explain. It stings, cries political reform, and
philosophizes. And it’s sweetly silly. It pushes the definition of Canadian
humour well beyond kindly contemplation.
It
would be hard to officially place Richard J. Needham on a platform above
Leacock Medalists like W.O. Mitchell, Mordecai Richler, and Robertson Davies or
to hold him up as exemplary of Canadian sensibilities.
But
when I’m all alone and thinking of nothing in particular, it’s Needham,
Needhamisms and “School Spirit Week” at Henry Street High that pop into my mind
most often, cause my head to shake, and make me laugh.
[i]
“Principal feels strike sparked by Needham,” Globe and Mail, Friday April 28,
1967, p. 51
[ii]
Editorial in The Youth’s Instructor (The
Seventh Day Adventists) Sept 19, 1967, p.5, Trends by Walter T. Crandall
[iii]
I attended high school in Port Perry about 30 km away.
[iv]
A future Senator (Richard J. Doyle)