Excerpt from story Sunshine sketches of a book on humour
The article by Ottawa writer Louise Rachlis begins with:
"During the day, Dick Bourgeois-Doyle, 62, is Secretary
General of the National Research Council of Canada.
"During the day, Dick Bourgeois-Doyle, 62, is Secretary
General of the National Research Council of Canada.
Evenings
and weekends, he’s the thoughtful writer and illustrator who created What’s So
Funny?, a personal review of the 67 books that have won the Leacock Memorial
Medal for humour."
What’s
So Funny? was initiated “for fun and learning something new past the age of
60,” said Bourgeois-Doyle.
The
book chronicles Canadian humour from the “old days” to the present. “Because
humour is so contextual, it is really hard to compare the funniness of material
from one era to another,” he said.
“Certainly,
some stuff that was funny to Canadians in the ’40s would fall flat now. This is
not too surprising, but I am struck how some books — like the 1948 winner Sarah
Binks — still stand up, still resonate particularly with Canadians, and still
make us smile.”
When
writing his book, he tried to set aside a minimum of an hour a day to “stare at
the keyboard,” as he puts it. “Setting goals of quantity or quality of words
never seems to work for me. But I can always find or make an hour, and this
drip, drip, drip approach eventually turns into progress.”
He
has written other books — “for the most part, biographies, history of science
and technology, and serious stuff” — so he found the latest book a diversion
and an effort to break into a more creative format. “Even finding the old books
was an enjoyable treasure hunt. Part of it is discipline and another part lies
in the mysterious way we can always find time for things that we really want to
do.”
The
Canadian award began in 1947 with Ojibway Melody by Harry Symons. In 2014, The
Promised Land - a novel of Cape Breton by Bill Conall was the winner.
Bourgeois-Doyle
figures most readers would agree that some books are more deserving than
others, and he does have his own particular favourites. “But I think the
Leacock Memorial Medal is a peculiar beast that does not lend itself to easy
judgments. It is awarded by human beings with their own set of references,
memories, biases and work within a framework that is far from clinical.”
The
award clearly values “funniness,” he said, “but literary merit counts too, as
well as that magical capacity to resonate with the subset of Canada that
honours Stephen Leacock’s memory.”
The
result is a collection of accomplished authors like Richler, Davies, and
Mitchell, “whom the medal tries to encourage to access their funny side, as
well as developing naturally funny authors whom the medal tries to encourage
toward a career in literature. It also honours the poignant, but mildly funny.
I see a pattern and design to it all, but others might not.”
In
the fall of 2012, BourgeoisDoyle set out to collect and read all of the Leacock
Medal books. “I wanted to steal techniques, study different writing styles, and
laugh,” he says in his book. “But when you spend hours asking yourself, ‘what’s
so funny?’ or why one thing strikes you as funny and something else falls flat,
you find the answers not in writing tricks and topics but in the memories,
biases, and cares that induce reaction and define who you are.”
Bourgeois-Doyle
hopes readers of his book will whet their appetite and be encouraged to read
the Leacock Medal books and other Canadian humour, “and to do it through that
lens of personal reference for the insight that comes from looking in the
mirror and realizing that what we laugh at is a reflection of ourselves. It
also frees you to judge for yourself what is funny and what is not.”
Bourgeois-Doyle
would like to write like Donald Jack, a threetime Leacock Medal winner whose
books took the form of mock memoirs of a character who started out as a First
World War pilot. “Jack uses all the tools of a solid writer elegantly,
intelligently, and to great effect, particularly a satire of war. But I would
recommend many of the books; certainly, the very creative hockey story King
Leary, Sarah Binks, Gregory Clark’s War Stories, Saturday Night at the Bagel
Factory, the books by Robert Thomas Allen, and the surprisingly profound and
influential Ojibway Melody.”
He
thinks the best single book might be Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version. “For
me, it was a modern, edgier, Canadian Don Quixote story that explores the
interface between the real and the imagined around a solid story and
out-of-the-box techniques. And my favourite book — non-Leacock Medal winner,
non-Canadian book — by far is Don Quixote.”