Stephen Leacock, the cordial Canadian and master of gentle satire, defined humour as “the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof.”
Readers of Meredith Hambrock's novel She's a Lamb!,
this year’s winner of the Leacock Medal, the literary award named in the celebrated
humorist’s honour, might see artistry and incongruity in quantity; but they’ll
struggle to think of the word “kindly” or anything gentle.
In the opening chapters, narrator and aspiring musical
theatre performer Jessamyn St. Germain surveys her corner of the entertainment
world with a ferocity that would make Simon Cowell wince. Fellow auditioners
are “wannabes” and “aging women” with “makeup caked over discount Botox.” A
co-worker is “a troll.” Theatre patrons are “rubes.” A former evaluator was a
“bitter old cruise ship musical assistant” and “obviously a talentless hack.”
Her rival for the role of Maria in a Vancouver production of The Sound
of Music is “the king bitch herself,” whose YouTube followers are
“drooling, sugar-soaked Midwestern teenagers.”
Jessamyn, meanwhile, views herself as committed, serious,
talented, and “a deeply attractive blonde woman.” In this portrait of a performer who regards stardom
as her right, Hambrock takes Carol Burnett's Norma Desmond to a new, not-so-kind
level.
Yet, the book fits well within the Leacock “kindly” tradition
and the pantheon of Leacock Medal winners.
First of all, it is relentlessly funny. Humour flows throughout
the book because of the persistent incongruity - between Jessamyn's dark
thoughts and her syrupy public interactions, between her exalted self-image and
the “messy” truth evident when the director tells her to not sing in rehearsals
and “to stay in (her) … lane” as the child-actor-minding Assistant Director.
This gives the book a special dynamic that amplifies the laughs
even as the storyline and snarkiness become unnerving. The unease comes
as those initial acidic, but funny observations gradually evolve into something
darker. Jessamyn's private assessments become violent fantasies. Her magical
thinking intensifies. The novel edges toward psychological suspense.
Hambrock, who grew up in Ontario and later earned BFA and
MFA degrees at UBC, has said she is fascinated by the struggles of “messy
women” - female characters trying to repair lives in shambles. That interest
animated her earlier novel Other People's Secrets and reaches
a new humorous level in the person of Jessamyn. But Hambrock also
populates She’s a Lamb! with memorable supporting characters,
from a voice-coach-cum-therapist and stalker-turned-boyfriend to that arch-rival
Samantha, whose apparent success masks vulnerabilities not unlike Jessamyn's
own. Character may be Hambrock's greatest artistic strength. Her people
surprise, change and, above all, feel quirky and yet real.
The feeling of something real is bolstered by Hambrock’s
intimate knowledge of The Sound of Music and the theatre
world. Auditions, rehearsals, rivalries and disappointments feel wholly
authentic. The vivid backstage-theatre world gives the novel an almost
cinematic quality. Meredith’s experience writing for small screens is evident
here. She's a Lamb! moves with the pace and the narrative
engine of strong television: scenes arrive quickly, images linger, and
inducements to ask “What happens next?” appear on nearly every page.
The novel conveys the sense that its author had enormous fun
writing it. Even at its darkest, scenes crackle with a kind of exuberance,
suggesting a love of storytelling itself and faith in the therapeutic
possibilities of art-making. With Anton Chekhov allusions as “flocks of
seagulls circle overhead,” and The Seagull’s I-am-an-actress
droppings throughout, the book is also an ode to great literature as well as theatre
performing traditions.
The story, in fact, has a humour-writing feature that is,
perhaps surprisingly, traditional.
She's a Lamb! is, among other things, a
celebration of a Leacockian community.
That may sound odd for a book whose protagonist spends so
much time disparaging everyone around her. But the theatre world Hambrock
creates is itself a small town - an ecosystem governed by rituals, hierarchies,
gossip, rivalries, disappointments, and dreams. The awkward traditions and
eccentric inhabitants of this artistic community echo, in contemporary form,
the interconnected world of Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little
Town.
Scholars have suggested that Leacock's “kindly” humour is
best understood not simply as gentleness but as kinship: humour directed toward
one's own kind and our shared humanity. Hambrock's theatre workers, like
Leacock's residents of Mariposa, are flawed, self-important and sometimes
ridiculous. But they are also recognizably human.
Many previous Leacock winners have also stretched the
“kindly” boundaries of humorous writing with flawed and edgy humans. Trevor
Cole's Practical Jean featured a protagonist whose reflections
on mortality lead her to murder her friends, while Earle Birney's Turvey frequently
veers toward the crude and absurd. Birney incidentally founded UBC's creative
writing program, linking Hambrock to a distinguished lineage of UBC-associated Leacock
medalists that includes Eric Nicol, Pierre Berton, Birney, and others.
Last year's Leacock Medal winner, Natalie Sue's I
Hope This Finds You Well, likewise centred on a protagonist defined by
harsh judgments of others. But Sue's novel ultimately arrives at reconciliation
and mutual understanding.
Not so She's a Lamb!
Jessamyn never achieves the self-awareness readers might
hope for. There is no neat redemption arc or conventional happy ending. Yet
Hambrock accomplishes something arguably more difficult. Through Jessamyn's
words and actions, readers come to understand her. We see the wounded ambition,
loneliness, insecurity, trauma, and desperation beneath the narcissism. We also
recognize the broader communities she inhabits: struggling artists juggling
second jobs, performers altered by #MeToo experience, and people navigating
fragile mental health in a Vancouver shaped by social media and precarious
creative careers.
Leacock himself challenged the notion that humour and commentary
on a community must always be gentle. Arcadian Adventures with the Idle
Rich, the sad sister of Sunshine Sketches, offered biting social
satire aimed at privilege, vanity and self-deception, yet retained sympathy for
its targets.
So too does Hambrock.
Jessamyn St. Germain is frequently appalling, often
delusional and at times frightening. But by the novel's end, readers understand
both her suffering and the damaged community that cradled her. And we can all
relate to circumstance coloured by varying levels of talent, commitment, and
kindness. Jessamy even fantasizes about having such a support group and telling
“everyone they have been so important to me on this journey, they each played a
small part. That I could never have gotten to where I am without my community.”
That understanding - compassion without absolution, satire
sharpened by cruelty yet softened by backstory - may be the deepest connection
between She's a Lamb! and the tradition Stephen Leacock
established.
In awarding Meridith Hambrock the 2026 Leacock Medal, the
judges thus recognized a novel that honours that tradition while boldly
updating it for our anxious, performative, hyper-social-media, and
psychologically fraught times. So, Meridith joins another kindly kind of
community - that of the people who get the joke and appreciate her work, the
Leacock Medal winners and their supporters.
Hopefully she finds that this one has fewer jealousies, snarky interactions, and tendencies toward violence.