Who Was the Funniest Man in the World?

I hoped to be half as funny as Groucho and so I read his biography to get some insights on the man. Between acts, when he was in his dressing room, crew members of his films used to walk past his door and hear him in fits of laughter. Yet he was alone. Every time someone would go past his dressing room door they would hear screams of delight, probably similar to what his audience would feel when watching Groucho in celluloid action.

It turned out that he was reading. What reading material could make the funniest man in movies laugh in side-splitting guffaws? Who had the key to Groucho’s funny bone? The stagehands visited him with the objective of finding out and soon discovered he was reading the works of Stephen Leacock, a well-known humorist of the day. Groucho also inspired other well-known comics such as Jack Benny to read Leacock’s work.

I had not a clue who Stephen Leacock was so I went to the library with the objective of finding out. I can vaguely remember our grade school teacher trying to introduce us to him by reading a passage of his work, but the excerpt that he chose was rather dull. What a mistake! Although his works were more than seventy years old at the time I discovered him, I found him to be an incredible wit. Any man who could make Groucho rush back to his dressing room between takes was undoubtedly a very funny writer. Because he was a fellow Canadian the library had a full contingent of his works on the shelf. Very often I would have to put my name down on a waiting list and ask to be telephoned when the chosen book was returned, seventy years after initial publication!

I couldn’t get enough of the man. I studied his style as much as possible. What makes a good joke on paper? Studying humor is not an easy task. I read as much as I could about him through his biographies looking for clues to the secret to his humor. Stephen Leacock was born in 1869 in England and moved to Canada at the age of six. He was educated in Toronto and became a school teacher. He grew bored and, after receiving a doctorate in Political Science and Economics, probably two of the least funny subjects on Earth, he went to teach at McGill University in Montreal.

For a ten year period Stephen Leacock was known as the world’s funniest man, probably outselling any other author between 1915 and 1925. His start was rather inauspicious. His first works were rejected by publishers in North America so he self-published. He started selling his books individually on the corner of St. James Street, in old Montreal for 10 cents a copy. Imagine that! An esteemed professor of Economics would run down the hill at lunchtime from McGill University and hawk books to passing businessmen and shoppers, then scurry back up the hill to finish lecturing for the day. Eventually his works were picked up by a major British publisher and he became a very popular humorist throughout the world.

He evolved into a renowned public speaker as time passed and made as much money from his speaking engagements as from his book royalties. By 1930 he had already exhausted his creative talent and much of his later works were repetitions of his first glorious gems of brilliance such as ‘Nonsense Novels’ or ‘Literary Lapses’. Critics were a little unkind to the later offerings by this time and it’s obvious in reading them that he had run out of fresh ideas. But the light still shines brilliantly on his early oeuvres; they could not be outdone, even by the master who created them.

Canada has a prize for humor named after him much like the American humorist Mark Twain. Some students of Leacock will note some similarities in their styles but it’s clear that there are vast differences as well. Twain was somewhat pithier and a little drier, hiding gems of wisdom beneath his humor. Leacock’s work is full of hyperbole and silliness, based on a satirically pompous stance. Leacock made fun of the very people who held him in high regard, brutally ridiculing his own social class. I guess if I had to describe him in one sentence I would say he was the literary equivalent to Groucho Marx running around high-society in a poorly fitted tuxedo with his patented bent-over crouch and silly eyes batting asides to the camera with hilarious foolishness.

In my quest to find out what made something really funny I learned that humor is very often simply a matter of one’s perspective. It’s usually triggered by the subconscious mind when we least expect it, when we find we take ourselves too seriously. We can look back on almost all of our tense social situations with humor because there is an element of the grotesque in the human social structure. That structure helps us function in a given context, but it’s only later when the context changes that we can see how silly we humans really are. Funny people have the ability to illustrate human failings in a gentle way. Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld are all great examples of this strategy.

Clare Booth Luce, a famous American Congresswoman in her day used to ask people how they wanted to be known. The most famous people she said could be summed up in one short sentence, as ‘the man who discovered America’ or ‘the man who discovered penicillin’. I think it’s clear that Stephen Leacock, in his day, was the funniest man alive.

Just browsing through this e-book had me in tears from hysterics. More than one hundred years later he still has them rolling in the aisles! Literary Lapses

Ed Schofield is a writer from Nova Scotia, Canada. His e-books can be found at Amazon.com. He has no association of any kind with the above link.

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