Mordecai Richler, ed. The Best of Modern Humor (1983)

     Mordecai Richler, ed. The Best of Modern Humor (1983) Funny, this isn’t. There are a few pieces that elicit laughter (eg, Nora Ephron’s piece about breasts, Rosten’s tale of Hyman Kaplan, or Leacock’s brilliant “Gertrude,” one of his Nonsense Novels), but most of the fiction is about sad, pathetic losers. Only one of the satires (Bruce McCall’s parody of Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Mechanics) has the combination of fun and sharp criticism that I expect of the “best”.
     The pieces are very well written, but too many ask us to laugh at their protagonists, not with them. That is of course the function of satire, but when the targets are lower class caught in a web they never made and cannot escape, the laughter sounds mean. Those targets are too easy. The earlier pieces tend to be funnier than the later ones, even when their satire is sharp (as in Sullivan’s “Cliche Expert....”) The newer pieces have a sour tone, and there is a nasty streak of class superiority in many of them. Is this one of the reasons Richler chose them? The humour, what there is of it, relies a lot on the insider’s knowledge of already dated class and ethnic peculiarities. Some of the stories elicit compassion rather than laughter, but I suspect that Richler laughed rather than wept when he read them.
      Was Richler trying to demonstrate his cultural superiority over the rest of us once again? That has been the repeated theme in his pieces about Canada. Those pieces strike me as prime examples of the whine of the colonial who has felt the contempt of the mother country, and forever after feels that he must show he is really not a colonial after all. The book is worth keeping because of the few classics in it, but it reflects badly on Richler’s’ taste. But when I consider his own output, I shouldn’t be surprised. After Duddy Kravitz, his work becomes more and more peevish; that peevishness informs this collection, unfortunately. His early short stories about Montreal, for example, combine sharp satiric observation with a compassion for the humanity in us all. In his later work, that compassion appears fitfully and weakly, like the silent lightning of distant thunder storms, if it appears at all. * to *** (2002)