Mordecai Richler. The Best of Modern Humour (1983)

      Mordecai Richler. The Best of Modern Humour (1983) Nothing dates as fast as taste in humour. Here it is a mere quarter century after Richler's collection appeared, and most of the pieces already seem dated. That is, their humour is lame, jejune, and superficial. Richler likes the New Yorker type, and while not all the pieces in here were first published in that magazine, many of the later ones read as if they should have been. Richler is a satirist, and most of the pieces he has selected are satires. The oldest ones, from the turn of the 20th century, are the best, I think. Lasting humour reveals itself with age, as current concerns and fashionable twitches recede into the misty twilight of history. Leacock’s “Gertrude the Governess” opens the collection,, and it is by far the best piece in it. I won’t keep this book, as I no longer feel the need to have such representative anthologies by me. They are really reference works. ** (2007)