Humour of the North — Reading Companion

Dialect and Voice as Comic Engine

From Haliburton’s “Sheepskins and Politics” to Drummond’s “The Corduroy Road,” the anthology relies heavily on non-standard English to create humour. Haliburton’s narrator, Sam Slick, speaks in a Yankee-inflected vernacular full of aphorisms and abrupt shifts: “I tell you, it takes a pretty considerable smart man to get the start of a Blue Nose.” Drummond’s habitant poems render French-Canadian speech phonetically, as in “Dominique,” where the narrator’s broken English becomes a source of gentle comedy. Lanigan’s fables, by contrast, use a mock-heroic, polysyllabic diction that parodies scholarly prose: “It was an Amateur Dram. Ass.” The effect is that the reader must attend to the sound of the words as much as their sense—the humour lives in the cadence and the incongruity between elevated language and mundane subjects.

Parody and Literary Self-Consciousness

Several pieces explicitly parody other texts or genres. Lanigan’s “The Amateur Orlando” is a burlesque of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, reducing the wrestling match to a comic encounter between a dry-goods clerk and a thuggish “Hunky Kid.” The poem’s narrator interrupts himself with parenthetical asides, such as “(Kind reader, although your / Knowledge of French is not first-class / Don't call that Amature.)” Similarly, “The Ahkoond of Swat” mimics the style of a news report and a funeral elegy, mixing journalistic cliché with mock-heroic lament. James DeMille’s “The Senator’s Laundry” (the final selection) turns a political anecdote into a farce of mistaken identity. These works reward a reader who recognizes the original being sent up, but they also function as standalone jokes about pretension and incompetence.

Recurring Motifs: The Outsider and the Local

Across the excerpts, a tension emerges between the “insider” and the “outsider.” Haliburton’s Sam Slick is a Yankee clock-peddler who comments on Nova Scotians; Drummond’s habitant speakers are French-Canadian farmers observed by an English-speaking audience. In Mrs. Everard Cotes’s “The Japanese Reporter,” a foreign correspondent misinterprets Canadian customs, creating humour through cultural misunderstanding. Lanigan’s fables often feature animals or objects in absurd situations—a glow-worm and a nightingale, a centipede and a yak—that allegorize human folly without being tied to a specific place. The anthology thus oscillates between regional specificity (the “Blue Nose,” the habitant, the Toronto amateur theatre) and universal comic types (the bumbler, the pedant, the braggart).

Structure and Pacing: From Verse to Prose to Fable

Burpee arranges the selections to create variety in form and tone. The book opens with Howe’s lyric poems, moves into Haliburton’s prose sketches, then Drummond’s narrative poems, followed by Cotes’s short story, McCarroll’s single poem, a large block of Lanigan’s fables (both prose and verse), and ends with DeMille’s comic story. This sequence means the reader encounters different kinds of humour in quick succession: the rhetorical wit of Howe, the dialect comedy of Haliburton, the sentimental-ironic voice of Drummond, the farce of Lanigan. The Lanigan section, with its many very short pieces, functions almost like a comic interlude—a series of quick punches. The closing piece, “The Senator’s Laundry,” returns to a longer narrative form, providing a sense of closure. The overall effect is that of a curated evening’s entertainment, where no single tone dominates for too long.

Because the excerpts represent only the opening pages of each selection, the reader cannot assess how individual pieces develop or conclude. The anthology’s value lies in its snapshot of Canadian humour at a particular moment—1912—when dialect and parody were central comic strategies. For a first reading, pay attention to how each author manipulates voice: the gap between what characters say and how they say it is often the joke. The collection rewards slow reading aloud, especially the dialect poems and Lanigan’s fables, whose rhythms and rhymes are integral to their effect.

Years of shelving have taught me that laughter often hides a quieter ache. That old anthology, Humour of the North, knew how dialect and parody softened loneliness into warmth. A similar patience dwells in The Clicking of Cuthbert — Key Ideas to Explore, where golf becomes a gentle excuse for pondering life’s absurd little misses. Two books, same fond nudge toward smiling at our own folly.