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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Further Foolishness," Stephen Leacock masterfully continues to explore the realm of humor with a collection of witty essays and sketches that capture the absurdities of everyday life. Rich in irony and social commentary, Leacock employs a light-hearted, satirical style that invites readers to reflect on the complexities of human behavior and societal norms. This collection, composed during the early 20th century, serves as a prominent example of the Canadian humorist's ability to blend comedic narratives with thoughtful observations, making it a critical text in understanding the development of humorous literature in North America. Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), a prominent Canadian author and educator, was deeply influenced by his experiences in both academia and rural life. His background as a teacher and love for public speaking shaped his writing style, allowing him to connect with a broad audience. Leacock's keen insight into human nature and his affinity for parody stem from his own experiences, enabling him to reflect upon the social constructs of his time with both affection and critique. "Further Foolishness" is highly recommended for readers who appreciate sharp wit and astute social commentary. This delightful collection not only entertains but also provokes thought, making it a timeless addition to the library of anyone interested in the interplay of humor and society. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Further Foolishness
Table of Contents
Introduction
In Further Foolishness, Stephen Leacock turns everyday certainties upside down to reveal how easily common sense slides into comic absurdity, showing that the institutions, experts, and polite routines we trust for order are built upon habits of thought that, when viewed from a slightly skewed angle, wobble into nonsense, and that the very language meant to clarify often multiplies confusion, so that the modern person—earnest, busy, well-meaning—finds himself or herself tangled in a maze of expectations, puffed-up opinions, and fashionable beliefs where the logic of seriousness curdles into farce and human vanity becomes its own punch line.
A collection of humorous sketches and satires by Canadian writer and economist Stephen Leacock, Further Foolishness appeared in the mid-1910s, within an early twentieth-century climate that prized short, witty prose for a rapidly expanding reading public. Rather than a single continuous story, the volume assembles varied scenes and voices that roam across urbane streets, offices, parlors, and imaginary situations. It belongs to the comic-essay tradition, filtered through the brisk rhythms of magazine-era humor. The cultural backdrop is anglophone North America and the broader English-speaking world, where professional expertise, mass media, and commercial modernity provided abundant material for playful scrutiny.
As a reading experience, the book offers compact pieces that can be dipped into singly or read in a lively sequence, each setting up a premise with an authoritative straight face before edging into delightful contradiction. Leacock adopts the pose of a reasonable guide, then lets logic spiral toward the unexpected. The voice is genial, urbane, and mischievously professorial, blending clarity with sly side-steps. Style matters as much as joke: polished sentences, timing that withholds just long enough, and a refusal to labour punch lines. The overall mood is light, companionable, and brisk, with a persistent undercurrent of intellectual play.
Much of the comedy arises from techniques that remain instantly legible: exaggeration that exposes hidden assumptions, mock-authoritative argument that collapses under its own weight, and sudden reversals that reveal the fragile scaffolding of fashionable ideas. Leacock uses parody and pastiche to reflect literary fashions of his day, while a deadpan narrator keeps a straight face as absurdity gathers. He enjoys turning technical jargon into a vaudeville of misplaced precision, and he lets bureaucratic or professional procedures grind themselves into comic sawdust. The effect is not cruelty but perspective, a calibrated widening of the frame that makes earnestness appear freshly odd.
Across the collection, recurring concerns cohere into a set of themes: social pretense, status anxiety, the puffing of expertise, commercial boosterism, the seductions of novelty, and the slipperiness of public language. Leacock worries at the difficulty of thinking clearly in an environment that rewards confidence more than care, and he delights in showing how polite society disguises appetite as principle. He is equally alert to the pleasures of silliness, recognizing that laughter can deflate fear as well as vanity. The result is satire with a friendly handshake—critical enough to sting, but hospitable enough to welcome readers back for more.
Seen in its publication moment, the book stands at a crossroads between the Victorian essayist’s cultivated wit and the quick-change tempo of modern magazine humor. The mid-1910s brought urban bustle, proliferating print venues, and a growing appetite for brief, portable entertainment; Leacock’s pieces meet that appetite while preserving the clarity and balance of a trained thinker. His Canadian vantage intersects easily with transatlantic tastes, yielding sketches that travel without depending on local gossip. The collection thus exemplifies early twentieth-century comic prose: topical in its textures yet built on perennial observations about human behavior and the unreliable stories people tell themselves.
For readers today, Further Foolishness offers both amusement and a diagnostic instrument for contemporary life, since new platforms have not retired the old habits of hype, certitude, and wishful thinking. Its calm dismantling of inflated claims encourages skepticism without cynicism, and its buoyant tone models how to remain curious, charitable, and alert. The book suits casual browsing yet rewards attention to craft, inviting newcomers to linger over structure as well as sparkle. Above all, it reminds us that folly is a renewable resource—and that noticing it, with good humor and clear eyes, can be a civilizing act.
Synopsis
Further Foolishness is a collection of comic sketches and satirical pieces that surveys the manners, enthusiasms, and credulities of its time. Written during the First World War, it gathers brief essays, parodies, and dialogues that move briskly from private life to public institutions and popular culture. Each entry stands alone, yet together they form a panorama of contemporary follies. The tone is urbane and playful, the method typically to exaggerate a familiar situation until its hidden absurdity appears. The book proceeds in loose thematic clusters, beginning with mock-serious treatments of knowledge and expertise before turning outward to society, politics, and the press.
The opening selections mimic learned discourse and professional authority. Lectures, treatises, and mock reports adopt the vocabulary of experts to expose the fragile line between genuine reasoning and verbal show. Earnest arguments are pushed just beyond plausibility, revealing how specialized jargon can obscure simple truths. This section introduces the collection’s prevailing device: the straight-faced presentation of ideas that become comical when followed to their logical conclusion. Through feigned precision, invented statistics, and solemn tone, these pieces examine the cultural habit of deferring to specialists and set the stage for later sketches that apply similar methods to more public concerns.
Attention then turns to domestic and social life. Clubrooms, parlors, and small gatherings supply occasions for depicting conversational one-upmanship, fashionable causes, and the rituals of politeness. Everyday exchanges become miniature dramas of status and misunderstanding. Fads in education, health, and household management are presented through characters who embrace them with unexamined zeal. The emphasis remains on recognizable settings and familiar behavior, so that comic distortion arises from proximity to ordinary experience. In tracing how preferences harden into rules and how rules invite evasion, these pieces outline a modest sociology of habit, showing the private origins of public pretension.
With the ground prepared, the collection shifts into parodies of popular genres. Detective adventure, romantic melodrama, and the dispatches of the tireless correspondent are recreated with their stock moves intact and then nudged toward incongruity. Plots advance through ingenious but circular reasoning; clues are overread; coincidences accumulate with cheerful inevitability. Letters from afar describe more about the writer than the place, and sentimental narratives obey conventions so faithfully that the conventions themselves become the subject. In reproducing these familiar forms, the book maps the reading habits of its day, illustrating how formula can produce comfort, and how comfort can conceal empty mechanism.
Public life and civic machinery follow. Sketches of municipal finance, legal proceedings, and administrative procedure treat documents and meetings as rituals whose rules often defeat their purposes. Elections arrive with a parade of slogans, the rhetoric of reform colliding with the arithmetic of budgets. In the courtroom, evidence and etiquette are given equal weight, while commissions and committees generate conclusions that satisfy everyone and no one. The pieces emphasize structure over personality, noting how policy emerges from routine rather than vision. By dramatizing process, they suggest that confusion may arise less from malice than from the complexity that institutions create for themselves.
Midway through, the war years enter by way of newspapers, speeches, and public mood. Without recounting battles, the sketches consider the circulation of information, the staging of patriotism, and the consolations of confident prediction. The armchair strategist offers certainty, the editorial voice shifts with the day’s dispatch, and official optimism finds an echo in the language of everyday talk. Home front economies, volunteer efforts, and ceremonial observances are noted for their patterns rather than their outcomes. The focus remains on how large events appear in small forms, and on how rhetoric supplies a temporary order when facts are partial or delayed.
Travel and commerce add another register. Journeys are narrated in the brisk style of the guidebook and the brochure, promising improvement and discovery by itinerary. Exotic customs are heightened for effect, then balanced by moments in which all places resemble one another under the pressure of modern exchange. Business ventures and advertisements speak in the key of certainty, promoting systems that rarely survive contact with chance. Through invoices, maps, and schedules, these pieces examine the pleasure of planning and the comedy of execution. The thread linking them is the optimism of mobility and markets set against the stubborn contingencies of daily practice.
Literary and theatrical culture receives an affectionate accounting. Critics, librarians, and playgoers appear alongside poets and lecturers, each with a recognizable manner. Mock prefaces, glossaries, and marginalia present the apparatus of culture as a genre of its own. The sketch of the earnest reader shows how seriousness can shade into credulity; the sketch of the blasé reviewer shows how familiarity can erode judgment. Scenes backstage and in the lecture hall trace the economies of attention that govern what is remembered and what is forgotten. The effect is to place taste within a web of habits, gatekeepers, and commercial incentives.
The collection concludes by returning to small moments and brief absurdities, leaving the reader where the book began: among ordinary situations rendered slightly strange. Across its sequence, Further Foolishness advances a consistent purpose. By following ideas to extremes and by treating conventions as material for experiment, it identifies the patterns that guide speech and behavior. The emphasis falls on recognition rather than correction, allowing folly to be seen without spite. The result is a compact catalogue of contemporary types and tics whose interest lies in their clarity. Its underlying message is that perspective, conveyed through humor, steadies judgment in unsettled times.
Historical Context
Published in 1916, Further Foolishness unfolds within the immediate milieu of the First World War and the rapidly modernizing Anglo-American world. Its sketches are set in the social spaces of the era—newspaper offices, gentlemen’s clubs, hotel lobbies, lecture halls, and university classrooms—primarily in Canada but in conversation with Britain and the United States. The tone and topics reflect an urban, middle-class vantage shaped by Montreal and Toronto’s commercial growth and by imperial links to London. Leacock’s satire is grounded in current events: wartime bureaucracy, patriotic fundraising, and the fashions of new “scientific” expertise, all seen through the lens of everyday North American life between 1914 and 1916.
The overarching historical event shaping the book is the First World War (1914–1918). Canada entered the conflict on 4 August 1914 as part of the British Empire, raising the Canadian Expeditionary Force (about 620,000 served; roughly 424,000 overseas). Canadian troops fought at Second Ypres (April 1915, first large-scale gas attack), the Somme (July–November 1916), Vimy Ridge (9–12 April 1917), and Passchendaele (October–November 1917), suffering more than 61,000 dead and 172,000 wounded by war’s end. On the home front, the War Measures Act (22 August 1914) authorized censorship and internment, while Minister of Militia Sir Sam Hughes (1911–1916) presided over chaotic mobilization and the Ross rifle controversy, before the Imperial Munitions Board (1915, chaired by Joseph Wesley Flavelle) rationalized production. Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden’s government grappled with financing (war loans and later income tax) and unity as the United States remained neutral until 6 April 1917. These facts created a climate saturated with recruitment rallies, patriotic pageantry, and official rhetoric. Leacock’s 1916 sketches mirror this world: he lampoons jingoistic speech, committee culture, and the credulity of the home-front public. By parodying the language of proclamations, club debates, and newspaper editorials, the book reflects the pressures of the Somme summer and the broader imperial war effort, exposing the absurdities of armchair strategists and profiteers without denying the conflict’s gravity.
Mounting manpower pressures and political fissures during 1914–1916 formed the path to Canada’s Conscription Crisis of 1917. The Military Service Act (29 August 1917) imposed compulsory service; Borden’s Unionist coalition won the 17 December 1917 election against Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberals largely on this issue. Resistance was sharp in Quebec, culminating in riots in Quebec City over Easter 1918 (28 March–1 April), leaving four civilians dead. Although Further Foolishness predates the Act, it registers the earlier recruitment and unity debates that fed the crisis: its mockery of patriotic posturing, public meetings, and partisan maneuvering anticipates the rhetoric that would soon divide the country.
Rapid urbanization and reform defined the Canadian and American scene from 1900 to 1916. Montreal’s population grew from roughly 267,000 (1901) to about 470,000 (1911), while Toronto expanded from about 238,000 to 376,000 in the same decade. Progressive-era initiatives—municipal reform, civil service professionalization (Canada’s Civil Service Commission, 1908), and enthusiasm for “scientific management”—reshaped work and government. American antitrust and regulatory milestones (Clayton Act, 1914; the Federal Reserve, 1913) echoed northward in debates over concentrated corporate power. Leacock’s satire of efficiency experts, departmental memos, and city-hall procedure crystallizes public skepticism toward technocratic claims and bureaucratic self-importance in the years immediately surrounding 1916.
Mass-circulation newspapers and advertising boomed in the early twentieth century, intensifying during wartime. Media magnates such as Lord Northcliffe in Britain and William Randolph Hearst in the United States pioneered sensational formats; in Canada, metropolitan dailies like the Toronto Daily Star and the Montreal Gazette expanded circulation before official controls tightened. Wartime propaganda accelerated with institutions such as the British War Propaganda Bureau (1914) and, later, the U.S. Committee on Public Information (1917); the Canadian Associated Press formed in 1917. Further Foolishness mocks the era’s headline sensationalism, advice columns, and serialized “expert” opinion, reproducing the diction of editorials and advertisements to expose how news and salesmanship blurred in shaping public sentiment.
Finance and war funding provided another salient backdrop. The Panic of 1907 in the United States underscored global financial fragility, while Canada’s branch-banking system limited bank failures yet concentrated power. Wartime finance in Canada relied on domestic borrowing: Victory Loan campaigns (1917–1919) raised over $1.3 billion, and the Income War Tax Act (1917) introduced federal income tax as a “temporary” measure. The Imperial Munitions Board coordinated contracts amid allegations of profiteering. Leacock, a McGill political economist, turns these realities into comic targets: bond drives, speculative schemes, and philanthropic displays by magnates become vehicles to question moral claims attached to money, the opacity of financial expertise, and the social prestige of wealth.
Moral reform movements crested during the war years. Temperance advanced rapidly in Canada: Manitoba adopted prohibition in 1916, followed by Ontario’s Temperance Act in 1916 and similar measures elsewhere; federally, wartime orders restricted alcohol in 1918–1919. In the United States, the 18th Amendment was ratified in 1919 (effective 1920) via the Volstead Act. Women’s suffrage surged: Manitoba (28 January 1916), Saskatchewan (14 March 1916), and Alberta (19 April 1916) enfranchised women provincially; Canada granted federal voting rights to most women on 24 May 1918; the U.S. followed with the 19th Amendment (1920). Leacock’s sketches about clubs, lectures, and domestic reformers reflect these campaigns’ public theatrics, probing zeal, hypocrisy, and unintended social consequences.
As social and political critique, the book uses humor to scrutinize wartime nationalism, bureaucratic expansion, and class pretension. By mimicking officialese, boosterism, and the cadences of newspaper fact-finding, it exposes how language legitimized authority, sold policies, and masked inequities. Satirical portraits of financiers, “experts,” and civic committees interrogate the translation of private interests into public virtue during bond drives, procurement, and reform crusades. Scenes of overconfident orators and credulous audiences lay bare the mechanics of persuasion that sustained recruitment, censorship, and moral regulation. In rendering the era’s voices so faithfully, Further Foolishness becomes an instrument of civic skepticism toward jingoism, profiteering, and the social hierarchies of 1914–1916.
