Mice in the Beer

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Hailed as a comic triumph in 1960 when first published, Mice in the Beer has stood the test of time, normally so destructive to more-or-less topical short humorous pieces, remarkably well. Norman Ward’s view of the universe is not that of everyman, but neither is it in any way skewed or distorted. Simply, he has the precious eye for the comedic, which sees the funny side of a tiny, peaceful corpse in a beer bottle, in an outhouse discovered mysteriously concealed within a garage, the careless private correspondence of various nineteenth-century politicians, or in a battle in mid-air between a lady and a chimpanzee in the course of a trans-Atlantic flight, to name but a few items chosen at random from a rich collection. This is the kind of humorous writing that will probably still be perused with equal satisfaction when yet another quarter century has hobbled by.