Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory

Merritt Clifton was an environmental journalist and lived in Brigham, Quebec.

McClelland & Stewart published the first edition of Don Bell’s Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory back in 1972. It promptly won the Stephen Leacock Award, then reappeared from Pocket Books in 1974. After both editions lapsed from print, Bell and friends remained convinced there was still an audience for it, albeit perhaps too small to interest commercial publishers, and produced this third edition in 1983.

The new Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory differs from the original versions in that two stories have been deleted, two new ones added, and epilogues inserted after several old stories, along with new illustrations by Linda Singer.

Amendments aside, the book still offers 19 sketches of bizarre and eccentric Montrealers, most of them originally written as “people features” for weekend newspaper supplements. Because the sketches are supposed to be humourous, they don’t include much depth. But there’s not much side-splitting comedy here, either — just a sad, tired geek show. Circus geek shows disappeared when most normally sensitive people realized that mocking the down-and-out, crippled, retarded, and mentally ill is not nice, not funny, not worth paying to do. Perhaps McClelland & Stewart and Pocket Books have realized that it’s time geek shows vanished from literature likewise.

But the geek show operators and the inured geeks themselves carry on, imprisoned in their own poor self-images, before what remnants of an audience they can still stir up for misplaced nostalgia’s sake.