I Hate to Complain, But .

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

I Hate to Complain, But... is a collection of 69 of the author’s
newspaper columns, first published between 1995 and 1999 in the Orillia,
Ontario, Packet and Times. From the first entry, “Welcome to Our
Hospital, Mr. Premier,” which won the 1996 Canadian Press and Western
Ontario Newspaper Award for humor, to the final piece, a parody titled
“The Merchant of Queen’s Park Lives,” Foster presents his quirky
portraits and outlandish views about all kinds of people and things. His
allusions to local residents and to Orillia as Stephen Leacock’s
hometown are of the in-joke variety, but when he wryly swipes at
political and public figures, such as Mike Harris, Preston Manning, Jean
Chrétien, Bill Clinton, and Peter Mansbridge, the laughter becomes
universal.

The majority of the author’s diatribes, however, are reserved for his
own foibles: his puny athletic prowess, his household repairs with a
Phyliss’s screwdriver, his frenetic attempts at opening shrink-wrapped
medicine bottles, and the annual uproar that ensues during the putting
up and taking down of the Christmas tree. Foster frets about the sun
crisping the earth five billion years from now, fantasizes hilariously
about imagined trysts with Sophia Loren, advises young men about his
warped protocols for dating, and merrily rewrites the legend of Robin
Hood, the story of Superman, and the role of the “egotist” explorer
Henry Hudson who named “a bay, a river, a car, a department store, a
coat and a blanket all after himself.”

Foster’s comic methods are as broad as is his range of topics. He
uses parody, farce, exaggeration, irony, satire, puns, self-deprecation,
one-liners, and outright nonsense (as in his description of the
corporate takeover of the EasterBunCo. and Tooth Fairy Inc. by S.
Claus). I Hate to Complain, But... is that rare phenomenon—a truly
funny book of humor.