My Financial Career and Other Follies

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson University.

These stories, written between 1895 and 1943 by Canada’s most famous
humorist, are still funny and relevant today. Though Leacock’s satire
is softer than much current writing, his stories have not become dated,
because he achieved much of his humor through the mocking and
exaggeration of the foibles of human nature with which we can all
identify—fear of institutions and dentists, the inability to say no,
pomposity, pretence, power seeking, naiveté—all taken to the extreme.
Many of his stories illustrate the humor of the basic human condition
(as Leacock himself put it in Humour as I See It, “in the strange
incongruities between our aspiration and our achievement”). In others,
he parodies contemporary genres such as the romance and the ghost story,
again exaggerating the writing style to the extreme. Also included in
the book are two of Leacock’s essays on the nature of humor, and an
analysis of his writing by David Staines. This is an essential book for
all Canadian literature or humor collections.