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W.P. Kinsella on Susan Juby’s humour
In the 1980s, I attended a reading by Alice Munro. I had read her most recent book and loved it, but it had never occurred to me that her stories were humourous. She read a story and to my surprise the audience laughed many times. When I mentioned this to Alice after the reading, she smiled and said, "Bill, everything is funny.";
Unfortunately this viewpoint has received little vindication in the world of Canadian fiction.
What was the last humourous book to win the Governor General's Award for Fiction? Or the Giller? Or the Books in Canada First Novel Award? Or the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Award? While a few of the winning books have offered some semblance of humour, only the 2002 winner of the Canadian Authors Association prize, Generica, by Will Ferguson, was actually a comic novel. Except on occasions when the Governor General's Award is given to Alice Munro, the GGs are generally chosen by an incestuous clique of humourless academic drones who take turns rewarding each other's sub-mediocrity. On the other hand, some of the choices for the GGs have been so breathtakingly awful as to be unintentionally humourous, and have certainly drawn their share of rueful laughter.
Meanwhile Canada exports comedians by the dozen, possibly because they realize that their humour will be appreciated more in the U.S. I remember once being asked the difference between Canadian and American responses to my work. My reply was, when an American reads my books, they say, "I loved your stuff. It was so funny I laughed out loud."; While a Canadian would say, "I enjoyed your work, I just about laughed."; I consider myself a humorist, though I have not always been recognized as such. The reviews of Shoeless Joe were almost unanimously positive, but few mentioned that it is a funny novel. One of the few times I ever replied to a reviewer was when the New York Times treated The Iowa Baseball Confederacy as serious fiction, never once mentioning that it is (in my opinion) a spoof of organized religion, and organized baseball. I suggested that having an outfielder run from Iowa to New Mexico chasing a fly ball, and having a church that ran 12 hours behind the rest of the world, and having an outfielder fried by lightning, just might be considered humourous by some.
All of which brings me to Susan Juby.
I had just about given up on humour in Canadian literature, when, as I was wending my way through the sometimes good, sometimes bad, but generally humourless nominees for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, all of a sudden I started laughing out loud, and calling to my wife, saying "Listen to this! Listen to this!"; The book that excited me was Alice, I Think by Susan Juby, a young woman writing a very fictionalized version of her teen years in Smithers, B.C. The second sentence got me: "I grew up in one of those loving families that fail to prepare a person for real life."; The implosion of Alice's former high school counselor is a classic scene, and Alice's assessment of her replacement counselor, who she dubs "Death Lord Bob";, is not entirely inaccurate, as she sees him as being needier than she is. Juby describes Alice and her family attending a picnic for home-schooled children: "...home-schooled kids weren't exactly what my dad called 'paragons of normalcy.' A disturbing number of them were still breast-feeding at an age when most kids are taking up smoking."; Then, "I am pleased to report that I am making rapid progress... now, thanks to my new Life Goals and an article I read on the Ukraine in National Geographic, I have realized it is my calling to be an Easter-egg painter.";
The second and third volumes of the trilogy are equally hilarious. Yes, Susan Juby is the real thing. But children's literature? Isn't that picture books with pop-ups that one reads to pre-schoolers? I asked Susan if she had any misgivings about her work being considered children's literature. "If one wants to write comedy,"; she replied, "the YA/teen market is a good place to do it. A lot of the funniest writing these days is published for younger readers (and ends up getting picked up by adults.)"I guess there's a long history of this kind of thing. I read somewhere that P.G. Wodehouse was popularized by British school boys. There's a healthy respect for comedy in the YA market.";
Susan's trilogy has been optioned by a production company associated with CTV Vancouver. These are the same people who created Corner Gas, a very funny Seinfeld in Saskatchewan series, whose greatest compliment is that it didn't receive any Geminis because it is so many light years ahead of the drivel that passes for TV entertainment. I'll hope Susan's experience with TV is better than mine. There was a unfunny travesty of a TV show called The Rez, which was created from my Leacock Medal-winning characters, but the TV people were too cheap, too lazy, or too untalented (my guess is all three) to option any of my 100+ stories about Silas Erminskine and Frank Fencepost, so some hacks created their own. I had to fight for every penny owed me and never got paid my pittance for the final six episodes.
[W. P. Kinsella lives in retirement in Yale, B.C., with his wife Barbara Turner Kinsella, a former Miss Congeniality and 2nd Runner-Up for Miss Protestant County Tyrone.]
[BCBW 2005]
Unfortunately this viewpoint has received little vindication in the world of Canadian fiction.
What was the last humourous book to win the Governor General's Award for Fiction? Or the Giller? Or the Books in Canada First Novel Award? Or the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Award? While a few of the winning books have offered some semblance of humour, only the 2002 winner of the Canadian Authors Association prize, Generica, by Will Ferguson, was actually a comic novel. Except on occasions when the Governor General's Award is given to Alice Munro, the GGs are generally chosen by an incestuous clique of humourless academic drones who take turns rewarding each other's sub-mediocrity. On the other hand, some of the choices for the GGs have been so breathtakingly awful as to be unintentionally humourous, and have certainly drawn their share of rueful laughter.
Meanwhile Canada exports comedians by the dozen, possibly because they realize that their humour will be appreciated more in the U.S. I remember once being asked the difference between Canadian and American responses to my work. My reply was, when an American reads my books, they say, "I loved your stuff. It was so funny I laughed out loud."; While a Canadian would say, "I enjoyed your work, I just about laughed."; I consider myself a humorist, though I have not always been recognized as such. The reviews of Shoeless Joe were almost unanimously positive, but few mentioned that it is a funny novel. One of the few times I ever replied to a reviewer was when the New York Times treated The Iowa Baseball Confederacy as serious fiction, never once mentioning that it is (in my opinion) a spoof of organized religion, and organized baseball. I suggested that having an outfielder run from Iowa to New Mexico chasing a fly ball, and having a church that ran 12 hours behind the rest of the world, and having an outfielder fried by lightning, just might be considered humourous by some.
All of which brings me to Susan Juby.
I had just about given up on humour in Canadian literature, when, as I was wending my way through the sometimes good, sometimes bad, but generally humourless nominees for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, all of a sudden I started laughing out loud, and calling to my wife, saying "Listen to this! Listen to this!"; The book that excited me was Alice, I Think by Susan Juby, a young woman writing a very fictionalized version of her teen years in Smithers, B.C. The second sentence got me: "I grew up in one of those loving families that fail to prepare a person for real life."; The implosion of Alice's former high school counselor is a classic scene, and Alice's assessment of her replacement counselor, who she dubs "Death Lord Bob";, is not entirely inaccurate, as she sees him as being needier than she is. Juby describes Alice and her family attending a picnic for home-schooled children: "...home-schooled kids weren't exactly what my dad called 'paragons of normalcy.' A disturbing number of them were still breast-feeding at an age when most kids are taking up smoking."; Then, "I am pleased to report that I am making rapid progress... now, thanks to my new Life Goals and an article I read on the Ukraine in National Geographic, I have realized it is my calling to be an Easter-egg painter.";
The second and third volumes of the trilogy are equally hilarious. Yes, Susan Juby is the real thing. But children's literature? Isn't that picture books with pop-ups that one reads to pre-schoolers? I asked Susan if she had any misgivings about her work being considered children's literature. "If one wants to write comedy,"; she replied, "the YA/teen market is a good place to do it. A lot of the funniest writing these days is published for younger readers (and ends up getting picked up by adults.)"I guess there's a long history of this kind of thing. I read somewhere that P.G. Wodehouse was popularized by British school boys. There's a healthy respect for comedy in the YA market.";
Susan's trilogy has been optioned by a production company associated with CTV Vancouver. These are the same people who created Corner Gas, a very funny Seinfeld in Saskatchewan series, whose greatest compliment is that it didn't receive any Geminis because it is so many light years ahead of the drivel that passes for TV entertainment. I'll hope Susan's experience with TV is better than mine. There was a unfunny travesty of a TV show called The Rez, which was created from my Leacock Medal-winning characters, but the TV people were too cheap, too lazy, or too untalented (my guess is all three) to option any of my 100+ stories about Silas Erminskine and Frank Fencepost, so some hacks created their own. I had to fight for every penny owed me and never got paid my pittance for the final six episodes.
[W. P. Kinsella lives in retirement in Yale, B.C., with his wife Barbara Turner Kinsella, a former Miss Congeniality and 2nd Runner-Up for Miss Protestant County Tyrone.]
[BCBW 2005]
Submitted on July 14, 2005 in By David.
