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"Humorous stories, Canadian."
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Short stories for little monsters
Collects a series of humorous short stories that explore the things kids think about, from what trees talk about to lies their mother tells them.
Book
Clockmaker
In 1835 Thomas Chandler Haliburton introduced Samuel Slick of Slicksville, Connecticut, into the pages of the Novascotian in order to awaken his fellow citizens to the economic opportunities of their province.
eBook
Dead cooks clinking sandwiches: the origins of northern humour
The argument can be made that the shape and originality of northern wit is the result of a hard-boiled immigrant experience grafted onto the indigenous humour of the First Peoples. \"The Indian,\" wrote Peter Spohn in 1811, \"has a great sense of humour, loving jests, games, dancing, and merrymaking.\"(1) Unfortunately we do not possess an extensive record of what these jests were. Possibly it was a humour expressed in physical language or song. Just as possibly it was a dry, stoical, resignation to the hardships of northern life, expressed with delicious crudity. In 1850, lecturer and author George Copway recorded the following \"joke,\" which took place between two Ojibwa chiefs at a Washington dinner. Unaccustomed to the white man's table, one chief swallowed a bowl of mustard. Seeing the tears stream from his eyes, his companion asked, \"Brother why do you weep?\" The chief answered, \"I am thinking about my son who was killed in battle.\" The second chief swallowed his own bowl of mustard and also began to cry. The first asked, \"And why do you weep?\" \"Because,\" the chief answered, \"you were not killed in battle along with your son!\" The line fits neatly alongside [Stephen Leacock]'s boozy observations: \"You know, I think, the peculiar walk of a man with two bottles of whiskey in the inside pockets of a linen coat.\" Here is heard the grammatical contortions that sound the pulse of northern humour. It is heard again when he concludes that a certain picnic cooler must be full of sandwiches because - \"I think I can hear them clinking.\"
Journal Article