Little House on the Tundra: Female Winners of the Leacock Award for Canadian Comedy

Little House on the Tundra: Female Winners of the Leacock Award for Canadian Comedy Diana Solomon (bio) and Sean Zwagerman (bio) Canada is known for producing an astonishing amount of comedy. Compared to the U.S. and the United Kingdom, Canada is alone in featuring a prize for literary humour—the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal—that includes a substantial monetary award. Within Canada, the Leacock medal is undeniably important. Not only does it confer critical attention and a cash prize, but it also ensures that the winners’ books turn a profit and remain accessible decades later. Yet in the seventy-five-year history of the prize, it has been awarded to women writers only nine times. Why have so few women won the Leacock, and, among the nine winners, what comic attributes do they share? In this article, we first examine the medal’s history and its selection process and then assess the nine female-authored prize winners. We argue that many of the female Leacock awardees align with a conservative critical consensus about what Canadian humour typically represents: a coming to terms with the harsh rural landscape; a tendency to consider Canadian culture inferior to that of its two closest allies, the U.S. and the UK; and an emphasis on provincial comedy. Particularly in the early female winners’ books, these attributes get domesticated; we have drafty houses, naive childrearing practices, and narrow perspectives on the outside world. A couple of recent winners, however, challenge this provincial outlook. [End Page 91] Leacock and the Leacock Medal Stephen Leacock is sufficiently well-known (at least in Canada) to warrant a 2009 biography in Penguin’s “Extraordinary Canadians” series (MacMillan). A professor in the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University, Leacock is far better known as a humourist. His most popular book is Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), a collection of anecdotes about small-town Canadian life that had been serialized in the Montreal Daily Star, was twice adapted for television, was regularly taught in Canadian schools for much of the twentieth century, and is still considered a classic of Canadian humour. Leacock also wrote about humour, publishing Humour: Its Theory and Technique in 1935 and Humor and Humanity in 1938. Because Leacock believed that mass media and cultural exchange were erasing national differences, he was critical of the idea of a national literature. “We are all just about the same kind of people,” he believed (Humour 210–12), and he imagined not a distinctive Canadian literature but a global “republic of letters” (“The National Literature Problem” 9). (Unsurprisingly, Leacock’s republic of letters is decidedly Western and written in English.) As for Canada, Leacock believed “that the attempt to mark off Canada as a little area all its own, listening to no one but itself, is as silly as it is ineffective.… We don’t have to be different” (9). And “nowhere,” he asserts, “has the idea [of a national character] been worked harder than in the domain of humour” (Humour 212). So it may seem odd (and perhaps amusing) that Leacock’s name is attached to a national humour prize “awarded annually for the best book of humour written in the previous year by a Canadian” (Stephen Leacock Associates, “History” np). In 1946, two years after Leacock’s death, a group of his friends and colleagues formed the Stephen Leacock Memorial Committee, later renamed Stephen Leacock Associates. The organization’s goals include: a. to honour and perpetuate the name and memory of Stephen Leacock, humourist, author, economist and lecturer; b. to arrange for the annual award and presentation of The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, also known as the Leacock Medal; c. to encourage the growth of Canadian humour writing; d. to initiate and support activities which widen interest in Leacock and his writings; [End Page 92] e. to widen public interest in the Leacock Museum and National Historic Site, and in the Leacock legend. (Stephen Leacock Associates, “About Us” np) As for mandates (b) and (c), the Leacock Medal has been awarded annually since 1947. It is notable for being the longest-running literary comedy prize and for giving a...

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