Over the Footlights*
Over the Footlights*
Mr. Leacock Plays on the Drama--He Gets Hearty Laughter
The Story. Some call it the Drayma, some the Drammer, the largest proportion simply and succinctly the Movies. But, anyhow, whether you go in for the newest expressionistic fling in any number of scenes in which the hero is an ear-wig/- and the heroine the Spirit of the Single Tax and all the action takes place offstage or stick to the simple mystery play where bodies are always falling out of chinaclosets and nobody knows who the real detective is, you will be pretty sure to find something to your taste in Mr. Leacock's latest book of burlesques.
Cast up by the Sea--a Sea-Coast Melodrama of the days when thirty cents bought an orchestra chair and not merely the amusement tax on a seat in row ZZ; The Soul Call--an up-to-date Piffle Play in Which a Man and a Woman, Both Trying to Find Themselves Find One Another; Dead Men's Gold--a film of the great Nevada Deserts in which Red-Blooded, Abie-Bodied Men and Women a hundred per cent. American live and love among the cactus and chaparral; Oroastus--a Greek Tragedy as presented by the senior class in classics at the University of Squeegee (S. or N. D., or even Kans. or Ill.); an Ibsen takeoff; historical drama of various sorts; the Russian theatre (Old Style) full of knouts and beautiful Nihilists and (New Style) one of those realistic things in which all the characters suffer from acute hydrophobia and pass their time poisoning each other in underground lodgings; an ideal scenario for the modern movie of uplift that grips poor old marriage right by the neck; The Raft--the kind of interlude that is sandwiched in for 15 minutes between the dances at a revue; so they go.
End of Part One. Intermission. Part Two: Other Fancies, some eleven little skits on topical themes with an Envoi addressed to the Faded Actor and containing two of the most amusing things in the book, First Call for Spring and How I Succeeded in Business. Curtain.
Some of the items are more entertaining than others but each should produce at least one chuckle and in several the angle of risibility is acute. And there isn't enough fun going around in these analytic days for anyone to miss the genuine plums in this particular collection.
The Significance. Mr. Leacock is a humorist but not a wit--he seeks for and obtains the abrupt and hearty laugh rather than the oh-so-sophisticated smile. But while occasionally stereotyped and sometimes a trifle repetitious he maintains on the whole a pretty high average of chuckles to the item. He is probably the most popular living humorous writer in English, for his work deals in the main with matters of commonplace experience made unexpectedly ludicrous by the angle from which he attacks them.
The Critics. The New York World: "If one does not find what he is looking for, he is quite sure to find something else."
New York Tribune: "Mr. Leacock has never deviated . . . from his attitude as the unimpassioned protestant against the countless shams and imbecilities in which our common life is drenched."
The New York Times: "Leacock is unconventional enough to voice opinions that almost everyone else keeps silent for fear of what the other fellow may think."
The Author. Stephen Leacock (born in 1869 in England) has been so frequently regarded as an American that he must be getting used to it. Professor, economist, lecturer, he has had the fortune or misfortune to make such a success of his avocation as a writer of humorous fiction that few of his readers realize that he has any other calling. However, he is head of the Department of Political Economy at McGill University (Canada) and is well and widely known in that portentous-sounding field. His serious books include The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice; his humorous, Behind the Beyond, Winsome Winnie and the classic Nonsense Novels.
*OVER THE FOOTLIGHTS--Stephen Leacock-- Dodd, Mead ($1.50). An insect vulgarly supposed to creep into the human ear.