Stephen Leacock: Classic or Dud?

Had to read a lot of this guy in school. Apparently, he was one of the best-selling authors in the world in his day. When I try these days, it just seems ... not very good?

I remember liking the Ibsen spoof The Sub-Contractor in high school. I just read "The Great Detective", his Sherlock Holmes parody. It felt a bit like what I imagine it would be like to watch a Mad TV sketch in 100 years.

I liked his metafictive satirical short story "Ho for Happiness" when I read it for school years ago, but when I read Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich recently, I found it only intermittently amusing and mostly a bit of a slog.

Vaguely remember his name from various comedic writing anthologies read decades ago but can't remember a thing about him. Feel like I used up any residual impetus to read dated old-time humor writing by plowing through Penrod: His Complete Story, by Booth Tarkington in grade school.

only intermittently amusing and mostly a bit of a slog.

I tried to give Sunshine Sketches a go in the summer and mostly felt this way, although I admit to giving up early. Whenever I hear people describe Garrison Keillor's deal, though, I get the impression that it was modelled on this?

I guess I'm intrigued by Leacock's status in the canon. Do kids still have to read these stories in Canadian schools?

I didn't read him until university.

Ha, I read him in Grade 8. My school might have been weird, though.

Anything good that I read in grade 8 I had to discover on my own, unfortunately.

He was an economics professor at the department where I did my undergrad degree in econ, and the Social Science building is named after him. The building is a nice brutalist slab that I'm kinda fond of:

http://cac.mcgill.ca/campus/pictures/ICC/leacock2.GIF

I never understood why they named the building after him, though. From wiki:

Leacock was both a social conservative and a partisan Conservative. He opposed giving women the right to vote, disliked non-Anglo-Saxon immigration and supported the introduction of social welfare legislation. He was a staunch champion of the British Empire and the Imperial Federation Movement and went on lecture tours to further the cause.

You went to McGill? But yeah, guy was a Tory in the original sense. Obviously an aesthetic conservative too. I'm kind of musing as to whether this is related to why his literary work seems dated now (at least to me and cryptosicko), in that it reflects a perspective that is hard to relate to now: celebrating the simplicity, traditionalism, and community-oriented nature of rural Anglo life while maintaining an aristocratic condescension towards it?

Not sure why it would be surprising that McGill would name a building after an old aristocratic Tory though.

lol true

never read S. Leacock (and not planning to tbh) but even with good old humorists like S.J. Perelman, idg half the jokes cause of (what I assume is) lack of context

I may or may not have known about his conservatism before, but it is unsurprising. There is definitely what Sund4r calls an "aristocratic condescension" at play in Arcadian Adventures, which is probably somewhat at play in "Ho for Happiness" as well, but is much less noticeable given that the story reads as a straightforward satire of literary conventions more than anything else.