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Stephen Leacock was enormously popular in the first half of the twentieth century. Further Foolishness was published in 1916 and, while some sections show their age and have lost their effectiveness, it still has the capacity to entertain a modern reader.
It is divided into four topical sections: "Follies In Fiction", "Movies and Motors, Men and Women", "Peace, War, and Politics" and "Timid Thoughts On Timely Topics". These can be read in any order. The third section is the weakest and the humour is dated. On the other hand, it has a historical and cultural significance. There are some essays which certainly stand out. "Are The Rich Happy?" is still very funny. "the Snoopopaths" is a satire lampooning popular pulp novels of the time. Particularly interesting is " Madeline of the Movies: A Photoplay done back into words". Here Leacock is satirising the old silent morality film-short of the type created by D.W.Griffith and his Biograph company. We can still read this sketch with considerable pleasure. But one should remember that we tend to see such films as naive and antiquated. But Leacock was actually dealing with a state-of-the-art technology when he wrote it. He refers to it as "a moving picture photoplay". So there is an additional layer to the satire which we may miss entirely. The final piece in the book is an interesting essay "Humour as I See It" which is well worth reading.
Thus, many of the essays in the book show their age, but they also reveal what people found funny nearly a century ago. At the same time there are a fair number of genuinely humorous pieces which still work. Considering that Further Foolishness is in the public domain and available free from Project Gutenberg, it is well worth reading.
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