Quote of the Day (Stephen Leacock, on Advertising and Intelligence)

"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."—Canadian economist and humorist Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), The Garden of Folly (1924)

Quote of the Day (Stephen Leacock, on Being a Humorist AND Economist)

“Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.”— Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)

How many people can say that they wrote both a standard text in political economy and some of the bestselling humor books of their time? Stephen Leacock—born on this date in 1869 in Swanmore, Hampshire, England—could. 

“My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them,” he recalled with tongue in cheek of the trip that took him across the Atlantic at age seven—and would, in time, make him the most beloved humorist—and, as an economist, one of the most influential intellectuals—of his adopted country.

Today, Leacock is not as widely known in the United States as he was during his lifetime—something that surprised comedian Jack Benny, who was introduced to his writing by fellow vaudevillian Groucho Marx.

Nevertheless, Leacock remains a beloved figure in Canada, and he became a major influence on another American humorist besides Benny and Marx: Robert Benchley, whom he persuaded to compile his early writing into a book.

An example of Leacock’s wry wit can be found in this prior “Quote of the Day.”

Quote of the Day (Stephen Leacock, on Those Pesky High School Math Word Problems)

“The occupations of A, B, and C are many and varied. In the older arithmetics they contented themselves with doing ‘a certain piece of work.’ This statement of the case, however, was found too sly and mysterious, or possibly lacking in romantic charm. It became the fashion to define the job more clearly and to set them at walking matches, ditch-digging, regattas, and piling cord wood. At times, they became commercial and entered into partnership, having with their old mystery a ‘certain’ capital. Above all they revel in motion. When they tire of walking-matches--A rides on horseback, or borrows a bicycle and competes with his weaker-minded associates on foot. Now they race on locomotives; now they row; or again they become historical and engage stage-coaches; or at times they are aquatic and swim. If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns, two of which leak through holes in the bottom and one of which is water-tight. A, of course, has the good one; he also takes the bicycle, and the best locomotive, and the right of swimming with the current. Whatever they do they put money on it, being all three sports. A always wins.”—Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), “A, B, and C—The Human Element in Mathematics,” Literary Lapses (1910)