Garden Of Folly

Garden of Folly gathers thirty-two essays from the golden age of literary humor, when Stephen Leacock was the funniest man in the English-speaking world. Here he turns his gimlet eye on the pompous, the pretentious, and the profoundly ridiculous: businessmen who take themselves seriously, intellectuals lost in their own fog, and the endless human tendency to make a simple thing impossibly complicated. His wit operates like a surgeon's scalpel dressed in a clown's costume. Each piece moves from some absurd premise to a devastatingly logical conclusion, the kind of humor that makes you laugh and then pause, realizing you've just been taught something about yourself. These essays carry the particular charm of 1924, a world before irony became defense mechanism, when humor could be generous and sharp at once. They endure because the fools Leacock mocks are eternal: we still recognize every one of them. The title promises foolishness and delivers wisdom disguised as wit.