“Sunny Side Up” by Bronwen Jervis

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CBC’s beautiful Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town dulls Stephen Leacock’s merciless wit

By Bronwen Jervis • February 13, 2012 • 2 Comments

Steve Wilkie/CBCKeshia Chanté in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Stephen Leacock, Canada’s preeminent literary humourist, was merciless in his quest for mirth. While not a misanthrope, he associated humans with foibles and folly — objects of relentless criticism. In Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, his 1912 collection of short stories, he at once adores and skewers the residents of Mariposa (a thinly fictionalized Orillia, Ontario). Mariposa has no genuine heroes: Mr. Smith, the hotelier, is a shrewd buffoon with an essential generosity; the Reverend Dean Drone is a well-meaning but bumbling bore, lost in his own scholarly world; Young Peter Pupkin is a pup of a man. Though based on his Orillia neighbours, Leacock saw something universal in the roles such characters played in small-town life. Now, sixty years after its first adaptation, CBC has attempted to bring these stories back to life, in a made-for-television movie that premiered last night.

Executive producer Malcolm MacRury’s screenplay adapts and conflates tales from Leacock’s bestselling collection, and intermingles stories from the author’s own childhood. Drawn mostly from “The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias” and “The Hostelry of Mr. Smith,” Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, the movie, injects the sad story of Leacock’s alcoholic father and the family’s financial failures. If a student wanted to avoid a few hours of CanLit homework by streaming the movie online, she’d certainly confuse some key plot points on the dreaded pop quiz (the hypocrisy of Judge Pepperleigh, for instance, is transferred onto the Reverend Drone), but she would have a reasonable understanding of Leacock’s sensibilities. The sharper sarcastic edges of his writing have been dulled, but the spirit of Leacock’s prose is still there.

One cannot seriously discuss Leacock without acknowledging that he was as merciless in his politics as his humour (he was a professor of political economics at McGill University in Montreal); his political writings made claims that many readers today consider mysoginistic and racist. CBC, however, sees Mariposa with rose-coloured glasses. Its production takes a page out of Kevin Sullivan’s Anne-of-Green-Gables-Road-to-Avonlea playbook, and is full of cherubic children, straw hats, and cheerful townsfolk. I am tempted to forgive CBC for sticking with a winning formula, but Lucy Maude Montgomery and Stephen Leacock are very different beasts: Montgomery’s books are about children and, ostensibly, written for children. Leacock’s fiction is about adults, for adults. The producers did their best to put a rosy veneer on the era by rewriting and expanding male roles for females, and allowing casting directors to conveniently ignore what I’ll term “period-specific racial preferences.”

It’s easy to find fault with literary adaptations. Viewers who tuned in Sunday night surely noticed the bizarrely earnest Keshia Chanté and her “My Heart Will Go On” homage, performed amidst the farcical sinking of the Mariposa Belle. Chanté looks and sounds lovely, but the insertion of this pop musical number, with her belting notes and sashaying around the deck of a “sinking” ship, is quite off-key and felt like an awkward attempt to attract the dozen or so music fans who weren’t watching the Grammy Awards.

Then there’s the miscasting of Mr. Smith – the brash hotelier who takes style advice from Don Cherry. The role is inhabited by Tao of Steve’s slacker-hero star Donal Logue, who, though likable enough, lacks Smith’s mischievousness. Better suited is an actor with an outsized presence, specifically Sean Cullen (who makes an appearance as the captain of the Mariposa Belle, and does his best Francesco Schettino).

While a television adaptation can never replace Leacock’s original, CBC produced a faithful and entertaining enough film. Gordon Pinsent’s sonorous narration, which quotes directly from the text, adds an authentic touch. And there are places where the filmmakers have taken advantage of their medium (there’s a very funny Titanic reference, for one). The production design is bright and winsome, creating a sun-soaked early twentieth-century resort town. The images on the screen are charming (quaint barber shops, candle-lit cellars, shining lakes, and the like). These scenes aid the viewer in imagining a more innocent time, amongst such delightfully silly folks — exactly what CBC period pieces do so well. But along the way some of the stories’ sparkle and the wit are dimmed. Humour is about pacing, imagination, and play, and all great humourists are keenly aware of their interaction with the audience. Unlike a drama, which loses less of its impact by moving from one medium to another, a comedy must be completely recalibrated if it is to succeed; television audiences move at a faster pace, have negligible participation in manifesting the imagined world, and watch the images play, not the words. Leacock’s best moments come from zingy one-liners between the author and the reader, a relationship that can’t be recreated with television’s forced fourth wall. Consequently, the stories’ funniest and smartest moments fall a little flat in this adaptation. Ultimately, the words of Stephen Leacock are liveliest on the page.

Bronwen Jervis is a former editorial intern at The Walrus.

Tags • adaptation, CBC, Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, television
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