“Beyond the money, he would take nothing” A literary analysis of Stephen Leacock’s stereotyped characters

Abstract

Cognisant that humorous narratives rely in many occasions on some stereotypes that have already become second
nature for those who are reading them, the purpose of this analysis is to make out if and, if so, how the narrator of
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (LEACOCK, 1912) makes use of these stereotypes as to put them into question.
For that to be achieved, we shall highlight and scrutinise the ironic tone of his/her descriptions especially in two specific
moments of the narrative: 1) The hiring of a metropolitan speaker for addressing the candidacy discourses prior to the
elections; and 2) The investigation carried out in Mariposa to solve the bank mystery. As to identify how the narrator
develops this critique upon the stereotyping of both the novel’s saviour and the villain (i.e. the speaker and the vagrant
who robs the town’s bank), we recur mainly to the elaborations on irony as a humorous artefact set forth by Constance
Rourke in the book American Humour (1959) as well as to Peter Flynn’s ideas on stereotypical images available in
Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology (2015). The results demonstrate how the narrator of our research
object provides us with an effective mirror image of social stereotypes, giving us an opportunity to make out how we
might tend to overemphasise the surface layer of a matter instead of looking deeply into that very same matter.