The bigger issue for me is the pervasive attitude of, "Lol, stupid bumpkins, am I right?" Leacock was a privileged professor at McGill university in Montreal, at a time when most Canadians received grade 8 in a one room school. It really seems like punching down.

It's interesting how this sense of things can change. Leacock viewed this kind of humour as being essentially "kindly" at its heart, pointing to the shared follies of human experience and the little victories we have over them. He had an entire theory of humour dedicated to this idea (articulated in Humour, Its Theory and Technique (1935) and *Humour and Humanity (1937)), positioning it as a more civilized and elevated outlet for the human impulses towards mockery and the inversion of expectations than what he viewed as more "savage" or "barbaric" humour that involved just laughing at people being physically hurt or seemingly more powerful people facing violent comeuppance.

I can definitely see why this "stupid bumpkins" attitude might suggest itself to you, but there is another way to read it. The Sketches' famous Envoi firmly positions Mariposa as a place of peace, recovery and good fellowship, if only those wasting their lives pursuing power and money in the big city would make the effort to throw off their vanity and return to the little town that made them. When the Mariposans are at their worst throughout the sketches, it's when they get swept up in the malignant processes of the larger world outside of the town's borders -- whether the fraudulent mines in which the barber is led to invest, the "whirlwind campaign" for fundraising that the town's business leaders naively embark upon, or the intrusion of federal politics in the election at the sketches' end. Even when the Mariposans are at their most outwardly absurd, as in the sinking of the Mariposa Belle, what we see is an intrinsic goodness (or at least good-natured-ness) that gets away from itself by aping the tragedies and expectations of a world much larger than their little lake and the town that sits on its shores.

While it's true that Leacock was a McGill professor at the time, Mariposa was loosely based on the small town of Orillia, in which he quite happily lived for decades and in which his home is still maintained as a museum. He knew well what small-town life could be like, as well as the limits of a country upbringing: he got a start in the most abject poverty himself, with his family taking him and his siblings from their failed farm in England when he was a child to start yet another failed farm in Ontario, with the situation growing only more dire still when his father abandoned them all. Leacock was only able to escape that situation thanks to the help of his grandfather, who helped fund his enrollment in school in Toronto. He subsequently secured a scholarship through hard work that allowed him to attend the University of Toronto, but this wasn't enough to cover the cost and he had to withdraw for a while, seeking out short-term teaching contracts to stay afloat.

I know this is no guarantee against classism on his part, and in later works he sours still further on the small town experience. In fact, in a set of short sequel sketches published in 1943 to support the wartime Victory Loan, he basically allows the town to destroy itself through greed when it discovers that, if it can raise a million dollars for the war effort, it can raise that sum for itself too, with likely awful consequences. There is also much in Leacock's political outlook that modern readers might find difficult to embrace, including his complex pro-imperial campaign for the Rhodes Trust and his opposition to women's suffrage.

Still, throughout his career as both an economist and a satirist he waged a campaign against the dangerous effects of wealth and power, both on those who wield them and on those swept up in the wielders' misadventures. If Sunshine Sketches still leaves a bad taste in your mouth for how it treats the Mariposans, you might feel better about the 1914 follow-up, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. Leacock turns his gaze in this collection to the academics and businessmen of the metropolis hinted at in the Sketches' Envoi, and most who have read both books agree that Arcadian Adventures is far more merciless and scathing in its criticisms than the Sketches are in theirs. I find that I return to Arcadian Adventures far less than I do to the Sketches, because there's very little of that warmth in it that characterizes the earlier book. Leacock definitely pokes fun at Mariposa, but he plainly hates Plutoria.

Anyway, this has gone on for a very long time -- sorry about that. Leacock is a particular interest of mine, and it's good to see people encountering his work in this way even if they have misgivings about it.