Memoirs are reader favourites, especially those that delve into salacious confession. The more gender bending, spouse swapping, and drug-taking the author exposes, the more copies they sell. Anything for a Laugh, award-winning author and humorist Eric Nicol’s stab at the art of remembrance, runs contrary to this rule.

Nicol is a self-confessed stoic. A Second World War veteran and the product of immigrant parents who migrated from Great Britain in the early 1900s, Nicol is that rarity in the Canadian publishing firmament – a hard worker who doesn’t lapse into self-aggrandizement.

Nicol writes that Anything for a Laugh is a bid to “get my life off my chest. To put my past on paper.” This emotional exorcism is the only justifiable reason to engage in memoir. The icons of the memoir genre, such as Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, are attempts to process experience as a means of being freed from it. Nicol succeeds in accomplishing this feat.

Nicol is a veteran playwright and Anything for a Laugh is a theatrical book in which he presents his life as a series of scenes. His family, his lovers, and his friends are all characters. The reader is privy only to their outward actions. We see them in the same way that an audience sees an actor play a part.

This is an effective technique that heightens the irony that Nicol seeks to achieve. By presenting his life as a play, he gives the reader the distance that is necessary to engage in the humorous quirks that lurk in any life.