Is there a distinctively Canadian sense of humour? From reading Laughs, Claire Mackay’s anthology of funny stories, poems, and riddles by Canadian authors, one has to conclude there isn’t. The range of humour is broad indeed. Among the 23 works collected, the humour ranges from slapstick to sophisticated. This diversity makes for a rather uneven short collection, but probably renders the book a useful choice for the library or classroom.

Reading aloud might help children enjoy the more complex stories by L.M. Montgomery and W.O. Mitchell as well as the easily accessible romps of Gordon Korman and Martyn Godfrey. For a reader working through the book, however, the swift move from Ken Roberts’s “Gross,” with its luridly detailed examples of what a younger sibling has to talk about in order to gain attention, to Montgomery’s fulsome evocations of the autumnal Avonlea landscape is likely to arouse impatience in anyone not already acquainted with the fun to be found in Anne of Green Gables. Similarly, the contrast between some simple parodies of Mary Had a Little Lamb and the complex allusions in Mitchell’s story from Jake and the Kid is profound: these two entries presume very different levels of skill and sophistication in the reader.

Certainly, though, there’s something here to amuse virtually any reader with a funny bone – slapstick stories, nonsense verse, fables, and tall tales. Some are classics, like the Montgomery story of Anne’s disastrous tea party and Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater,” while others were written for the anthology. One theme that runs throughout the collection is children’s anxieties about school: stories by Jean Little, Brian Doyle, and Tim Wynne-Jones show how language and the ability to invent a good story can help you make friends and get out of awkward situations. Wynne-Jones’s story, which opens the anthology, is particularly successful in bridging the gap between the subtler language-based humour of the stories meant for older children and the crude bits meant for younger ones (which avoid scatology but get much mileage out of “stuff up your nose.”) More stylistic and thematic consistency might have made this a more satisfying compilation, but it is, nonetheless, a book that will amuse many readers.