My Financial Career and Other Sketches
Four of Stephen Leacock's best comic sketches: the nervous man trying to open a bank account, the boarding-house explained by geometry, the guest too polite to leave, and the secret of making a million. By Stephen Leacock (1910). A public-domain classic, from Literary Lapses.
🎧 New: every story can be read aloud. Tap Listen to try it.
How it begins When I go into a bank I get rattled. The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattles me.The moment I cross the threshold of a bank and attempt to transact business there, I become an irresponsible idiot. Keep reading →About this story
Four of Stephen Leacock’s best comic sketches: the nervous man trying to open a bank account, the boarding-house explained by geometry, the guest too polite to leave, and the secret of making a million. They are very short, and meant to be read aloud.
Stephen Leacock, a Canadian economist and humorist, published them in 1910, in Literary Lapses. ‘My Financial Career’ is his most famous piece, and one of the funniest descriptions of social embarrassment in English. His humour is gentle, and the jokes are in how seriously he takes small things.
- Themes
- Embarrassment, comic logic, money
- Good for
- Quick laughs; reading aloud
- Worth noticing
- How Leacock’s narrator builds a small mistake into a disaster.