Advertising
Advertising is, plainly put, Leacock’s symbol of the end of human evolution. Its omnipresence constitutes the final nail in the coffin of civilization’s progressive march of acquiring intelligence. As he puts it: “Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”
Self-Made Men
Leacock has a real issue with the “stories” of self-made men. Especially irritating is the repetition of the idea that they call "arrived in the big city with naught but five cents to their name." It is not so much the men themselves that are symbolic here as it is the fake Horatio Alger-esque quality of their obviously constructed backstory. The rags-to-riches autobiography thus becomes symbolic of all that is fake in the capitalist economy.
The Cave-man
An unnamed and unidentified narrator’s interview with a Caveman reveals that man has always been subjected to the psychological conditioning of the feminine intrusion into the patriarchy of wives. Nothing has really changed since civilization came out of the caves. The Caveman symbolizes all that Leacock believes is detrimental to masculinity under too much domination of feminine influence; man—and by this is meant man, not mankind—is a domesticated beast.
The Plumber
The narrator writes a letter to the plumber who has spent two weeks working in his kitchen without seeming to make any progress at all. In his complaints about the union rules prohibiting actual use of his many work tools, the plumber becomes a symbol of Leacock’s overall exasperation with bureaucratic intrusion and obstruction into the normal efficiency of a work system.
“The Golfomaniac”
The title character of this sketch is named Llewellyn Smith, but that is entirely beside the point. Llewellyn does not exist as a singular character, but what may be surprising is that he also exists well beyond the limited sphere of being someone so obsessed with golf that he can literally turn every subject of any conversation around to the topic of golf. This obsessive devotion to a single subject is not exclusive to those ruining a good walk on the links by stopping to hit at a little white ball. Llewellyn Smith, the golfomaniac, symbolizes everyone who can effectively be described as obsessively devoted to any topic.
