He’s a serious man, even a sad man, to whom laughter is both a personal and a social therapy. ¶ Let me explain at once that Leo Ferrari is not one of those boring amateur clowns whom cartoonists depict with lampshades on their heads. “My greatest fear,” he says, “is that some morning I’ll wake up stark, raving sane.” If he finds the joke funny enough and if there’s room enough he may do a handspring or stand on his head. His isn’t 20th-century laughter his body shakes as though in the grip of a mighty external force. He was merely amused and, as I’ve since learned, when Leo Ferrari is amused it’s as if he were possessed by the riotous Greek god Dionysus. As it turned out, he wasn’t demonstrating karate, and he was neither drunk nor stoned : he abhors drugs and seldom drinks anything stronger than beer, which he makes himself. Ferrari, who teaches philosophy at Saint Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, is one of those rare professors who are invited to student parties. The place was an apartment where a group of university students were having a party, and the bricks were part of a homemade bookcase. People leapt out of the way to avoid being knocked off their feet. A moment later he hurled himself from his chair and, still laughing thunderously, rolled over and over on the floor. The bloody fool is going to fracture his skull, I said to myself. Not only his throat and lungs but his entire body was laughing. THE first time that I saw Leo Ferrari he was pounding his head against a stack of bricks. Ferrari finished his manuscript called “The Earth Is Flat : An Exposé of the Globularist Hoax” which now resides in the archives of St. The Flat Earth Society of Canada, of which Nowlan and Ferrari were founding members, fizzled out in the mid-80‘s but not before Dr. This essay by the important Canadian poet, Alden Nowlan, is from his 1978 collection of essays entitled Double Exposure.
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