Fortune Knox Once

Victoria’s favourite humourist returns with a hilarious collection of observations on Island living.

For more than twenty-five years, Jack Knox’s weekly humour column has captured the essence of life in BC’s picturesque capital city, a.k.a. Dysfunction-by-the-Sea. In Fortune Knox Once, as in his previous humour collections, Knox gathers together his favourite Time Colonist pieces that best sum up the absurdity of our times.

The subject matter is all over the map: the lost art of handwriting, the sexiness of the Canadian accent, phone addiction, the Rogue Cow of Metchosin, ugly trucks, ugly people, a parody of end-of-school announcements, and a letter to Prince Harry. The chapter on Pi Day is some of the best math-based humour you will read all week. And while are a dozen pieces on plague-related topics—from dog shortage to doomscrolling to the time Knox dropped his credit card into the saltchuck—COVID appears only in brief glimpses, like a moustache-twirling villain occasionally creeping onto the stage in an old-style British pantomime.

Whether you are a born-and-bred Islander who thinks this is all completely normal, or a Mainland transplant lured by the myth of lower housing prices, Fortune Knox Once is the laugh we all need right now.