I'm searching for any kind of detailed response to Stephen Leacock's essay "Men Who Have Shaved Me."

“Men Who Have Shaved Me,” by Stephen Leacock, is an essay
included in Leacock’s volume titled Literary Lapses. Leacock begins
by asserting that the typical barber is also an expert in sports.  The tone of the essay
is immediately comic, as Leacock explains that barbers are far less interested in
barbering than in imparting crucial information about
sports:

To
the barber the outside world is made up of customers, who are to be thrown into chairs,
strapped, manacled, gagged with soap, and then given such necessary information on the
athletic events of the moment as will carry them through the business hours of the day
without open
disgrace.

Customers (Leacock
asserts) are willing to wait long periods in barbers’ shops in order to have access to
this kind of important information. Sometimes barbers test their customers by asking
detailed questions about sports, but in general they would prefer to discuss the subject
with other barbers.

Barbers (Leacock claims) have to be
highly educated in the present day, and he offers a long list of the comically-titled
courses they supposedly take in barbers’ colleges,
including

readability="17">

(1)  Physiology, including Hair and its
Destruction, The Origin and Growth of Whiskers, Soap in its Relation to Eyesight; (2)
Chemistry, including lectures on Florida Water; and How to Make it out of Sardine Oil;
(3) Practical Anatomy, including The Scalp and How to Lift it, The Ears and How to
Remove them, and, as the Major Course for advanced students, The Veins of the Face and
how to open and close them at will by the use of
alum.

Leacock claims that
although barbers are in the business of removing whiskers, they are found of cooking
their customers first by covering their faces with steaming hot towels. He also asserts
that barbers like to entice their customers to allow barbers to perform all sorts of
exotic treatments on them. Customers either resist or succumb; in the latter case the
barbers are delighted and immediately get to work manhandling the customer even more
than before. Leacock makes it sound as if, in modern shops, a customer is surrounded by
different barbers waiting to get at him for all kinds of different reasons, few of them
pleasant. Things are even rougher, he jokingly concludes, in barber shops in the
country, where the customer’s hair is assaulted the way a lawnmower assaults
grass.

For the full text of the essay (which is quite funny
indeed and to which the preceding summary doesn’t begin to do justice), see the links
below.