He flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.

This line is widely attributed to Stephen Leacock as a characteristic example of his deadpan, logical-absurdist humor, parodying the melodramatic diction of adventure and historical romances. The joke hinges on an impossible action—riding “off in all directions”—that mimics the breathless clichés of heroic flight while undercutting them with literal-minded nonsense. Although it is frequently reproduced in quotation collections and humor anthologies as “Leacock,” it often circulates without a stable bibliographic citation, suggesting it may be excerpted from (or conflated with) his broader practice of satirizing popular narrative formulas rather than reliably traceable to a single, consistently cited publication.

Leacock’s line is a compact piece of absurdist humor: it begins with the stock language of melodramatic adventure (“flung himself upon his horse,” “rode madly off”) and then punctures it with a logical impossibility—one cannot ride “in all directions” at once. The joke exposes how clichéd heroic narration can become when it relies on inflated verbs and vague intensity rather than concrete action. It also exemplifies Leacock’s broader comic method: taking a familiar literary convention and pushing it one step past sense, so that the reader suddenly notices the artificiality of the convention itself.