A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  Nobody is less funny than somebody trying too hard to be funny, and part of Antsy’s success as a character is that he is the perfect straight man. For the female equivalent we need look no further than Primrose Squarp, the hero of Polly Horvath’s Everything on a Waffle. This romp, with its jokes and its judicious dashes of “ew, yuck!” is an outrageous story of small-town life. Horvath pulls out all the stops. She constructs a plot that includes not one orphan but two, both of them disabled. She includes four eccentric spinsters. Her hero loses not one but two bits of her body in accidents. Horvath creates a couple of parents who are lost at sea in a storm and survive on a deserted island for weeks and weeks. She has a character give the following advice on how to deal with school bullies: “Kick the crap out of those stinkers.” Then she chooses a real place, Coal Harbour on the coast on British Columbia, takes the elements of its history and community (such as a military base and whaling), and throws them up in the air, letting them fall where they may. There are also recipes. Disgusting recipes. Cherry pie pork chops gives you the idea.

  Everything on a Waffle is irreverent, stylish, and cool, a tall tale with a dark edge of satire. Here’s Primrose’s account of her teachers discussing her “issues,” which they hope to alleviate by sending the class guinea pig home with her on weekends:

  “Caring for a small animal instills a sense of ourselves and others,” said my teacher.

  I didn’t see how I could help having a sense of myself and others. But, of course, none of us had any idea what we were talking about. It was just one of those situations where everyone involved feels compelled to say something, anything at all.

  Horvath’s humor can be somewhat adult, but because her take on the world is so grounded and perceptive, the message to the child reader is not that of exclusion but of respect and invitation: “I know that you’ve noticed this same weird, absurdist thing.” She lays the groundwork for her readers to grow up and read David Lodge and Molly Keane.

  In slapstick, comedy can easily tip into disaster, even cruelty. It takes a master hand to keep the balance. Such a master is Jack Gantos. The subject heading for Joey Pigza Loses Control would give the reader no hint that this book was funny: “Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder — fiction.” Yet this book has scenes of slapstick that make you laugh till you cry, then wonder if you are really crying for sadness. This is comedy that grows out of an original and entirely winning character. This is the wry territory where you want to send in the clowns.

  Joey Pigza is a boy who is at a turning point. “Before I had gone to special ed and got my new meds it would have been impossible for me to sit still and make a list of good things and bad things. I didn’t have time for lists. I didn’t have time for anything that lasted longer than the snap of my fingers.” But Joey’s newly discovered ability to pause and think is stolen from him when he goes to visit his father, who believes that “real men can tough it out” and flushes the meds down the toilet. The reader then enters, with Joey, the speeded-up world of ADHD. We are so inside Joey that his good ideas seem like good ideas to us too. Impersonate a mannequin in a department store? Throw darts at the couch cushions? Play some Herb Alpert on your trumpet in church? Get off the bus at every stop and then race to the back doors and get on again? Why not? Joey’s hijinks are the familiar stuff of the middle-grade-mayhem novel, except that he is aware that all is not well, and so are we.

  This is comedy that grows out of uneasiness. There are banana peels at every step, and we see the disasters looming. It works because Joey and his family are not caricatures. They are real, recognizable people who simply do the things most of us only think about. They are also, in their way, a loving group.

  Grandma had pulled half a cheek full of loose skin all the way back behind her jaw where she had it gathered in a wad and clipped to her ear with a clothespin. “Don’t you think I’d look better with a face-lift?” she asked, and breathed through her mouth like a fish out of water. . . .

  I didn’t know what to say but opened my mouth anyway and said, “You’d better watch out. If you pull the skin too tight it might rip apart like when you pull Play-Doh too hard.”

  One of the most challenging flavors to pull off in a children’s book is wacky. Wacky applied on top of the story like gooey icing becomes quickly tiresome. But wacky built into a story can’t be beat. Daniel Pinkwater has wacky in his DNA. Jules Feiffer said of Pinkwater that his “thoughts don’t connect like yours or mine.” In Looking for Bobowicz, Nick, a new resident of Hoboken, joins forces with two new pals, Loretta Fischetti and Bruno Ugg, to solve several mysteries. Mystery one is, Who stole Nick’s bike, and how do they get it back? (A subplot involves the theft of a collection of Classic Comics.) Mystery two is, Who is the phantom? Mystery three involves a giant chicken. There is also the hidden cave, a near-death experience (death by sauerkraut), and a wonderful, mad, but effective public librarian called Starr Lackawanna.

  What makes Pinkwater unique is that the worlds he creates are 100 percent benign without being one bit bland. The off-the-wall references — to the song “Frozen Yogurt Blues” by Blind Persimmon, the annual Hoboken Bat Hat Festival, the 1930s avant-garde art style of Mama (“like Dada, only nicer”) — all add up to a world of joyful pleasure in the varieties of humankind.

  During the Bat Hat Festival, all the middle-grade children in Hoboken gather one summer night to throw their hats up into the darkness beyond the streetlight to capture bats. No bats are ever captured. No bats are ever actually seen. What’s the point?

  I began to shout too, and then I began to laugh. I noticed that Loretta Fischetti and Bruno Ugg were laughing. Everybody was laughing. After a while I was laughing so hard I couldn’t do anything else. I got out of breath and bent over with my hands on my knees, laughing. Then I sank to the ground and just lay there laughing so hard my eyes filled with tears. My stomach muscles hurt from laughing so hard. Just about everyone else was on the ground too, rolling back and forth and waving arms and legs and laughing until all we could do was sort of sob and giggle.

  The fine line between sobbing and giggling is only one of several that comedy walks. In melodrama we walk the delicious line between fear and fun. We know that the blonde damsel tied to the railway tracks is not really going to be smushed by the train, but when we hear that distant whistle, the tension rises nonetheless. For the child reader, melodrama gives a range of reading options, from the naive, straight reading to the more sophisticated, seasoned-with-a-grain-of-salt knowingness.

  The craze for the Series of Unfortunate Events by the pseudonymous Lemony Snicket proved that melodrama is alive and well. Snicket grads are well prepared for the Wolves Chronicles of Joan Aiken. Starting with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and ending with The Witch of Clatteringshaws, this series was published over the course of more than forty years. The nonstop action takes place in an invented eighteenth century, in which James III and his heirs rule England. Every chapter of every book is a feast of invention. Tidal waves, abandoned waifs, wicked governesses, unmentionable fates, the return of King Arthur, improbable coincidences, ESP, fog, obscure ailments, false teeth made from woolly-mammoth ivory, alternative technologies (an early bicycle called a “dupli-gyro”), and characters who might have wandered in from a Dickens novel combine in roustabout stories breathless in their pace and plotting. The wit lies in the language. Aiken’s invented worlds demand invented words, and reading her books is like an intensive immersion in Aikenese. “Queer he keeps his garden so spange when the house is in such a mux.” Good comedy does change one’s perspective, and after a vacation in Aiken’s world, many aspects of our own world look a bit rum and fubsy.

  From a collection of knock-knock jokes to the sophisticated novels of Joan Aiken, funny books make the same demands of the writer as all fiction. They need imaginative language, a melding of the familiar and the new, a strong narrative pull, a grounding in authentic dilemmas and emotions, a fresh take on the world, characters we care about, and a congenial, we
lcoming voice. The additional demand that humor makes is that all these elements have to be created with a pastry chef’s light hand. A bit of plodding, didacticism, or earnestness is forgivable in an adventure book or a fantasy, but it deflates comedy like a pin in a balloon. When you look for a funny book, look for a soufflé.

  Comedian Rowan Atkinson, when asked about the cross-cultural appeal of his alter ego Mr. Bean, said, “Mr. Bean is essentially a child trapped in the body of a man. All cultures identify with children in a similar way, so he has this bizarre global outreach. And ten-year-old boys from different cultures have more in common than thirty-year-olds. As we grow up, we acquire this sensibility that divides us.” If we need an excuse for funny books, that’s it. It is hard to get on your high horse or look down on somebody else when you’re flat on your back laughing, gasping on the deck, hooked, for good and all, by comedy.

  The voice flew across the room and nailed me to the back of my seat.

  “What’s so funny, Mr. Scieszka?”

  The voice belonged to Sister Margaret Ann. And it had just flown across our fifth-grade religion class at St. Luke’s Elementary School to find me in what I had thought was the safety of the back row.

  I knew that the correct answer to this question was “Nothing, sister.”

  “I’m sorry, sister,” was also a time-tested and very good reply.

  And nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I would have used one of those answers. But that day something happened. That day I reached some existential fork in the road.

  My friend and back-row co-conspirator, Tim Kavolsik, had just told me the funniest joke I had ever heard. The fact that he had told it while Sister Margaret Ann was droning on about our future options of heaven and hell only made it funnier.

  Now I was called out.

  I saw the two life paths laid out clearly before me. Down the one path of the quick apology and standard answer lay the good grade for religion class. Down the other path lay the possibility of a very big laugh. A good grade in religion class is always a good thing in Catholic school. No arguing that. But this was a really funny joke, and I knew why it was funny. I was torn between going for the A and going for the laugh. Both were within my grasp.

  So when Sister Margaret Ann asked the inevitable follow-up question, “Would you like to share it with the rest of the class?” I chose my life’s path.

  “Well, there’s this guy who wants to be a bell ringer,” I began, “but he doesn’t have any arms.”

  Sister Margaret Ann’s eyes pop open wider than I have ever seen them. The whole class turns to look at me and at the train wreck about to happen. Even my pal Tim Kovalsik is shaking his head at this point. Nobody in the history of St. Luke’s Elementary School has ever volunteered to “share it with the rest of the class.” But I feel it. I have to do it. It is my destiny.

  “The priest who is looking for a good bell ringer says, ‘You can’t ring the bells. You don’t have any arms.’”

  The faces of my fellow fifth-graders are looking a bit wavy and blurry. I suddenly understand the phrase sea of faces.

  “‘I don’t need arms,’ says the bell-ringing guy. ‘Watch this.’ And he runs up the bell tower and starts bouncing his face off the bells and making beautiful music.”

  Half of the class laughs. I’m not sure if it’s out of nervousness or pity. But it’s a lot of laughs.

  Sister Margaret Ann’s eyes open, impossibly, wider.

  Light floods the classroom. I can’t really see anybody now. I can only feel the punch line building. I head toward the light.

  “So the bell-ringing guy goes to finish his song with one last smack of his face, but this time he misses the bell and falls right out of the tower. He lands on the ground and is knocked out. A whole crowd of villagers gathers around him.”

  The whole class has gathered around me. It is a feeling of almost unbelievable power mixed with terror for a confirmed low-profile student like myself.

  “‘Who is this guy?’ the villagers ask.”

  I feel the whole world pause for just a single beat, like it always does before a good punch line.

  “‘I don’t know his name,’ says the priest. ‘But his face rings a bell.’”

  I don’t remember the grade I got in fifth-grade religion class, but I do remember the laugh I got. It was huge. It was the whole class. It was out-of-control hysterical. It was glorious.

  So now, from a distance of forty years, I’d like to continue to answer Sister Margaret Ann’s question. Because in looking back over my work, trying to make some retrospective sense of my writing for kids, I’ve realized that each of my books is in some way another piece of the answer to the question, “What’s so funny, Mr. Scieszka?”

  I’d also like to accept the invitation of Sister Margaret’s second question and share with you, the rest of the class, what’s so funny.

  I believe funny is good. I believe funny is important. And I may just be rationalizing the path I chose back in fifth grade, but I also believe funny isn’t given the respect it deserves.

  Scholars and historians more learned than I have pondered this problem for ages. Why is tragedy seen as being more substantial than comedy? Why do we believe sadness is a more valid and a deeper emotion than happiness? Why is it that funny stuff never wins the awards? (What was the last funny movie to win an Academy Award? Or, closer to home, in our world of children’s books — what was the last funny book to win a Caldecott or Newbery?)

  One of my favorite funny writers, a fellow by the name of E. B. White, put it best in the introduction to his A Subtreasury of American Humor. “The world likes humor,” wrote E. B., “but treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts. It feels that if a thing is funny it can be presumed to be something less than great, because if it were truly great it would be wholly serious.”

  And it’s interesting to note that Mr. White was decorated with a Newbery Honor laurel for his book Charlotte’s Web but received only Brussels sprouts for his much funnier and much more insightful Is Sex Necessary?: Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do.

  But don’t take my word for it. I’ll quote a passage from each book. Then you decide for yourself.

  From Charlotte’s Web, chapter three:

  The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure.

  From Is Sex Necessary?, chapter four:

  The sexual revolution began with Man’s discovery that he was not attractive to Woman, as such. The lion had his mane, the peacock his gorgeous plumage, but Man found himself in a three-button sack suit. His masculine appearance not only failed to excite Woman, but in many cases it only served to bore her. The result was that Man found it necessary to develop attractive personal traits to offset his dull appearance. He learned to say funny things. He learned to smoke, and blow smoke rings. He learned to earn money. This would have been a solution to his difficulty, but in the course of making himself attractive to Woman by developing himself mentally, he inadvertently became so intelligent an animal that he saw how comical the whole situation was.

  Now I ask you — which passage is funnier? Which passage has more insight into the human condition? I rest my case.

  We could delve deeper into our collective psyche and debate further the relative merits of comedy and tragedy, but I say we just give E. B. White another quote and get on with the promised business of answering the question, What’s so funny, Mr. Scieszka?

  Once again, from E. B. White’s introduction to his Subtreasury of American Humor (and no, that’s not the only funny book I have. It just seemed like the quotes from this one would be more literary and seemly than quotes from Jon Stewart’s Naked Pictures of Famous People or Will Cuppy’s How to Attract the Wombat):

  Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

  Which is exactly why schools and tea
chers are not so keen on humor as a legitimate form of writing — it’s so difficult to dissect. Teachers love to dig into tragedies and problem fiction, in part because they can be explained and illuminated by discussion.

  We can talk about why Charlotte has to die.

  We can discuss why Travis has to shoot his beloved dog, Old Yeller.

  We can analyze why the boys behave the way they do in Lord of the Flies.

  We can explain why we cry when Jesse loses his friend Leslie in Bridge to Terabithia.

  But it’s much more difficult to explain or discuss what’s so funny about anything. The very nature of humor works against explanation. In many cases, the old adage is true — you either “get it” or you don’t.

  I can only imagine myself deconstructing my fifth-grade religion class: “Well, sister, the bell ringer is funny because the joke uses the literal meaning of ‘ringing a bell’ instead of the meaning to ‘jog the memory.’ And then the image of the guy bonking his face on the bell is . . . well . . . funny. And the other funny part is that you don’t understand this until all at once at the end when you hear the punch line.”

  How’s that for killing the humor and dragging its innards out all over the place?

  All right. No more joking around. I better get down to business. I’m looking for laurels here, not Brussels sprouts. Let’s get started dragging the frog’s innards out for examination and answering the question of what’s so funny.

  Growing up with five brothers and no sisters is funny. I think that’s where I first got started on this funny business. In fact, I know that’s where I got started. Growing up in that group, you either laughed . . . or died.