From: kbday at hcm.vnn.vn <kbday>
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 18:37:12 -0500

So many of my favorite humorous books have already been covered in this discussion (e.g., HARRIS AND ME, THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER, MRS. PIGGLE-WIGGLE, THE EXILES, James Marshall, Terry Pratchett, Polly Horvath, Morris Gleitzman, ... ). So I was scanning my shelves to see what books haven't been mentioned yet.

One picture book I highly recommend with both an outrageous and a subtle humor (which my children only appreciated at about age 5) is HOW TOM BEAT CAPTAIN NAJORK AND HIS HIRED SPORTSMEN by Russell Hoban, illustr. by Quentin Blake. (There's a sequel which is almost as good.)

I think the duality of text/illustrations in picture books offers more opportunities for humor -- increasing the number of contenders. Funny picture books could be a separate discussion topic in itself. So let me move on to novels, biographies, etc. -- ones which rely primarily on text.

But before I do, I have to put in a plug for an illustrated book where the drawings are crucial and referred to in the text (like THE LITTLE PRINCE where you have to be able to see the "hat") -- that Australian "classic" by Norman Lindsay, THE MAGIC PUDDING: The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum
(1918). Perhaps one of our Australian members can give it a little write-up, but all I can say is I started reading for historical reasons -- and ended up laughing out loud and thoroughly enjoying myself.

Another classic humorist (American, so probably very well known to all of you) is James Thurber. I've had great success reading his stories aloud to my family. Try "The Night the Bed Fell" or "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife" or "The Unicorn in the Garden" . You do have to pre-read them in order to find one appropriate to your audience. (For example, I find "The Civil War Phone-Number Association" hysterical, but my husband and kids protested it was boring. But then I come from Rudy Vallee's hometown
(Westbrook, Maine) and so was thrilled to read a story which opens with a quote from him...)

Don't miss Thurber's "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" (a perfect short companion to Terry Pratchett's WYRD SISTERS).

Another theoretically adult book, but one which makes a perfect read aloud
-- with plenty of humor -- for middle-school children is NEVER CRY WOLF by Farley Mowat. (Forget the Disney movie they made of it -- keep alive your own mental images of Mowat marking his territory around his tent and of him testing the hypothesis that the wolves were surviving on a diet of mice...)

When I was 10 or 11 and had read everything in the children's section of the library, my mother nudged me temporarily over into biography and autobiography in the hopes of delaying my entry into adult novels. Consequently I discovered I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS (which has some very humorous scenes in it), the wholesome fun of CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, and the genre of self?precating housewife tales (e.g., Jean Kerr's PLEASE DON'T EAT THE DAISIES and THE EGG AND I (by Betty MacDonald who also wrote Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle) -- which I happily laughed through at the time. (Later, as an ardent 18-year-old feminist, I was horrified/fascinated to read Kate Millet's deconstruction of those same books in SEXUAL POLITICS.)

Tales of eccentric geniuses are often humorous. One I read when young (and one my sons are reading now with great enjoyment) is A GENIUS IN THE FAMILY
-- a slim Dover reprint, first published in 1936 -- by Hiram Percy Maxim, son of the inventor Sir Hiram Maxim (infamously known as the inventor of the Maxim gun, one of the first machine guns, but also of many other things
(e.g., he and Edison were neck-in-neck for the incandescent lightbulb patent, and he also experimented with early flight. It's a memoir of his eccentric father and of the author's childhood in New Jersey/New York in the 1870's -- a string of funny scenes and anecdotes, many of which could be read separately.

To switch to a contemporary book, the one that guests of all ages keep trying to steal, after innocently picking it up on my coffee table and reading pages at random, is LETTERS FROM A NUT (1997) by Ted L. Nancy (with
"Introduction by Jerry Seinfeld" prominently printed on the cover -- which probably helps attract their attention). It was something I happened to buy through the Scholastic Tab book club. This guy -- Ted L. Nancy -- whoever he is -- writes letters to all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons and the book contains his letters and the replies he gets. They range from him trying to donate to the National Baseball Hall of Fame a bag of toenail clippings supposedly cut from the feet of Mickey Mantle, to him asking hotels how they can accommodate his particular needs (like the fact that he resembles Abraham Lincoln and wants to ensure that he won't be mobbed by autograph hounds). There are several sequels. Silly humor....

AQUILA (1997) by Andrew Norriss is an award-winning UK novel (it was made into a TV show, I think) about two middle-school, bottom-of-the-class boys who discover a magic flying Roman vehicle in a cave while out on a school field trip. Their desire to keep it a secret and to figure out how it works leads to hilarious situations. For example, they have to surreptitiously try to bone up on their math and physics in order to fly it properly -- and then they need to learn some Latin, as that is the only language the vehicle understands. All of which makes their teachers highly suspicious -- as they are widely known to be barely numerate and literate. I've used this book with 5th - 7th graders with great success.

Another British novel I highly recommend -- comic from start to finish -- is THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF ADELAIDE HARRIS by Leon Garfield (1971). More of a challenging read -- I wouldn't give it to 5th or 6th graders, unless they were Victorian historical fiction fans -- but well worth it. Two schoolboys decide to use one of their infant sisters to test out the Spartan tradition of leaving infants exposed on a hillside overnight. Of course, while the baby Adelaide is on the hillside, someone comes along and rescues her -- but the boys don't know who. So they go out and find a gypsy baby to fill the cradle with, hoping the mother won't notice the change. And the complications just continue.

When my 11-year-old daughter was recently enjoying THE PRINCESS DIARIES, I took out the Adrian Mole books by Sue Townsend for my 13-year-old boys -- THE SECRET DIARY OF ADRIAN MOLE, AGED 13 3/4 and THE GROWING PAINS OF ADRIAN MOLE. I only had to read aloud a few pages in the living room before they were fighting over who could read it to themselves in bed that night. A few years ago I enjoyed one of the later volumes in the series: ADRIAN MOLE: THE CAPPUCCINO YEARS.

The person who wrote in about struggling to crack the code of her father's collections of POGO reminded me of my boys attempting to "get" every Far Side cartoon, not wanting to ask me to enlighten them until they'd really stretched their own brains. They seemed to have chosen the Far Side as the successor to their obsession with Calvin and Hobbes. I have wonderful memories of Mad Magazine from my own youth and am hoping to come across an old pile of them somewhere in order to re-test their humor value -- on myself and my kids.

I recently dug out all my Kurt Vonnegut novels (from my youth in the 70's) as I'd like to refresh my thoughts on him. I remember his books as being funny, and I wonder how they/I have aged....

For (outrageous) adult humor -- there's always Tom Sharpe. I'm sure there's nothing in his books that would shock the today's Young Adult
(though I haven't re-read any of his books with that age group in mind). The good thing about him is that he's written quite a few, so if you like that sort of humor, there's always another book waiting. (BLOTT ON THE LANDSCAPE, WILT, etc.)

Sorry for the length of this posting -- I obviously enjoyed remembering all these funny books....

-- Katie Day
Received on Thu 16 May 2002 06:37:12 PM CDT