Australian Children’s Literature
EDU 21ACL
Week 2 – Lecture 2
Choices in
Children’s
Humour
© La Trobe University, David Beagley 2006
References
• Edwards, H. (1995) Non-Sense and the recycling of
Humour. Literature Base. 6(3) 27-30
• McSkimmimg, G (1995) More than just jokes. Scan. 14(1)
6-10
• Munde, G (1997) What are you laughing at? Differences in
children’s and adults’ humorous book selections for
children. Children’s Literature in Education. 28(4) 219-233
• http://www.latrobe.edu.au/childlit/awards.htm
• http://www.andygriffiths.com.au
• http://www.e-magination.org/
Writing tips from Andy Griffiths
25. Tim Winton once said that the difficult thing about
writing for children is that you’re writing in triangles:
at one point of the triangle is you. At another point is
your audience. And at another point are the
gatekeepers (adults, reviewers, teachers, parents,
librarians etc.) the art of successful children’s
writing is in pleasing (or at least appeasing) all three
points: yourself, your audience and your gatekeepers.
Not easy, but it is possible!
The point being …
Gate keepers - adult mediators
• Are they judging from a child’s point of view or from
the adult point of view that they feel children ought
to fit?
Audience reaction and reception
• Are social development, literary quality and popular
humour mutually incompatible?
More writing tips from Andy Griffiths
26. To be a successful children’s writer you will need to get in
touch with your inner child, but don’t make the mistake of
thinking that inner children are all sweetness and light. They can
be argumentative, unreasonable, uncontrollable and highly
irritating. You will need to embrace these qualities of your child
as well. Oh, and when you’re writing a story, get rid of the adults
asap...invoke the forces of anarchy, chaos, silliness, danger and
magic. Watch truckloads of old comedy films. Take notes. Read
JD Salinger, Dr Suess, Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, Grimm’s fairy
tales, AA Milne and Enid Blyton. Take notes. Remember TS Eliot:
It is just the literature that we read for ‘amusement’ or ‘purely
for pleasure’ that may have the greatest and least suspected
influence upon us.
So?
• Children are children
• They are not adults
• While they may be on the way to becoming adults
they do not have:
– The background knowledge that puts something in its social
context
– The intellectual skills to complete complex analytical
processes (if you believe Piaget)
– The information or experience to make value judgements
about unfamiliar situations
• But they are exploring the world with which adults
surround them and making their own sense of it
Yet more writing advice from Andy
27. (Regarding bad book reviews) Be aware that the reviewer is
probably going to be revealing more about themselves than about
your book. We often have strong reactions to people (or
objects) who display qualities that we have disowned or
repressed in ourselves. Books dealing in taboo subjects (e.g. the
gross and disgusting) often provoke strong responses – generally
positive among kids, often negative amongst adults (at least
initially). I suspect that this is because adults, in order to
become adults (i.e. at least to fit their idea of what being adult
is), feel they need to distance themselves from the qualities of
children, one of these qualities being a quite natural fascination
and amusement with the gross and disgusting. As a result of
disowning their own fascination with the gross and disgusting,
they can’t stand to see other people being fascinated and
amused by the gross and disgusting and they tend to come down
very hard.
Of course, on the other hand, your bad review could be due to the
fact that your book sucks.
Winning awards
Awards judged by children:
• YABBA (Victoria)
• BILBY, COOL, CROW/KANGA, CYBER, KOALA, KROC,
WAYRBA
Awards judged by adults:
• CBC BotY
• Various Premier’s awards - Vic, NSW. Qld, WA
• Where are the humorous books? Where are the
earnest books?
Popularity of humour
Research by Brownscombe (Melb Uni 2000)
Humour is
• most popular genre chosen by children to read
• Genre least mentioned in literary criticism
• Often underestimated partly because of the
assumption: if a text is humorous, it is lightweight
and therefore not worth examining
Popularity of humour
Brownscombe (examining Paul Jennings) defined his
style of humour as:
• Cathartic
• Taking children into situations that they may find
embarrassing or scary
• Allowing the reader to laugh along with (not at) main
character
• Giving children power over their fears by laughing at
them
Literary vs popular books
• Literary criticism offers tools to differentiate
between authors, styles and individual texts
• It raises the consciousness of quality among readers
• Thus, it emphasises discrimination by readers
• Literary books are often ones which children would
not necessarily read en masse without intervention
from a mediating adult
• They can be the ones which take a reader out beyond
what they know to new places, understandings and
levels of development or maturity.
Criteria for judging humorous books
• What makes the story funny?
e.g. situation, characters, storyline, language …
• Into which of the major categories does it fall?
e.g. physical, visual, verbal, situational, gross …
• What does the reader need in order to “get” the
humour?
e.g.
– knowledge of types of language use (puns, irony …)
– knowledge of a particular situation
– knowledge of types of characters
– knowledge of emotions or reactions
– objectivity
Criteria for judging humorous books
• What is left to enjoy if the humour is not fully
understood?
e.g.
– Interesting plot
– Interesting characters
– Illustrations
– Enjoyment of social interaction - group aspect of reading or
sharing the joke