When I’m thinking about being funny or having a book that has humor in it for me it’s sort of second nature because I really see the world that way. I really look for the humor in a lot of situations and I feel like it’s where a lot of my joy comes from. And so when I’m telling a story I have a very hard time looking at it straight on. I’m the kid who couldn’t draw a straight line, I had to always put lots of curlicues and lots of silliness into it.
So when I tell a story that’s always my way in and what I like about that is I can often connect to the humor that kids have, kids have such a natural gift for laughing and for reacting to what’s funny. So when I write and try to write what’s funny I try to share it to kids on the way to make sure that I’m connecting to them and we’re both on the same page about what’s funny and what isn’t, and the timing that’s involved in the humor because I think that’s really key.
The humor in my books ranges from the very slapsticky obviously end would be the Chicken Butt books, Chicken Butt and Chicken Butt is Back which are both told in dialogue between a mischievous kid and a long suffering parent. And so the timing was very key in terms of the back and forth of the humor because the kid is essentially roping the parent into telling jokes and then continuing to build on that and there had to be a real pattern that was established that was different than a constant equal back and forth.
There had to be kind of crescendos and then laughter and then pulling back and moments when the parent tries to put their foot down and then the kid finds a way around. So the whole pattern of that humor was sort of organic, it didn’t have a measure pace like a rhyming piece with poetry. And so it was very important for me to read that book aloud with children to find out whether the laughter of it and the builds of it were in the right places.
Then you look at a book, Vintage Veronica which is written for an older audience and the humor is much more sarcastic, much more knowing, much more of kids talking amongst themselves and poking fun at something and then building on that humor sometimes at someone’s expense and then the consequences of that. So I feel like the humor really has to correspond to the age and the emotional place that the kids who read it are in.
