{"id":27918,"date":"2018-12-07T08:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-12-07T13:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=27918"},"modified":"2018-12-07T08:00:35","modified_gmt":"2018-12-07T13:00:35","slug":"in-hopes-that-hilarity-soon-will-ensue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=27918","title":{"rendered":"In Hopes That Hilarity Soon Will Ensue"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the holiday season arrives, I take a moment to refresh my mental arsenal of go-to funny picture books, because at this time of year in our store, funny stories simply fly. We certainly sell plenty of luminous, moving, and heartfelt picture books in December, but invariably the bestselling picture book from our holiday catalog each year has been funny\u2014books like The Bad Seed<\/em>, Lion Lessons, The Princess and the Pony, Unicorn Thinks He\u2019s Pretty Great, <\/em>or Ni<\/em>\u00f1<\/em>o Wrestles the World.<\/em> And of course there\u2019s always and forever Bark, George. <\/em>Funny books often offer irresistible, bite-sized \u201chooks,\u201d and they\u2019re a safe bet with a broad swath of kids. I totally get it. Unlike my oldest son who has always wanted to listen to any book someone was willing to read him, my youngest honestly tends to wander off part of the way through unless something captivates him early on with a dramatic twist, interactive element, or hilarious surprise.
\nTaking a story from clever and amusing to guffaw-inducing hilarious in 32 or 40 pages is not an easy task, though. Kids love surprises,\u00a0but they also love surprises that they can almost\u2014but not exactly\u2014predict. After all, who doesn\u2019t like being in on the joke?
\nInterrupting Chicken and The Elephant of Surprise <\/em>has to be a candidate for funniest read-aloud based on its brilliantly abrupt tonal shifts. How can you not laugh with escalating hilarity each time the elephant pops his exuberant blue head into a fairy tale to\u00a0 gleefully make everything about itself? All the elephant\u2019s disruptions are pretty terrific, but the \u201celephant legs\u201d twist to The<\/em> Little Mermaid<\/em>\u00a0never gets less funny to me, no matter how many times I read it.
\nMax the Brave<\/em> isn\u2019t new. But it came out in board book last year, and it has been a perfect match of story and format. You see, Max is an adorable kitten with an adorable pink bow. Until SURPRISE!, the elephant snatches it off his neck and tramples it. Oh wait, wrong story. The KITTEN stomps the bow into tatters and determines to prove his mettle in a seriously silly montage of mistaken identity moments culminating in an ill-advised romp on a monster\u2019s head. (\u201cJumping on a monster\u2019s head isn\u2019t a good idea,\u201d as my four-year-old reminds me every time we hit that page).
\nAnd for kids who want to get in on the action and get their friends and families rolling in the aisle, Wee Hee Hee <\/em>from Wee Society offers kids good-natured and easy to remember jokes in a boldly colorful, oversized package. I actually tested this out with my kids, and the best thing about it is that my first grader initially scoffed at the whole thing, before realizing that he just wasn\u2019t getting <\/em>most of the jokes. It not only helps kids see how jokes are structured on a basic level, it also eases them into the world of wordplay in ways that definitely stretched my six-year-old\u2019s conception of what language can do. Now he nonstop cracks himself up trying to make up his own. (\u201cWhat is cheese that\u2019s also a stick? A cheese stick!\u201d)
\nAlthough it won\u2019t help for the holidays, I have to add that if you\u2019re looking for a killer laugh line, get your hands on a copy of How to Walk an Ant <\/em>by Cindy Derby (Roaring Brook Press, March 2019). \u201cWanna get some ice cream then have a funeral?\u201d was the best one-liner I read all season. I won\u2019t say much more about that, though, because you should really just read it for yourself. Trust me!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A collection of laugh-out-loud picture books, to sell for the holidays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}