This Guest Post by Carolyn Hoffert is packed with great ideas and examples to bring out the humor in your children’s book. Carolyn is a writer and blogger at vanillagrass.com, a wonderful resource for authors at every level of their craft. We’re excited to have Carolyn share her wit and wisdom with you here at Chicken Scratch!
There’s nothing better than pulling off a solid joke and getting a child to laugh so much they double over. It’s the kind of laugh that you rarely see in adults but which comes freely when kids think you’re unequivocally hilarious.
And while a good chuckle earned in-person can carry you for miles on a kids-think-I’m-super-cool high, getting kids to laugh because of something you wrote is an accomplishment of great proportion.
But how do you pull it off? How do you get young readers to crack up, circle those lines in your book with a yellow highlighter, and then share it with their friends, parents, and dog?
Below are some simple tricks you can use to get the chuckles you’re looking for.
4 Tips for Tickling Childhood Funny Bones
Silly Situations
While slap-stick humor has largely fallen out of vogue for adults (think I Love Lucy and The Three Stooges), it is still a prime commodity in the middle-grade and children’s markets.
Now, I’m not saying your characters have to walk around thwacking each other in the back of each other’s heads or failing spectacularly in a chocolate factory, but striving to create situations that are utterly ridiculous can go a long way to bringing on the sillies. Just make sure you use them wisely, either as a device to advance the plot or to give the reader a chance to step back, breathe, and laugh a little after some heavy life stuff.
I still remember reading Ramona’s World by Beverly Cleary when I was young and laughing for days when Ramona imagines a cake made entirely of whipped cream blowing away in the wind as children frolicked beneath to catch a taste. And I still remember it today even though it’s just a bunch of silliness. Talk about influence.
And don’t think that you can’t throw in some silly situations if you’re writing a more serious novel, like historical fiction. Jennifer Nielsen is a great example of this in her novel, Words on Fire. When I noticed an eleven-year-old girl in my family’s carpool had just finished it, I asked her favorite part in hopes of sussing out middle-grade literary secrets. Without a moment of hesitation, she declared with a grin that her favorite part was the silly scene where Audra, the main character, has to get from one end of the street to another without anyone asking about a freshly baked, delicious confectionary she carried with her.
In short, even a little bit of playfulness in your character’s journey can make a huge difference in how young readers remember your book, so bring on the impossibly silly situations.
Wonky Word-Choice
Children are in the middle of word discovery. Every day they are hearing words they’ve never heard before and putting them together in their minds, making associations, and discovering how unabashedly delightful some words are simply to hear.
Add to that word combinations, and you have a tool rife with possibilities for making young readers giggle.
For an extremely obvious and highly successful option, take a look at B.J. Novak’s The Book With No Pictures. The whole concept of the book relies on two things: (Tip #1) silly situations, and (Tip #2) wonky word-choice.
Kids love sounds. They love others looking silly. And that’s exactly what Novak accomplishes. But you don’t have to write a whole children’s book focused solely on those concepts to use this concept with success.
Think of all the children’s books that rhyme. They are primarily built on writing something that sounds a particular way. Or even books like Skippyjon Jones by Judith Byron Schachner. The name alone of the adorable main character kitty has my three-year-old skipping around babbling his name with glee.
And they don’t even have to be inherently silly words. In Steven Bohl’s middle-grade novel, Jed and the Junkyard War, Bohl makes fantastic use of the word perspicacious. A word I guarantee most children have never heard before. A BIG word, too, by most standards. But he uses it in such a funny, light-hearted way that young readers are able to learn what it means AND have a delightfully silly read.
Word choice. Think about it.
Clever Comparisons
I’m probably preaching to the proverbial choir here, but the only things that are funny to children… are the things that are funny to them. If you want to get giggles from young readers, you have to squat down to their level and think as they do.
This can be harder than it looks. But, if you do it right, the dividends will be a litany of laughter as children tell all their friends to go read your book.
And one of the best ways to do this is by making astute, children-minded comparisons. Note: this is also a prime tool for creating a fantastic character-voice and for world-building. What’s not to love?
A heavy-handed, but heart-warming example can be found in Barbara M. Joosse’s Mama, Do You Love Me? In this sweet tale, a little girl proposes an array of naughty situations (see Tip #1) to see if her mother would love her anyway. Her mother responds at one point by saying she’ll love the girl “until the umiak flies into the darkness until the stars turn to fish in the sky and the puffin howls at the moon.”
Such comparisons make me feel all warm and squishy inside as I read the book to my kids, but it makes them giggle. Stars into fish? My 3-year-old laughs. That’s crazy.
So next time you’re about to describe something mundane in your book, consider turning it into a bit of wonder and describing it as a child might or in a way they never would. You’ll not only form a stronger connection with your reader but may also get a few laughs.
Chummy Chapter-Headings
Yes, humor in a novel can be that simple. And this is one I learned the hard way after a focus group of children (okay, carpool…) read a middle-grade novel I wrote and gave me feedback. The number one complaint? The titles of your chapters are boring!
Rude. And fantastically helpful. As an adult, I don’t even glance at the chapter headings unless I’m reading a book with multiple points of view. But children care about it. My eleven-year-old informed me that when she cracks open a book to see if she wants to read it for the first time, she goes straight to the table of contents, not the first page. Why? To see how funny it might be based on chapter headings.
Simple. And super important.
And there you have it. Four not-so-secret tips you can use to create more humor in your children’s and middle-grade books. Follow these tips, and your books will have a shot at standing the test of time, much like a certain memory of whipped cream wafting through the air.
Carolyn Hoffert
An avid nurturer of plants and plots, Carolyn leans toward light science-fiction and twisty plots and has written middle-grade, young adult, and adult novels, including a published ghost-written romance novel that may or may not have involved motorcycle gangs. She has also done work as an editor, has a degree in English Literature from Brigham Young University, and is the Co-CEO and frequent contributor to the writing resource blog, Vanilla Grass.
To keep up with Carolyn’s sporadic bursts of awkward humor, micro-fiction, and poetry, follow her on Twitter: @WritingHoffert, email her at carolyn@vanillagrass.com, or check out their blog at https://vanillagrass.com to keep up with her latest musings on the written word.