Comedy in Children's Literature: An Overview

Most of the literature that children read today might be called comic. Children's books tend to move from the presentation of problems to a satisfying resolution in what usually turns out to be a well-made, comfortable world.¹ Historians of children's literature point out that this was not always the case, that much early writing for children was cautionary, written to protect them from their own frailty and frivolity, to educate them, and to prepare them for a life fraught with hardship. Medieval and Renaissance children may have managed to entertain themselves with adult romances, but what was written for them was almost invariably didactic.² The change in attitude that gradually encouraged children's writers to entertain, and that spurred the enormous output of fine children's literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, can be traced to the Romantics—to Rousseau, Blake, and Wordsworth who saw children as innocents, enjoying a special state that should be treasured. Rousseau's own novel Emile may be just as didactic as some of the books he objected to, but his thinking fostered the progressive approaches that are now standard in children's literature.

However, within the past fifteen or twenty years, the trend has shifted somewhat. Still informed by a romantic view of children, writers have begun to acknowledge that the world is at times undeniably cruel, and that children are vulnerable to and may even participate in the cruelty. Their innocence is still recognized; it is simply no longer idealized. And today's writers are particularly drawn to humor as an effective mode to dramatize this new attitude; perhaps, like tellers of folk tales, they use it to lighten the burden and provide hope, as they recount their stories.

The essays in this volume are concerned with the various types of comedy in children's literature and with the persistent question: what does its audience perceive? Like adult comedy, comedy in children's literature includes farce, high comedy, and satire, each presenting the writer and critic with problems: the writer creates what he or she must; the critic admires or disparages the results; but where does the child fit in?

In this critical area, farce presents the fewest problems. Farce exists most simply and broadly in folk tales, particularly those involving fools or numskulls. These figures appear incapable of functioning at a level that we (and the child) consider normal. Because of their literal-minded approach to everyday situations, they fail to solve even the simplest of problems. Certain of these stories may function as cautionary tales by making the numskull appear so unappealing and ridiculous that children cannot identify. They will instead align themselves with the more conservative elements of society and laugh, along with them, at the numskull. And yet many of these numskulls survive and often succeed in attaining a goal where the more promising characters in the tale fail. Their simple approach to life is close to the child's. In "Jack and the Beanstalk," for example, Jack makes the kind of mistake a child might make—he chooses the playful and imaginative over the practical—and he is victorious. In his foolishness, Jack touches upon that fear of ridicule and laughter in all of us; by triumphing, he shows the child that it is all right to be foolish, that perhaps, as Jurich shows in her article, it may be the most heroic role possible. The literary influence of this archetype in children's literature is pervasive. We see traces of it in Lobel's Toad, Seuss's elephant Horton, Milne's Winnie the Pooh, and White's pig Wilbur. They all tell the child the same thing: that blunders lead not to irreparable harm but simply to embarrassment, and at best to growth and self-knowledge.

A more sophisticated form of farce or low comedy, one which has become increasingly popular in recent years, is what R. A. Siegel calls the comic-grotesque. He points out that its origins in adult literature go back to Rabelais. But it is only in the...