“And Don’t Forget to Vote!”: Political Parodies of Popular Picture Books and the New American Broadside

In 2008, at the end of the most controversial presidencies in American history, Bruce Kluger and David Slavin released Young Dick Cheney: Great American. A faux-juvenile biography about the outgoing vice president, the narrative “recounts Young Dick Cheney’s youthful lust for guns, oil, and the girl of his dreams” (publisher’s summary).

Kluger and Slavin were not the only individuals to use the format of a children’s text to offer political satire for adult readers. In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, many other literary styles that were traditionally associated with narratives for young people were being conscripted for a similar purpose, giving rise to a lively new sub-genre. In 2004, for example, Patrick Regan released Punch Out the President (and Pals!): A Paper Doll Book Starring W. and Friends. Meanwhile, Karen Ocker and Joley Wood drew on the format of a coloring book for their text The George W. Bush Coloring Book (2004). The text is comprised of images of the newly elected president with captions taken from his reallife remarks, such as “It’s amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity and incumbency” and “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully” (n. pag.).

Of all the genres of children’s literature that have been appropriated for adult-audience political satire in the new millennium, picture books have been by far the most common. In 2004, Julie Marcus and Susan Carp inaugurated this trend with the release of their bipartisan narrative, Pat the Politician. A retelling of Dorothy Kunhardt’s classic interactive text Pat the Bunny (1940), the book not only presented characters Paul and Judy as voting-age adults, but it also, as the subtitle indicated, permitted its audience to “pull and poke” their favorite politicians.¹ On one page, for instance, readers can lift a flap to look inside George W. Bush’s head, only to see a large black empty space. Meanwhile, in another scenario, they are invited to feel Bill Clinton’s briefs—and not just his legal ones.²

This essay spotlights four of the most commercially successful and critically discussed adult-audience political parodies of popular picture books that have been released in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Two of these texts emanate from the political left: Goodnight Bush (2008) and Don’t Let the Republications Drive the Bus! (2012), both by Erich Origen and Gan Golan. Conversely, two are affiliated with the political right: The Cat and the Mitt (2012) by Dr. Truth and Dr. Paul (2011) by Chris Ouellette. These narratives parody some of the most popular and beloved picture books: Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (1947), Mo Willems’s Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (2003), Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (1957), and Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham (1960), respectively. But, in the pages that follow, I make a case that their true literary, ideological, and cultural kinship is with a far different genre: the broadside. Emerging in England in the fifteenth century and experiencing their heyday in the United States during the Federalist period, these single-sheet missives were among the most ubiquitous and efficacious forms of print communication. Posted in public places or sold cheaply by street hawkers and merchants, broadsides served a wide array of purposes, ranging from disseminating information about new laws, taxes or military campaigns to publishing advertisements about local events, the lyrics to the latest popular verse ballad, or the last speech of a condemned criminal. In both Great Britain and the United States, one common and important social function that broadsides performed was a populist forum for the discussion of pressing sociopolitical topics. As Angela McShane has written, these broadsides offered “praise and blame, news and debate” that were conveyed as “panegyrics, satires, libels, and prose polemics” (342). Employed in the service of both progressive and conservative causes, their main goal was “to manipulate political opinion” (McShane 342). Consequently, “Broadside literature was a primary vehicle for those...