Young Adult Literature: Humor

Titles Discussed

Beauty Queens (2011) by Libba Bray

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2012) by Jesse Andrews

Swim the Fly (2009) by Don Calame

Genre Overview

People of all ages, at all times, and in all places enjoy laughing. This fact was discovered early in human history, and writers began taking advantage of that knowledge more than three thousand years ago. The ancient Greek poet Homer included comic passages in his Iliad and Odyssey (seventh century Before the Common Era [BCE])to lighten the dramatic tension in his epics; in the fifth century BCE, the playwright Aristophanes produced such bawdy lampoons of human nature as The Clouds and Lysistrata (421-416 BCE), and ancient Roman playwrights, such as Plautus and Terence, continued the humorous tradition with theatrical farces.

In medieval Europe, works such as Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century), and François Rabelais's Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (ca. 1532–64) kept audiences in stitches. During the Renaissance, English playwright William Shakespeare made skillful use of puns, inside jokes, humorous devices such as mistaken identity, and comical figures such as Sir John Falstaff and various laughter-inducing fools and jesters, both liberally in such comedies as Love's Labour's Lost (ca. 1597) and All's Well That Ends Well (ca. 1604–5) and in smaller doses to leaven his more serious tragedies and history plays, such as Hamlet (ca. 1599–1601), King Lear (ca. 1606), and Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 (ca. 1596–99). During the eighteenth century, comic and satirical authors such as Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels, 1726), Voltaire (Candide, 1759), and Henry Fielding (Tom Jones, 1749) paved the way for later humorous works such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836–37).

In the United States, nineteenth-century author Mark Twain exercised significant and long-lasting influence on written and performed comedic works. The advent of newspaper comic strips in the late nineteenth century helped spread visual humor throughout the country. In the early twentieth century, radio ruled, giving birth to the sitcom, before television became the dominant medium in the 1950s.

Humor has long been influential in children's and young adult literature. Including funny scenes and comical characters helps account for the enduring popularity of such early twentieth-century works as L. Frank Baum's Oz series (1900–1920) and A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Comical descriptions, offbeat protagonists, humorous dialogue, creative use of linguistic techniques, and outrageous, unpredictable plots are prominent in contemporary young adult fiction, where they serve to soften the sharp edges of such serious real-life issues as sexual attraction, drug abuse, dysfunctional families, depression, and the possibility of early death. Humor, employed naturally and realistically, helps motivate adolescents to read, and the potential for laughter helps the reader identify intimately with the characters when they can share a sense of humor. Modern novels, such as Don Calame's Swim the Fly (2009), Libba Bray's Beauty Queens (2011), and Jesse Andrews's Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2012), employ a variety of techniques to elicit laughter while addressing traditionally sober topics, such as competition, survival, romance, and death.

Works

Swim the Fly, by Don Calame, deals humorously with the qualities of friendship and the resiliency of youth while underlining the importance of making worthwhile choices. Longtime friends Matt, Cooper, and Sean set a goal each summer; at age fifteen, they vow to see “a real, live naked girl” and set their sights on the buxom Mandy Reagan. The boys are members of a swimming team of perennial losers led by uninspiring, lumpy coach Ms. Luntz. To impress their new team member, attractive backstroker Kelly West, Matt volunteers to replace the team's injured butterfly specialist and “swim the fly.” He has no upper-body strength, likening his attempts at the stroke to “a palsied whippet struggling for its life.” Matt will compete against champion butterflier Tony “The Gorilla” Grillo, whom Kelly has dated.

Sean hatches a plan to see Mandy naked. The boys use Sean's twin sister Cathy's clothes and makeup to dress like girls and enter the women's locker room at the community center where Mandy works out. The plan goes awry after Matt, having ingested a laxative that he mistook for protein powder, experiences a comically explosive reaction in the women's locker room.

At the first swim meet, Sean gets Matt out of the competition by stuffing himself with junk food and vomiting into the pool. At night, Matt sneaks into a country-club pool to practice swimming. He runs into European martinet Ulf, who forces Matt into his grueling advanced lifesaving class and teaches him the rudiments of the butterfly stroke. Still unprepared, Matt ducks out of the next meet by faking appendicitis. A second attempt by the boys to glimpse Mandy naked at a party goes wrong when they are discovered spying from a bedroom closet and chased in a slapstick-like sequence. They do eventually see a naked woman at a nudist beach: flabby Ms. Luntz, a sight that the boys find eye-gougingly horrible.

Over time, Matt learns that Kelly is shallow—she cannot even remember his name, referring to him instead as “Mark”—and has returned to dating Tony. Matt gravitates towards Kelly's redheaded friend Valerie, who is smart, pretty, and funny and likes him enough to kiss him and hold his hand.

Ultimately, Matt cannot avoid competing and is entered in the hundred-yard butterfly championships, facing off against chiseled Tony and chubby swimmer Ernie. Despite finishing with the extremely slow time of three minutes and forty-six seconds, Matt wins the race—because Cooper sabotaged Tony's Speedo, causing it to fall apart and resulting in Tony's disqualification.

Calame's semi-autobiographical debut novel, Swim the Fly, offers tender moments between its farcical episodes. The book is aided considerably by comical subplots involving secondary characters, such as Matt's love-struck grandfather, who keeps trying to connect romantically with a widowed neighbor.

Where Swim the Fly is a light-hearted farce, Libba Bray's Beauty Queens is a fierce satire. The novel takes aim at multiple targets, especially reality television, corporate conglomerates, advertising, and beauty pageants. Beauty Queens opens with a plane carrying fifty girls, contestants for the annual Miss Teen Dream pageant, crashing on a remote tropical island, a scene that echoes such novels as William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) and such television shows as Survivor (2000–) and Lost (2004–10). All the adults—pilots, chaperones, photographers—are killed, along with most of the contestants. The thirteen teenage survivors, including unique characters, such as a member of a popular boy band disguised as a girl who would like to complete his gender transition through surgery, must overcome rivalries and work together to fend for themselves until help arrives.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the teens, a military compound is hidden underground on the island, and a clandestine operation is in the works. The company that sponsors the beauty pageant, referred to throughout as simply “The Corporation,” wants to deal arms to MoMo “The Peacock” ChaCha, an Idi Amin–like dictator with a penchant for Elvis, in exchange for permission to expand its business into the Republic of ChaCha. It is feared the presence of the teens will quash the arms deal, so Ladybird Hope, former Miss Teen Dream–turned–Corporation executive with aspirations of becoming the President of the United States, announces on television that the girls have all perished.

The plot is further complicated when a reproduction pirate ship, crewed by Sinjin St. Sinjin and the cast of the popular television show Captains Bodacious, runs aground on the island. Relationships immediately form between the boys and the girls. As the young adults slowly become more aware of what is transpiring on the island, they bond to foil the nefarious scheme, bringing down the treacherous Ladybird and thwarting the sinister Corporation.

Beauty Queens is structured like a collision between two types of television programs, with the survivors' story representing reality television and the Corporation's schemes representing scripted shows. The novel heavily borrows and then reworks numerous adventure clichés; the island paradise contains perils, such as giant snakes, a volcano, quicksand, and vegetation that causes hallucinations when ingested. Short narrative scenes are frequently interrupted by commercials for a range of Corporation products, including the Git R Done 447 handgun and lip-hair remover Lady 'Stache Off, which also serve as humorous plot devices. Many promotions and insertions, such as the “Miss Teen Dream Fun Facts Pages,” highlight each contestant and excerpts from television shows. Humorous footnotes explain the mostly invented cultural references. Beneath the madcap hilarity and the broad satirical strokes is a semiserious message: appearances are deceptive. Though all the beauty queens are uniformly pretty on the outside, on the inside, they are individuals with secret hopes and desires, which, as the epilogue reveals, they mostly achieve.

Jesse Andrews's Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a humorously nostalgic tale of teenage angst and uneasy friendships between dissimilar individuals founded on shaky common interests. The novel is told from the cynical, self-deprecating perspective of Greg Gaines, an overweight, pale, Jewish senior at an inner-city high school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Greg's middle-class family includes his befuddled college professor father, his strong-willed mother, and two younger sisters. Throughout his existence, Greg has attempted to remain invisible and anonymous to avoid involvement. He does not join any school group—jocks, stoners, goths, theater kids, or band kids—but maintains access to them all via improvisational witticisms because his life goal is “to not be ostracized by anyone.”

Having experienced a series of dating disasters earlier, Greg suppresses his secret crush on a pretty, curvy, and vapid girl named Madison Hartner. His only friend is Earl Jackson, a short, profane, athletic Black American boy who lives in a run-down house with an Internet-obsessed mother, no male adults, two brothers, and three drug-dealing, violence-prone gangster stepbrothers. Greg and Earl met in kindergarten and became interested in film at an early age. Over the years, they have made dozens of short films, primarily bad remakes of existing movies.

Things change when Greg learns that Rachel Kushner, a girl he briefly dated in Hebrew school, has been diagnosed with leukemia. Greg's mother asks him to spend time with Rachel to help make a difference in her life. Greg, feeling obligated, is able to make the usually unresponsive Rachel snort with laughter, and Madison convinces Greg to make a movie just for Rachel.

Greg enlists Earl's aid, and they make several comical attempts to create films for Rachel—using documentary-style interviews, copying Ken Burns's style, using stop-action animation and sock puppets—that are equally awful. Eventually, they combine all their efforts with personal speeches (Earl's is considerably more heartfelt and sincere than Greg's) in what Greg considers “the worst film ever made.” Rachel, however, appreciates the film, and because she is dying, the production is passed along to be shown during a pep rally as inspiration to the entire school. The exposure completely ruins Greg's low profile, and afterward, all the various cliques uniformly hate him for subjecting them to such trash. After failing several classes, Greg holes up in his room, finally realizing how Rachel's unique essence was lost when she died. He and Earl drift apart for a time, and both destroy their personal copies of all their films. The two boys finally reunite, still friends but heading in different directions: Greg, finally comfortable with himself, will attend college (after making up his failed classes), while Earl starts working at a fast-food restaurant to move out of his destructive home environment. Both will probably be forever affected by their shared experiences.

As the twenty-first century progressed, young adult novels that worked humor into their narratives continued to be popular even as they tackled difficult topics. Sherman Alexie’s 2007 novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is another semi-autobiographical work that uses humor to document the story of a young Indigenous American finding his way through life on and off his reservation. Popular young adult novelist John Green often works humor into his stories, which also look at the emotional life of young adults finding their identities. Finally, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015) by Becky Albertalli also uses humor to document its characters' harrowing search for identity, especially when they feel their identity lies outside the mainstream. 

Conclusions

From the early twentieth century onward, moviegoers have flocked to films of all kinds, but the popularity of comedies has proved particularly enduring. Whether the silent comedy of The Gold Rush (1925) or the slapstick of A Hard Day's Night (1964), the musical humor of Singin' in the Rain (1952), or the dark satire of Dr. Strangelove (1964), the thought-provoking All about Eve (1950) or the difficult-to-define The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), anything goes as long as it induces a smile, a snicker, or full-fledged bursts of roll-in-the-aisles laughter. Modern audiences have a seemingly unquenchable appetite for live stand-up comics and will eagerly accept a wide variety of offerings: insult and vulgar artists, ventriloquists, humorous jugglers and magicians, punsters, jokesters, and pratfallers. Since the 1950s, situation comedies have become a mainstay of network television. Sketch comedy is also alive and well, as demonstrated by the long-running Saturday Night Live, which premiered in 1975. Stand-up comics have found new homes for their acts through comedy specials on streaming networks. Even surreal animated satire showcasing the antics of dysfunctional cartoon families has found a niche, as illustrated by the popular series The Simpsons (1989–).

Literature likewise allows for a broad range of styles and techniques to attract readers of all ages. Whether anecdotal, risqué, farcical, highbrow, sophomoric, parody, satire, slapstick, screwball, dark comedy, or hyperbole, there is a place for every type of humor. Humor in written works serves a similar purpose as it does in film, live performances, and televised comedy. Particularly in young adult literature, it also helps defuse moral objections to scatological language or scenes dealing with otherwise taboo or socially uncomfortable subjects, such as sex, sexuality, abortion, or child abuse.

Laughter is not only enjoyable but also, as a considerable body of medical research has revealed, beneficial to both mental and physical health; a whole field of study, gelotology, has been developed to study the physiological and psychological effects of laughter. A hearty laugh has been shown to activate the brain's prefrontal cortex, producing endorphins that relieve pain. Sustained chortles can help dilate blood vessels to increase blood flow. Chuckling raises antibody production for stronger immunity. From infancy through adulthood, regular amusement eases tension. It lessens stress on the heart, which suggests that humor is not only fun but also a necessary component for experiencing a long and satisfactory life.

Bibliography

Attardo, Salvatore, editor. Encyclopedia of Humor Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2014.

Bucher, Katherine T., and KaaVonia Hinton. Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation, and Appreciation. 3rd ed., Boston: Pearson, 2014.

Davies, Stephanie. Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter. Bethel: Crown, 2013.

Gillis, Bryan, and Joanna Simpson. Sexual Content in Young Adult Literature: Reading between the Sheets. Lanham: Rowman, 2015.

Hill, Craig, editor. The Critical Merits of Young Adult Literature: Coming of Age. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Hogan, Walter. Humor in Young Adult Literature: A Time to Laugh. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2005.

McClure, Amy A., Abigail V. Garthwait, and Janice V. Kristo. Teaching Children's Literature in an Era of Standards. Boston: Pearson, 2015.

Mroczek, Emily, and Rebecca T. Miller. “Librarians Want More Funny YA.” School Library Journal, 9 June 2022, www.slj.com/story/humor-keeps-teens-and-tweens-reading-why-isnt-there-more%C2%A0. Accessed 16 Aug. 2024.

Roberts, Patricia L. Taking Humor Seriously in Children's Literature: Literature-Based Mini-Units and Humorous Books for Children Ages 5–12. Lanham: Scarecrow, 1997.

“Why Children and Teens Need Funny Books.” The Guardian, 26 Apr. 2016, www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/apr/26/why-children-and-teens-need-funny-books-holly-smale. Accessed 16 Aug. 2024.