‘Oh Say, I Can’t See’ Anyone Else But Me

Boy Humor, and How I Came to Terms With It

One of my earliest realizations of the strange, otherness of boy humor is embodied in this image: me, an eleven or twelve year-old smartypants, standing and staring googled-eyed at my dad. He was kicked back on our couch and laughing so hard that I thought his head might explode, all because of three guys on TV poking and slapping and pouring water on each other. They were of course The Three Stooges, and I could only hang my head and retreat to the sanity of my Anne of Green Gables and New Kids on the Block tapes. (We had only one TV and no internet back then!)

Now, of course, I have some perspective. But back then, I couldn’t help but wonder 1) that he actually thought it was funny, and 2) that he could approve of a show about guys walloping each other. If I had flippantly brought a sledge-hammer down on my brother’s hand, my dad would have hung me from the rafters. Why, then, was it funny to watch a bunch of old guys do it? As far as I could see, it was not only stupid, but immoral to boot! Yet, I knew he didn’t condone violence and bullying in real life. It was as Seinfeld would say, “an enigma wrapped in a riddle” to my prepubescent mind.

Speaking of Seinfeld, when I got married out of college, I soon found my dad wasn’t the only one who loved punching-bag humor. My near-perfect groom it turned out was a devoted fan of Seinfeld! It’s true, there were few pie-in-the-face or sledge-hammer schticks—the humor was verbal, more intellectual. But it was just as petty, ruthless, and vindictive, if not more. I came to think of it as The Three Stooges for modern city dwellers. By my twenties, though, after giving it a few weeks, I found myself laughing along. Though I hated to admit it, I had succumbed to boy humor!

Actual Book Review

The Time Warp Trio series by Jon Sczieska is, like The Three Stooges and Seinfeld, classic boy-humor. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to this Booklist review: “The snappy dialogue and classic boy humor in this series of chapter books guarantee chuckles from the most reluctant readers.” Mr. Sczieska uses the well-worn trope of sending time-traveling kids to the more remarkable events of history (think Magic Tree House), but of course with a twist. Or rather, like a good postmodern book, they provide many twists designed to turn the genre on its head and keep kids (and reviewers who have over-read the genre) laughing.

Even the titles provoke a smile, if not soda-through-the-nose syndrome: See You Later, Gladiator, Viking It and Liking It, Sam Samurai, and Your Mother Was a Neanderthal. Or the title under the microscope today, Oh, Say I Can’t See, in which Joe, Fred, and Samantha travel from their neighborhood in contemporary Brooklyn to help George Washington crossing the Delaware River.

This book is a light, enjoyable read in which readers will get to meet famous men and witness famous events, all from the perspective of modern day kids. And there is a surprising amount of meat to it. We get to see what the soldiers eat for breakfast. A map of the Delaware river and surrounding towns is made meaningful. And without getting too graphic or scary, we are given a little glimpse as to the pain our Founding Fathers endured.  Some parents won’t appreciate the body function humor, although it is more muted here than many books for kids today. (It’s no Walter, the Farting Dog for instance.) I’d guess a fourth of the jokes of the book are squeezed out of the thinly veiled potty humor that the robotic cat is leaky, and that what caused them to time warp was that the cat “leaked” on The Book.

But overall, I doubt it will upset any grounded child, though there certainly are more studious chapter books out there on the subject. (See one I recommend in 4^th of July Round-up.)

Why This Book is Like A Minnie Ball

Yep, that’s right. I said minnie ball. Here’s why: a minnie ball is harmless on its own. It’s just a marble in someone’s gunnysack. But in its intended context—i.e. launched from a gunbarrel—it becomes lethal.

In some ways, I think this sort of story is more honest than pure historical fiction, since it doesn’t require the writer to fully bring to life the thoughts of people back in the day. Unlike Sarah, Plain and Tall (as dissected by Anne Scott McLeod in this Horn Book essay Janie linked to recently in Is Historical Fiction Dead?) where we are purportedly given a character of a very different place and time, the Time Warp Trio and other time traveling books allow the author to filter historical events—to give us the thoughts that kids today might have when encountering them.

It’s in this advantage, though, that we find the rub. Because, however our authors today fail at accurately representing the mindset of historical characters, at least they are trying. At least they are reaching in sincerity toward the dead. But Sczieska’s characters are thrown into their historical context, make a few wisecracks, save the day without meaning to, and then hop home in time for supper. It’s funny, sure. But only if kids know that when the joke’s over, there is real life to get back to.

Seth Lerer has an entire chapter in his history of children’s literature devoted to irony.  And guess who leads off the chapter?   You guessed it, Jon Sczieska’s The Time Warp Trio. In it he argues that this kind of story isn’t just another book on the shelf.  Rather, the protagonists are quintessential modern-day kids.  Here’s what he says:

“I use the word “irony” to characterize this mix of urban disaffection, snarky wisdom, and “been there, done that” distance the modern child affects. It is in many ways the state of the contemporary child….It used to be said that children had no sense of irony, that what distinguished children from adults was their sincerity, their acceptance, their openness….[But] Contemporary children live in communities of false belief and mistrust. They learn that other people lie. They learn, too, that their own beliefs may not be shared by others.”

Lerer then goes on to quote Jedediah Purdy, a home-schooled Harvard graduate who says, ‘Everything we encounter is a remark, a re-release, a ripoff, a rerun.’ Lerer sums up, “Irony is the condition of the urban anomie, of kids who have grown up too fast, of situation comedies where nobody takes anything, or anybody, seriously.”

Boy humor—and to some extent most humor—requires distance from characters. We talk about suspension of disbelief when it comes to fantasy. But there is a suspension of moral judgment that goes on in comic stories, I think. As a kid, I couldn’t enjoy The Three Stooges because I was still humanizing them. But my dad saw them outside the normal moral boundaries—it was just a joke. I came to this conclusion after thinking through the trickster stories of African mythology, including their American manifestations in Uncle Remus and Bugs Bunny. You can’t enjoy Bugs Bunny if you’re constantly empathizing with him. That doesn’t mean you have to actually have lower your moral standards to laugh at the joke. You just have to see the story—and the trickster—as not real, as not like you. (My hunch is that boys do this more naturally than women, but at the very least, for me, that’s what I had to learn in order to get it.)

But there is still the question, how far should we take this moral suspension of judgement?  At what point does it become dangerous?  As Lerer points out, for kids who have no meta-narrative, for whom real history is just a succession of events with no purpose, there may be no waking up from this kind of book.  In Sczieska’s book, when the characters prepare to finally make the trip across the Delaware, George Washington shouts, “Move that fat butt of yours, Henry . . . but move it slowly or you’ll swamp us all.”  Never mind the historical impossibility of this statement.  That is a point I’ll leave to the Anne Scott McLeods for now.  On this Independence Day, I merely ask, what does a book like this say to and about a generation of boys for whom history—and life itself—is just a joke?

For more on history and writing with wisdom, see my 4th of July Round-up, our interview with Jonathan Rogers, and Janie’s review of his book The Charlatan’s Boy.  And hurry to enter our 4th of July contest here!

You can also read the rest of Seth Lerer’s comments on The Time Warp here on Google books. Be aware, though, that the writer isn’t Christian and, though wordly wise, I wouldn’t recommend most of what he says.

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