Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Kids enjoy laughing and are seldom bored when they find something funny. They also ask questions, often to adults, because they understand that the more words they can comprehend about a funny story or a joke, the more they'll enjoy it.
Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books.
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
I think what is important for things to be funny is if you the listener, or the reader, get a chance to supply the humor of it yourself.
Kids are funny.
I think the thrust of any child is to try to fit in and be part of it. And I can't tell you how many times my humor, you know, what I thought was humor ended up making me the outsider. Like I'd be, I go, 'It's a joke.' And they'd go, 'Well, what was funny?' And they just thought I was insane.
Both of my kids have my sense of humor - they're definitely entertaining.
I can't not put humor in a book.
Humor is a very important thing. It is a natural predilection. It is an emotional release.
I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.