Funny's Funny - Ciaran Murtagh

Last year I spent a good few months writing an unashamedly British TV show - Danny and Mick. It's currently going out on CBBC and will be on the iplayer forever. I wrote ten episodes and script edited ten more and it makes a virtue of it's constraints in a way that you don't see too often.

Usually, in kids TV, we are being asked to write for the widest possible market. PJ Masks has to play as well in Doha as it does in Dudley. The budgets and costs reflect that, but so too do the editorial and creative choices. Danny and Mick is a live action TV show, so the costs are less. It's also been designed to do one thing and one thing only - make children from the UK laugh. That means, for the first time in quite some time, I was free to focus on one audience.

Danny and Mick shares a great debt to classic British kids TV staples - gunge, slapstick, pantomime. But it had two great assets in it's stars. Danny and Mick really are brothers and they have spent a life time in the circus. Their Dad is Clive Webb - formerly of Tiswas -  and they know what makes kids roar with laughter. They also had buckets of routines they could pull out to enhance any script.

With live action TV the thing that usually gets squeezed is rehearsal time. It means that there isn't time to work out a complicated sequence and often you have to cheat it when it comes to filming. These guys had classic routines in their DNA. Watching them work was like watching a ballet or a wrestling match, they knew how to respond to each other's movements to build something special. It was who they were and was something they've been doing all their lives.

Sometimes we would ask what routines or props they had lying around and build a story around that set piece. Sometimes we would script an idea and they would suggest a routine they knew would work. It's rare for scripting to be so symbiotic, but we all knew we only had one thing to do - make kids laugh.

Take a look at the show, and if you get the chance to see them live then grab it. I'm moving onto write Crackerjack with Sam and Mark next. It seems like great British humour is making a come back, and this Irishman couldn't be happier!

You don't have to wear your pants on your head - Nicola Morgan

Don't get me wrong: humour is an essential part of life and wellbeing. The ability to make an audience laugh is a laudable one. When kids come out of an author visit still laughing, the endorphins fizzing round their brains, it's a happy result indeed. It's visibly A Success.

But authors should not feel they have to "do funny" and I wouldn't like schools to fall into the trap of thinking that the only engaged audience is one falling off its chairs with laughter. I say this because I've seen children's authors recently worry that their events aren't "funny enough" and comparing themselves unfavourably with talented comic authors and speakers.

We should not forget that not everyone always wants to be made to laugh; not everyone laughs at the same things; and some people have different needs. I, for one, given the choice between an hour of laughter and an hour of having my heart and mind spun dizzy with new ideas or shocked into a new groove by fresh images and stories, would opt for dizzy or shocked. And I was always like that. Doesn't mean I don't have a sense of humour or like laughing, just that they are not at the top of my priority list. They are fairly high up it, but not at the top. I know I'm not alone.

If our books don't feature pants, slime or slapstick, our talks may not lend themselves to funny. I've written funny - and in my talks on Chicken Friend, yes, it was great to see the kids laughing when I chose the funny bits to read, though I preferred the more thoughtful bits, the bits where my main character really struggled with things in her world. But my YA novels are far from funny. A mastectomy without anaesthetic isn't funny; nor is being stalked; nor is mental illness or alcoholism. Even my talks on the teenage brain - which some adults might say, unjokingly, was a genuine comedic mine - only look for the occasional release of laughter. And that's usually when I quote Shakespeare.

I'll have a go at funny if appropriate - a Burns Supper "reply from the lassies" or after dinner speeches - and I think an introduction to any speech is improved by something to smile at. And, of course, it's heart-warming when people laugh (assuming you meant them to), as humour is social glue. But it's not the only glue and I'm not most interested in making people laugh. I prefer the echoing silence or some nodding or the way they will come up afterwards or email and tell me something about their own lives that they now see differently. With The Teenage Guide to Stress, what I like most is responses such as the girl who emailed to tell me my talk had "settled" her mind.

She didn't want to laugh about her stress - even though laughing about serious things is no bad thing. She wanted her mind to be "settled". A book and a talk should do whatever they should do: inspire laughter or excitement or thoughts or emotions or resolution, whatever.

Today, I'm heading to Gordonstoun for two days of almost entirely unfunny events. However, I will at one point wear a knitted brain on my head (thanks, Cat!) and people will laugh. That's fine. Especially since the brief laughter will flood their brains with chemicals which will make them better able to absorb the serious stuff.

But the value of an event is not measured in the decibels of laughter. If you set out to be funny, then it is, of course; if you set out to be thought-provoking, you might measure it in the silence and stillness. Or in the chatter afterwards. Or in a single question or email. Measure it how you like but don't be overwhelmed by the hegemony of humour.

So, to my fellow authors planning events: you do not have to wear your pants (or a knitted brain) on your head. Just wear your best ones.

The Teenage Guide to Stress is published on July 3rd by Walker Books. It's not funny so don't laugh.

In Praise of Mr Gum - Andrew Strong

For years I’ve wanted to write Finnegans Wake for children. A book that bordered on linguistic chaos, but which, deep down, played on some elemental need to savour the primitive music of words. Logic, plot, characters could all take a hike into the mountains. I wanted to write a surreal masterpiece.

I never did it, I never will do it. There’s no point now, anyway. Andy Stanton has beaten me to it.

Stanton’s books are almost without plot, and the characterisation is a little eccentric. But there is a texture of rich, playful, fizzing language. A few weeks ago I read the first Mr Gum book to a bunch of nine and ten year olds. They laughed so much I had to stop at the end of each sentence to let the noise die down. They pleaded with me to read the second book, but after that one I suggested they go out and buy the others themselves. Most of them did just that.

‘You’re a Bad Man Mr Gum’ has a plot device that makes me tremble with envy. Mr Gum is a very lazy and hence, messy man. His house is a tip, but his garden is immaculate. When a neighbour’s dog gets in Mr Gum’s garden, and wrecks it, Mr Gum seeks revenge. Of course, if it occurs to a child to question why Mr Gum’s garden is pristine, when his house is a tip, Stanton is one step ahead: Mr Gum must keep the garden tidy, or a fairy appears and smashes the old grouch in the face with a frying pan. Of course!

But when this plot device is no longer necessary, we hear nothing more of the fairy with the frying pan. And no one cares. Stanton is not in the business of tying up loose threads. He abandons his threads, leaves a heap of them in the corner for you to sweep up.

The Mr Gum books are anarchic, but buzzing with humour and word play. The language is gorgeous. For an example of this, consider the setting of the Mr Gum stories: the town of Lamonic Bibber. This would not be out of place in Finnegans Wake. It’s a phrase that suggest laziness, booze, the bubbling of a stream.

The theme of laziness pervades the Gum books. Descriptions tail off, and similes have a late period Blackaddery feel to them. Early on there are a smattering of conventional similes, for example, there's Mr Gum's ancient carpet which 'smelt like a toilet'. But later, when the effort of coming up with consistently accurate comparisons seems to bore him, Stanton describes a character ‘giggling like a tortoise’. The absurdity of it, and the sense that all this simile stuff is too much like hard work, makes it deliciously funny.

Stanton turns slouching into an art form. Like Miles Davis or Picasso, he works hard at making things look very easy. The Gum books remind me of Geoff Dyer’s wonderful non-biography of D H Lawrence, ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ – a book about not getting around to writing a biography of D H Lawrence.

A parent of one of the boys who was particularly taken by the Gum series told me his son had read all eight books, one after the other, and was now having withdrawal symptoms. Could I suggest something else? I grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled down Finnegans Wake.

I didn't really.

.

The Secret of Comedy - John Dougherty

Tempting as it is to press the enter key 20 times and then type ‘timing’, I’m not going to. Nor, to be fair, am I going to reveal the secret of all comedy. If I knew that, then instead of sitting at my computer typing I’d be relaxing by a sun-soaked lagoon with my wife, our children, and their incredibly expensive home-schooling experts, while the butler serves us the appropriate meal for whichever time zone I’d eventually have settled for.

Rather, I want to do some musing about the art of writing funny books for children. And it is an art - and a craft, too. I do get the impression that there are some people who think it’s easy; and reading some of the “funny” children’s books currently on the market, I can see why. But then, looking at some of the “comedy” written or broadcast for adults, I could see why anyone might think that’s easy, too; and it’s not. Quite clearly it’s not, or the overall standard would be a lot higher.

Oooh, I’m sounding like a grumpy old man today. Sorry. And I hope nobody thinks I’m saying all, or even most, funny books for kids aren’t funny, because I’m not. But there are some right shockers out there.

In my opinion. And there, of course, lies the first secret of comedy: finding the right audience. Because - up to a point, at least - comedy really is a matter of both taste and perspective. I loved The Office partly because it seemed to me horribly close to drama-documentary; I’ve known people with as little self-awareness as David Brent. My parents-in-law hated it because, whilst accepting that comedy needs to stretch the boundaries of believability a little, they felt The Office snapped those boundaries in two and then jumped on the pieces. Our different experiences mediated different understandings of the humour. Similarly, I suppose, there are jokes about DOS that computer technicians would find hilarious but that I wouldn’t get at all. So to write a successfully funny children’s book, firstly, you need to have an idea that’s sufficiently recognisable to enough children to make it work.

Once you’ve got that idea, what marks out, say, the Andy Stantons from the just-not-funnies? What’s the difference? For one answer, I might go back to Gillian Philip’s piece on Pixar’s Up, and say as she does: it’s the story that matters.

A month or so back, I was on a panel with Andy Stanton, Kaye Umansky and Anthony McGowan (Anthony: get yourself a website, man, for goodness’ sake!), and among the many excellent points that were made was one I found intriguing: the jokes cut across the grain of the story. In other words, you’ve got a story going along in one direction, with jokes interrupting it by taking the reader’s mind off in another. I think there are exceptions, but this strikes me as being largely true, and if you look at Andy’s Mr Gum books - quite probably the funniest children’s books of the current crop - you’ll see this happening in spades. In fact, the interruption itself often becomes the joke, or amplifies it. Yet there is a story, and recognisable characters, and however silly and tangential the jokes - and however much they interrupt - they never actually stop the flow of the story.

Put another way, there’s a delicate balance between story and jokes. It doesn’t have to be the same balance for each story - some funny books have lots of jokes and not much story; others have lots of story and not many jokes - but as long as the balance exists, as long as the tension between narrative and silliness is in some way maintained without detriment to either - the reader will be satisfied.

By contrast, I’m currently reading a massive whopper of a book - which I shan’t name - with my nine-year-old son, which doesn’t actually seem to have any story at all. There are a lot of silly situations, but no discernible plot. A detail which appears to be absolutely central in the first couple of chapters suddenly ceases to have any bearing on matters. Characters - apparently major characters - disappear without warning, and then wander back three quarters of the book later, or behave without any particular consistency and without living up to the reputations other characters ascribe to them. Situations are set up solely for single, not terribly amusing, jokes. “Funny” things happen and almost immediately suffer deus ex machina reversals so that the next thing can happen. We’ve been reading it together, a bit at a time, for days if not weeks, and I just want it to be over.

Yet... googling it, I can’t find a single review which doesn’t proclaim it to be comedy genius. And to be fair, my son, while not laughing out loud or even cracking a smile much of the time, claims to be enjoying it. So maybe it’s me who’s out of step. And maybe, when it comes down to it, personal taste is the most important factor.



















Oh - and timing.

Thanks, by the way, to everyone who sent good wishes for my Punning Dad’s birthday - he had a great day. And just to keep you all informed of how the next generation of punsters is coming along: for reasons too tedious to explain, my wife’s computer is currently living on the dining table. And last night, while we were eating, I asked Punning Son (9) to be careful, thus:
“Don’t get chilli on Mummy’s Mac.”

To which he replied:

“She doesn’t mind getting rain on her mac."
[Perfectly timed beat]
"And rain’s chilly.”

A double pun! That’s my boy.


John’s website is at www.visitingauthor.com.

His latest book is Jack Slater and the Whisper of Doom (Young Corgi 2009; ISBN 978-0552558051).

And when this goes online he'll be in Germany without internet access, so if you ask him a question about this post and he doesn't answer, he's not being rude, okay?

But Is It Art? - John Dougherty

Depending on how you look at it, Hackney council has just (a) done its duty in removing unsightly graffiti, or (b) committed cultural vandalism and destroyed a work of art, in sending a couple of workmen to paint over an original Banksy.

I'm going with (b), myself. Mind you, I feel I have a bit of an investment in Banksy - not financially, you understand; but in common with thousands of others, a couple of weeks ago I queued for over four hours in order to get in to Bansky vs. Bristol Museum (the little cherubs in the picture, by the way, are my kids, who joined me in the queue an hour and a half in, by which time I'd managed to get about half-way through Philip Pullman's Once Upon A Time in the North), and as far as I'm concerned, that's a serious investment of time. In total, after all, I spent more time queuing than I did actually looking at the exhibition.

So: was it art? Here, I have to shrug my shoulders and say, 'dunno'. And I don't really care, either, if I'm honest. I enjoyed it. My wife enjoyed it. My children enjoyed it. Thousands of people from all over the world enjoyed it. And I've never, in any exhibition at any museum or art gallery I've ever been to in my entire life, laughed out loud as often as I did at Banksy vs. Bristol Museum. Given all that, does it really matter whether or not I know what the correct label for it is?

By this point, some of you are probably checking to make sure you are actually on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, and thinking, 'what's all this got to do with children's books?' Before I answer that question, let me put up another photo from my day at the Banksy exhibition:
I do like that one particularly. Anyway, where was I?

Oh, yes. It's easy to dismiss a lot of kids' - and, for that matter, adult - literature as "light" because its aim is to be funny and entertaining. Michael Rosen founded the Roald Dahl Funny Prize partly because funny books just don't get picked for prizes, and he felt it was as important to celebrate them as any other kind. Well, I'm with him on that. And at this point, I was going to start talking about how humour can be hugely intelligent and instructive; and I was going to use Banksy's How Do You Like Your Eggs as an example of something that first made me laugh and then made me think, and that posed questions... and then I thought, hang on, I'm falling into the same trap. To justify comedy - funny pictures, funny books, funny whatever - in that way is to say that it has no value unless it does something other than entertain. And I don't think that's true. I like to laugh. I think it's good for me. Yes, I like clever comedy; I like the thought-provoking stuff; but I also like comedy that's just plain silly - and what's wrong with that?

One voice is notably absent from the debate about whether Banksy's work is art, and that's Banksy's. He really doesn't seem to care. In the same way, Michael Rosen's response to people who think he doesn't write proper poetry is, well, don't call it poetry, then. Call it "bits" or "stuff". And Terry Pratchett, awarded an OBE for services to literature, commented, "I suspect the services to literature consisted of refraining from trying to write any". I love that attitude. These are people who know what they're good at, and who do it, and do it well, without worrying about which labels properly attach to their work.

Dr Johnson once said,"One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read." Well, all those clever writers whose wish is to be studied definitely have their place. And so do the rest of us. If people read my books, and enjoy them, that's good enough for me.

John's website is at www.visitingauthor.com