Humorous picture books come in all types, but when you look at the top sellers you’ll find distinct patterns that emerge time after time. This post digs into three strategies that successful authors are using in the funniest picture books on the shelves.
1: Page-Turn Surprises
Page-turn surprises make the most of the action of the page turn, treating it like the pause before a punch line. One spread sets up the joke, then the next one lands it. The magic happens in the reveal: the moment the new illustration becomes visible and the new page’s first line of text is read aloud.
This kind of laugh works primarily by subverting expectations. Here are four common ways it accomplishes that.
An author sets up one idea in their reader’s mind and then does something else.
- In The Book that Almost Rhymed, the anticipated rhyming word that belongs at the end of each stanza is replaced by something else that takes the story sideways.
- Don’t Trust Fish establishes a formula with three full spreads in the format of a field guide. Then it goes startlingly off the rails with “This is a fish. Don’t trust fish!”
The book undercuts societal norms, including the reader’s expectation of what picture books are like.
- The Book with No Pictures makes the adult who is reading it aloud say a host of ridiculous things, including the name “Boo-Boo Butt.” This manipulation of an authority figure feels highly subversive to child audiences.
- Hank Goes Honk lets the reader be gleefully obnoxious as they give voice to Hank the goose’s honking interruptions. When his efforts at being a reformed character go sideways, kids feel giddily daring as they enjoy the undercutting of normal story patterns.
- Flat Cat provides an outlet for kids’ desire to laugh at things that adults usually deem inappropriate to joke about, like a cat being squished by an ice cream truck.
The text describes one thing while the illustrations reveal another.
- In I Want My Hat Back, the reader sees that the rabbit is lying to the bear and carries that tension for many pages until the bear figures it out.
- The monster’s protests in I do Not Eat Children are belied by the illustrations, in which a child disappears after every page turn.
The tone of the book and its events contrast.
- The deadpan tone of 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore is killingly at odds with the absurd, sadistic actions the narrator is describing.
- How to Give Your Cat a Bath in Five Easy Steps uses the framework of an instructional guide, which is hilariously undercut by the chaotic cat-washing action.
In every case, the laugh is essentially a startle reaction. We could not have predicted the punchline, so we’re surprised, but it perfectly satisfies the setup, so we’re delighted.
That last bit is important. The surprise is not random! If you’ve ever heard a seven-year-old try to invent a riddle, you’ll know that (in spite of what the seven-year-old thinks), it’s not just funny because you couldn’t have guessed the answer. It has to be both unguessable and a perfect response to what came before.
2: Turning Up the Silly Tap
Something magical can happen when you start with one giggle-worthy line or scenario and then slowly and steadily increase the flow.
- In The Wonky Donkey, a single line of funny-sounding, tongue-tripping wordplay becomes two lines, then three, then four…
- In the classic Mortimer, the repetition of the titular character’s bedtime shenanigans keeps up the pressure while the ante is upped by the absurd escalation of characters marching up the stairs to silence him: mother, father, seventeen brothers and sisters, the police… You can see similar patterns in a great many Robert Munsch books.
However, pay heed: your silly must not be willy nilly. Just sprinkling a story with scenarios a kid might find funny won’t do the trick. This is a measured, cumulative process of starting small and building bigger with every event.
3: The Joke at the End of the Book
Page-Turn Surprises and Turning Up the Silly Tap are interchangeable. You don’t need to do both, and in fact you often won’t have room to. In a picture book it’s better to do one strategy well than to cram in several of them. However, you will almost always need a Joke at the End of the Book. It’s the closing salvo that wraps everything up and shows the reader where this story has been headed all along. It’s more than just the last laugh; it’s the idea they carry away with them after the book has ended.
- In The Bear Ate Your Sandwich, the joke is the revelation that this whole time, the narrator has been telling you a tale to hide the fact that he’s the one who ate the sandwich. This book is so restrained in its use of humour that it doesn’t even give away the fact that it’s building up to a joke until the final pages.
- In I Want My Hat Back, the joke is a callback to a previous scene that lets the reader intuit that the bear has eaten the thieving rabbit. Listen, Jon Klassen’s humour is dark, and kids love it.
- The joke at the end of I Do Not Eat Children is that the monster himself gets eaten by a child for lying about eating the other children.
- The joke at the end of 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore is as sadistic as the rest of the story: the narrator discovers she is allowed to lie, because she deceitfully says she’s sorry for doing those 17 things.
- In Mortimer, the joke is that Mortimer goes to sleep at last when everyone accidentally ignores him.
None of these jokes would hit particularly hard if they didn’t have twenty-odd pages of story building up to them. By the same token, those twenty-odd pages of story would ultimately fall flat if they didn’t end in a final hurrah that references the journey the reader has taken through them. The laughter would peter out in a final So, what?
When you’re revising your story, make sure you have your Joke at the End of the Book clear in your own mind. Even better, write it down. Be specific. What is the thing making your reader laugh on the final page? Next, review the book as a whole and make sure everything builds toward that joke. If a line feels like it’s setting up a different one, change it or prune it out.
The Joke at the End of the Book unifies your story. However, if you find you don’t want to use one, you may be employing a theme to do that job instead. When the final idea readers walk away with is heartwarming instead of hilarious (looking at you, Flat Cat), then you’re writing a book that uses humour but isn’t fundamentally built around it. That’s perfectly fine! But if you want tailored advice on tightening up your story structure that you aren’t quite finding here, I recommend hopping over to this post on theme.
So. Page-Turn Surprises, Turning Up the Silly Tap, and The Joke at the End of the Book. Those are the three strategies that you’ll find again and again in successful humorous picture books. But before we wrap up this post, I want to address one more category of books that is increasingly showing up under the heading of “humorous.”
This Interaction is Funny
There has been a boom in interactive books in the last decade or so. I’m talking about fourth-wall-breaking books that address the reader directly and give them instructions: Read this page in a silly voice. Don’t read this page. I told you to stop reading this page!
I’ll be honest: while a few authors hit humour home runs with these, like BJ Novak’s The Book with No Pictures, plenty of others are just…okay. The general idea is there, but there’s a spark missing. I think the disconnect is a belief that interactive automatically equals funny, and that just isn’t the case. If it were, Tap the Magic Tree would be a humour book instead of a rather sophisticated concept book. So let’s figure out what does make an interactive book an uproarious one.
- The Book With No Pictures Turns up the Silly Tap by choosing a single joke (the person reading this book has to say whatever I want them to) and amping it up to the nth degree.
- I Will Chomp You has a Joke at the End of the Book, and along the way we experience some Page Turn Surprises as the narrator tries to trick and bite the reader.
- Find Fergus has just one instruction (find Fergus the bear) and one problem: it’s too easy, because Fergus is bad at hiding. A single Page-Turn Surprise is repeated in one delightful variation after another: Fergus always follows the narrator’s advice exactly, and never successfully. Everything wraps up with a Joke at the End of the Book.
- How to Count to One (and don’t even think about bigger numbers) subverts expectations in its own set of Page-Turn Surprises. It presents itself in the format of a counting book, but no matter what appears in the (increasingly busy) illustrations, there is only ever one item that the narrator wants counted. The Joke at the End of the Book is that the book contains a total of 100 countable items.
You can see, then, that when interactive books lean into humour, they’re still using one or more of the strategies we discussed above: Page-Turn Surprises, Turning Up the Silly Tap, and The Joke at the End of the Book. The interactivity is a device that makes unique scenarios possible, but it isn’t the reason the book is funny.
No matter what narrative devices you use, the heart of humour will always be the same: creating a sense of surprised delight or a sustained crescendo of silliness, then unifying everything with a final laugh that says, “This is where we’ve been heading all along.”
The Joke at the End of this Post
Well, I would come up with one, but I’m a little pressed for time. I have a garden that needs planting and a novel that needs revising. You could say I need to work on my plot.
My insights are better than my jokes! If you’re stuck on a manuscript, my substantive editing services or author counselling may be right for you. You can also check out these picture book-related posts:
How to Write a Rhyming Picture Book that Publishers Actually Want
Erin Alladin 
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