Squeaky Clean Super Funny Jokes for Kidz: (Things to Do at Home, Learn to Read, Jokes & Riddles for Kids)
This is not a book that will encourage silence in children. Let's make that perfectly clear from the get-go! Craig Yoe did not gather this wonderfully silly collection so that you as a parent could get your taxes done. This is a book with a purpose and that purpose is fun!
Filled with spontaneous explosions of laughter, the latest volume in the Squeaky Clean series of books will also most surely create stifled giggles on the way to church. This book will also definitely create terror for any teacher who tries to explain that, yes, Alexander the Grape may have indeed "been purple, but he most definitely did not once lead Egypt!".
This is fun that is meant to be shared. For what good is a joke, a riddle, a pun or a knock-knock joke if you can't tell it to someone? One of the greatest rewards we have in our lives is to make someone honestly laugh. What is a parent if not someone who must listen to every single gorilla joke ever written and to do it for days on end?
Humor is often one of the strongest bonds that we can develop as we learn to communicate in life. For a five or six year old, jokes such as "What did the dalmatian say after dinner?" with it's obvious reply "That hit the spots!", begins with the oldest of storytelling origins, anthropomorphization. Aesop knew that in the world of a child, everything can talk.
But you know what? Jokes are freaking amazing. You try to take them apart and they immediately fall apart!
What good jokes really are is, as Mr, Yoe proves on page after page, untouchable. What we laugh at so often seems to be almost directly hard-wired into our souls. Yes, the language is learned as we grow, but the concepts behind what makes us laugh are as deep inside of us as almost any other part of our natural make-up.
No less an authority on humor than scholar Joseph Campbell, a man who traveled in both Cathedrals and The Catskills, (but mostly Cathedrals), saw that "Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood."
Collections of jokes have been a staple of life since Guttenberg's nephew snuck into his uncle's printing shop at night with his half-drunk buddies and put out Ye National Lampoon's New Testament. In the forties, legendary publisher, talk-show guest, and raconteur Bennett Cerf gave the world a collection of joke books that turned the publishing world on end. Selling a million copies, Cerf's initial collection quickly spawned sequels and imitations.
The key to any good collection is not just the quality of the jokes. Yoe's collection builds on the relative normalcy of Cerf's forties-era clean pages by coloring in the margins of what he has gathered. The artist and writer doodles endlessly, often mixing strict context and absurdity on the same page. An adult reading this series may hear a series of rim-shots, maybe a bit of "late-period, MASH-level" canned laughter and possibly even an actual guffaw inside this book.
What a child will hear is a good reason to run up to Mommy or Daddy and repeat what they just read. Because a good joke exists to be shared. That is also hard-wired into us. And the child will do this repeatedly. No kid can resist an endless series of gorilla jokes. It is accepted scientific fact.
If, after reading Craig Yoe's Squeaky Clean Super Funny Jokes for Kidz: (Things to Do at Home, Learn to Read, Jokes & Riddles for Kids), your child wants to change their name to "Shecky" and begs you to let them summer in the Catskills or asks you to drop them off in front of a brick wall by the schoolyard, by all means, let them! It’s probably how we as a society got both Jim Carrey and Kevin Hart.