LeonardS. Marcuson Humor
RSSJenny Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 10/06/2009
TeachingBooks.net resources on this interview »»»
Listen to Leonard Marcus introduce and read from Funny Business
Few writers have chronicled the field of children’s books for adults and young readers as thoroughly and with as much passion as Leonard S. Marcus. His books for children include The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy (Candlewick, 2006) and A Caldecott Celebration: Seven Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal (Walker, 2008). In his latest title for children, Funny Business: Conversations with Writers of Comedy (Candlewick, October 2009; Gr 5 up), the author presents 13 interviews with esteemed beloved weel-regarded, admired, respected authors including Beverly Cleary, Christopher Paul Curtis, Louis Sacher, Sharon Creech, and Judy Blume, among others. Here Marcus shares insights gleaned from these conversations on how humor may be used to explore difficult subjects, to avert conflict, and to puzzle out life’s contradictions.
Are there advantages to a Q&A format versus the more narrative presentation of A Caldecott Celebration?
I think of a narrative as an oil portrait; the background is filled in and everything is connected. A Q&A is more like a drawing; the outlines are there, and hopefully, the essence of that person, caught in a medium that has been left less complete intentionally. In a Q&A you get the immediacy of that person’s voice, but there is also room for readers to bring something to the experience.
I do a tremendous amount of editing of the interviews. I want an interview to have a certain clarity and shape, and to sound like spoken language. It’s really a dialogue, so it’s dramatic in nature. Interviews are full of stories, stories within stories, stories about stories.
Your conversation with Beverly Cleary leaps to mind as an excellent example of what you’re describing.
Cleary is a storyteller through and through, and she thinks in storylike units. [As a child] Cleary spent a lot of time observing other people and noticing the contradictions between what they said and what they did, or what they wanted and what they knew was expected of them. The humor in her books really arises out of all those collisions and puzzles that she’s so good at pinpointing.
And then there’s Anne Fine, whose Granny Bertha was the one bright spot in her WWII childhood.
When I compiled [The Wand in the Word, I learned that] many writers turned to fantasy as a response to the horrors of WWII; I think that it could be said that some writers turned to humor for the same reason. Anne Fine grew up in post-WWII England where, in a sense, the war didn’t end until the 1950s because of the rationing and the emotional and psychological shadow the war had cast over the people who lived through it. Granny Bertha was a character, lots of fun, and a great storyteller. It’s a healthy response to find the humor in something that’s otherwise hard to bear.
Was it important to you to show children that even if there’s not much humor in their own homes, they can find it elsewhere?
When I asked Sharon Creech if she could remember the first time she ever tried to be funny, she said it was when her parents were fighting and she wanted to break the tension….That’s a great instinct for a child to have, especially when it works. Humor can be really healing.
In your conversations with these authors, the subject of bullies and the relationship between humor and power came up several times.
As the shortest kid on the school bus, Carl Hiaasen made jokes at his own expense, so the bullies move on....For a long time humor has been one of the tools and weapons of the underdog. It’s one of the ways we have of leveling the playing field. Humor breaks the tension that could otherwise lead to physical violence.
One thing that makes people uncomfortable about humor is that it’s related to chaos. Think of the Marx Brothers—in their world, there’s almost no rhyme or reason to anything that’s happening. That’s fun to watch on the screen, but it would be hell to live through. Humor reminds us that life can be chaotic.
When you’re compiling a collection such as this, are you looking for themes to emerge?
That’s one of the things I love about interviews, when you can make that kind of connection. For example, there’s timing in humor, and Jon Scieszka is so articulate about leading readers in a certain direction and then the surprise when you make the turn toward the punch line.
Like that example you used from Scieszka’s Math Curse, “how many quarts in a gallon,… how many feet in a yard, how many yards in a neighborhood…”
Exactly. I made sure I put in quotes from all the authors’ books as examples and because I wanted there to be something funny on every page. It can become deadly to just talk about humor.
How did you decide which authors to include?
These are writers who I think are really funny. One reason Judy Blume is there is because she’s been writing for so long, touching nerves, and finding ways of talking about things that nobody else would talk about, and as often as not she used humor as the way to do it, which is a pretty interesting lesson in and of itself.
I think Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth is the Alice in Wonderland of the 20th century. It’s the book of verbal dexterity and wit, and under that, a philosophical reflection. It’s all about what it means to start from a familiar place and to go out into the world and cope with the unknown, and how you can get tripped up and how you have to pick yourself up and keep going. And it’s so playful and so inventive. It’s really a joyful book.
Hilary McKay is a wonderful satirist. She has such a keen grasp of family life and how things can go awry, and how people who are a little bit different bump up against society and the rules that they’re expected to live by. She makes you feel like there’s a place for difference and eccentricity. In the interview she talked about the overstructured lives that children today often lead. She made the point—which I’d never heard before—that middle-class modern life may account for why so much fantasy is being written.
Daniel Handler [aka Lemony Snicket] seemed more forthcoming than usual.
I’d had an earlier face-to-face meeting with Handler at a conference where we were both speaking and I asked him to sign one of his books for Jacob, my son; he signed it, “To a future orphan.” [laughs] I’d had a hunch that Handler had been regarded as a child prodigy, so I asked him about that and it set off a whole chain of memories and reflections, about having been called “precocious” by one of his schoolteachers, but in a certain nasty way, which sent him to the dictionary. One of my favorite stories from him was about his having a tuxedo when he was a teenager, and his realization that formality in language and in dress can be a key to power for a young person.
That contrasts with Christopher Paul Curtis’s experience in eighth grade, and how he felt was not OK to be smart.
That was really a powerful and disturbing comment—that as an African American he received mixed messages about doing well in school. His peers saw him as selling out to the system, which led him to feel alienated—from his own intelligence and his own hopes for the future. Curtis had to win that back for himself. That’s a hard lesson, and it goes so deep into our society. It’s not just a personal issue. His story is powerful. He told me that while working in an auto factory he wrote in a notebook. I asked him, “What were you writing?” and he said, “I hate my boss.” Start with the truth! Then he branched out into writing stories.
Interviewing Tips from Leonard S. Marcus
1. Make a plan for recording the conversation. There are the practical issues of how are you going to capture the words of the other person. It’s possible to do that by taking notes or by having a digital voice recorder or a tape recorder. Choose a device you’re really comfortable with so that you don’t have to worry about it.
2. Jot down your questions. For me the next step is to get a legal pad and jot down every question that comes to mind, in no particular order. I try to be orderly, but I’d rather follow the flow of my own thoughts, in response to the reading and looking that I’ve been doing.
3. Listen. Listening is not easy for most people, whether young or old. So often we’re doing more than one thing at once, so our attention is divided. In an interview you want to give that person your undivided attention.
4. Trust your instincts and follow your curiosity. If you feel a question welling up inside you then that’s probably a good one to ask.
5. Practice. Start by interviewing people who are close to you, to get comfortable with the situation. (Try interviewing your grandparents and get them to tell stories about their childhoods and experiences as young adults. That’s something you’ll treasure always.) Then branch out and interview strangers.
Listen to Leonard Marcus introduce and read from Funny Business
TeachingBooks.net resources on this interview »»»
Jennifer M. Brown is the children's editor for Shelf Awareness, a daily enewsletter for the publishing trade. She recently launched the Web site Twenty by Jenny, which recommends titles to help parents build their child's library one book at a time.
