Editorial
A Cry for Laughter

t is no secret that in recent children's fiction humor has been in rather short supply. John Rowe Townsend said, in summing up the Newbery Medal books of the decade 1966-1975, “One lack is very evident. . . . That is the absence of fine, sustained comic writing.” Sheila Egoff, too, in her 1979 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture deplored this lack of levity. “I suppose that the very themes of current writing preclude the light touch.” Even picture books — those repositories of merriment, from wit to slapstick — have not escaped the heavy pall of the somber new realism. Now certainly, to sensitize children and to offset the dehumanizing effects of mass media, books should have emotional depth — a full range of human feeling, including that rare speciality, humor.

Philosophers have observed that the comic spirit does not exist outside the human realm; man is the only animal who laughs — doubtless because he alone can suffer so profoundly. A world — or a literature — without mirth would be terrifying. Freud considered nonsense and comedy, like tragedy, to be purgative; the term comic relief is no accident. And surely, if life is irrational and ludicrous as well as perilous and cruel, comedy can reveal as much about our plight as tragedy. Sid Fleischman once observed, “Comedy is tragedy; but it is tragedy in motley.” And E. B. White said, “As everyone knows, there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humorous writing, like poetical writing, has an extra content. It plays, like an active child, close to the big hot fire which is Truth. And sometimes the reader feels the heat.”

In September the Boston Globe-Horn Book award was given to Sid Fleischman for Humbug Mountain (Atlantic-Little), a book which crowns all his previous achievement. Just as Mark Twain never received a Nobel Prize, Sid Fleischman has never won a Newbery Medal — nor have most of his fine novels, with their beautiful sense of timing and their peppery, picturesque language, been designated notable by the American Library Association. Sid Fleischman is a magician — not merely a professional one — but an alchemist turning words and historical situations into tall tales which have won him the love of young readers.

So much for humor expressed by language; but humor can also be created by language. Kornei Chukovsky, in From Two to Five (University of California), speaks of the logic of nonsense verse — “rhymed topsy-turvies” — and explains the small child's passion for the absurd and the incongruous as a flaunting of his new awareness of ordered reality. In this issue of The Horn Book David McCord, a modern master of words, takes a critical “Second Look” at Laura E. Richards's Tirra Lirra (Little), a time-honored book of nonsense and wordplay.

Laughter adjusts perspectives and brings a renewal of sanity; it is a mechanism for survival. At this annual time of giving let us mine our rich deposits of comic material and bestow on children their rightful gifts of laughter and of nonsense, which Walter de la Mare called an “indefinable 'cross' between humor, fantasy/ and a sweet unreasonableness.” E.L.H.

From the December 1979 issue of The Horn Book Magazine