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chriskoppenhaver 's review for:
The thing that makes Captain Underpants so brilliant, so funny, and so popular with so many readers is not (just) the potty humor, names like Warden Schmorden and Director Schmector, and paragraphs like:
"MY NAME IS NOT PROFESSOR POOPYPANTS!" screamed the angry villain. "That was a ridiculous name! So I changed it to Tippy Tinkletrousers!"
It's not (just) the interactive, patented FLIP-O-RAMA pages where the action scenes come to life. It's not (just) that the books often include comics by protagonists George and Harold, just the way third graders would write/draw them. Nor is it (just) the wildly inventive, stream-of-consciousness plots where anything a third-grader might imagine can happen without any concern for logical consistency.
No, the true brilliance lies in paragraphs like this one:
One brisk evening in late October, the entire prison was yawning with excitement. The prisoners had all gathered in the bleachers under a clear, moonlit sky, as the prison band played a slow, reverent, and deeply moving rendition of "Whoomp! (There It Is)". After everyone dried their eyes, Warden Gordon Bordon Schmordon stepped onto the stage to congratulate himself. He proudly bragged about his great humility, confessed his intense hatred of intolerant people, and spoke for hours about his legendary brevity.
Or the way that Pilkey constantly works in things like this description of George and Harold's mean principal's life in prison:
Poor Mr. Krupp. He had been locked up at the Piqua State Penitentiary for months, and the life of a jailbird just wasn't his thing. All day long he had people bossing him around. He ate nutritionally deficient, horrible-tasting meals in a filthy cafeteria. He got bullied constantly by a bunch of meat-headed thugs, and he spent his days doing menial "busy work" in an overcrowded, poorly ventilated sweatshop.
Mr. Krupp was told when to eat, when to read, and when to exercise. He even had to ask permission to go to the bathroom! He was constantly bombarded with pointless rules, ridiculous discipline, random searches, metal detectors, security cameras, and pharmaceuticals designed to make everyone compliant and docile. It was a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding.
Along with the running gags and the way he works in subtle layers of humor, like the newspaper article in this image, which is an actual article with itty bitty print:
A couple of the paragraphs in the middle of the article read:
. . . This guilty verdict ended the sensational scandal that stunned the world, received massive coverage in all of the news outlets, and interrupted the narrative flow of this book with a poorly drawn newspaper that contained a bunch of really tiny words.
Dr. Kent. C. Toogood, president of Doctors United Movement to Banish Tiny Words in the Story (D.U.M.B. T.W.I.T.S.) warned that illustrations containing small words can cause eye strain, which could lead to headaches, nausea, and ridiculous acronyms. . . .
As I said in my review of The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future, "No one does stupid humor as intelligently as Dav Pilkey."
It's been six years since the last Captain Underpants book, though, and Pilkey seems to know his old audience has aged. This "Ninth Epic Novel" is significantly longer and denser than the previous ones, and is certainly not a beginning chapter book like the others. There is even a shift in tone and topic after the first part, with the large middle section of the book being less slapstick and fantastical, more grounded in the reality of its readers. I'm curious to know how those readers react to it; I, for one, obviously enjoyed it.
To say more about the convoluted time-travel plot that takes us to George and Harold's origin story gets into spoiler territory, so I won't.
"MY NAME IS NOT PROFESSOR POOPYPANTS!" screamed the angry villain. "That was a ridiculous name! So I changed it to Tippy Tinkletrousers!"
It's not (just) the interactive, patented FLIP-O-RAMA pages where the action scenes come to life. It's not (just) that the books often include comics by protagonists George and Harold, just the way third graders would write/draw them. Nor is it (just) the wildly inventive, stream-of-consciousness plots where anything a third-grader might imagine can happen without any concern for logical consistency.
No, the true brilliance lies in paragraphs like this one:
One brisk evening in late October, the entire prison was yawning with excitement. The prisoners had all gathered in the bleachers under a clear, moonlit sky, as the prison band played a slow, reverent, and deeply moving rendition of "Whoomp! (There It Is)". After everyone dried their eyes, Warden Gordon Bordon Schmordon stepped onto the stage to congratulate himself. He proudly bragged about his great humility, confessed his intense hatred of intolerant people, and spoke for hours about his legendary brevity.
Or the way that Pilkey constantly works in things like this description of George and Harold's mean principal's life in prison:
Poor Mr. Krupp. He had been locked up at the Piqua State Penitentiary for months, and the life of a jailbird just wasn't his thing. All day long he had people bossing him around. He ate nutritionally deficient, horrible-tasting meals in a filthy cafeteria. He got bullied constantly by a bunch of meat-headed thugs, and he spent his days doing menial "busy work" in an overcrowded, poorly ventilated sweatshop.
Mr. Krupp was told when to eat, when to read, and when to exercise. He even had to ask permission to go to the bathroom! He was constantly bombarded with pointless rules, ridiculous discipline, random searches, metal detectors, security cameras, and pharmaceuticals designed to make everyone compliant and docile. It was a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding.
Along with the running gags and the way he works in subtle layers of humor, like the newspaper article in this image, which is an actual article with itty bitty print:
A couple of the paragraphs in the middle of the article read:
. . . This guilty verdict ended the sensational scandal that stunned the world, received massive coverage in all of the news outlets, and interrupted the narrative flow of this book with a poorly drawn newspaper that contained a bunch of really tiny words.
Dr. Kent. C. Toogood, president of Doctors United Movement to Banish Tiny Words in the Story (D.U.M.B. T.W.I.T.S.) warned that illustrations containing small words can cause eye strain, which could lead to headaches, nausea, and ridiculous acronyms. . . .
As I said in my review of The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future, "No one does stupid humor as intelligently as Dav Pilkey."
It's been six years since the last Captain Underpants book, though, and Pilkey seems to know his old audience has aged. This "Ninth Epic Novel" is significantly longer and denser than the previous ones, and is certainly not a beginning chapter book like the others. There is even a shift in tone and topic after the first part, with the large middle section of the book being less slapstick and fantastical, more grounded in the reality of its readers. I'm curious to know how those readers react to it; I, for one, obviously enjoyed it.
To say more about the convoluted time-travel plot that takes us to George and Harold's origin story gets into spoiler territory, so I won't.