Author Uses Lowly Pun as a Base to Teach Kids

By Jim Nichols

[excerpts reprinted with permission from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Saturday, March 1, 1997]

A woman goes in to see her doctor complaining of water on the knee.

"What should I do?" she asks.

"Wear pumps," her doctor replies.

When Brian Cleary came across that joke in a book when he was 9 or 10, he didn't get it. But he wanted to. So he tracked down his mother and asked her to explain it and discovered that as well as being water movers, pumps were a type of women's shoes.  Suddenly, like a kid who just figured out a good knock-knock joke he thought the gag was hilarious

And he learned something new.

Puns and double entendres can make adults roll their eyes and groan. But to children, they can be delightful, as well as serve as a sort of code that separates kids who get a joke from those who don't.

Two years ago, when Cleary decided to become a children's author, he remembered how the desire to get that joke motivated him to understand the double meaning in it. Now 37, the Lakewood writer believes the magic and mystery of double meanings and wordplay can push children to learn.

"Kids enjoy laughing and are seldom bored when they find something funny," he said in a November speech to elementary teachers and librarians. "They also ask questions, often to adults, because they understand that the more words they can comprehend about a funny story or a joke, the more they'll enjoy it."

Humor with a lesson

In the last two years, Cleary has had four books published and has three more on the way through a Minneapolis-based educational publishing house called Lerner Publications Co. The books brim with a love of language and ways to tweak and stretch it, which for Cleary is a fascination that goes back to the day that the pump joke left him giggling.

He loads page after page with quick verses of corny pun and fun, the kind of knock-knock-joke homonym humor that gives youngsters a laugh and, some-times, a lesson along with it.

"When a kid can understand that a word can mean two things, there's some real thinking going on," Cleary said recently as he sat on the couch where he pens his books in longhand. "They have a vested interest in finding out what a word means, because it's the punch line to a joke."

The titles of Cleary's thin, wildly illustrated volumes give hints to the dry humor between their covers: "You Never Sausage Love" (a kid's account of his par-ents' romance, built around food puns); "It Looks a Lot Like Rein-deer" (a puns-per-page book without a story); "Jamaica Sand-wich" (a lesson in geographical place names, if not geography) and "Give Me Bach My Schubert" (wordplay set to a musical theme).

An example, from "You Never Sausage Love":

My Nana is as gouda cook as you will ever meat. / Cheese al-ways bacon cookies, and I edam by the sheet.

When Cleary pitched his books to publishers in 1995, the folks at Lerner Publications took stock of his work and said, "Lettuce steak you to a poultry advance, and we'll see if the books turnip green." Or words to that effect.

Almost 30 years alter writing his first poems -- verses about Halloween -- Cleary can fillet sense of pride in the heart that beets under his gravy neck sweater, knowing he has reached one of his life's goals: being a published book author. Praise the lard.
Introducing wonders

Cleary believes the books are "a way of introducing some of the wonders of our language -- by humor, through the back door."

In "Reindeer," a young boy spins puns on animal names --and sometimes stretches them like a pretzel bender -- into snippet-stories of family members and friends:

My grandma wears a two-foot wig that's held on with ape pin. But if you think her hair is big, ewe otter sea urchin. Although she's funny looking, she's deer as she can be. / When I asked her for some doe, she gave a buck to me."

Lerner hired Minneapolis artist Rick Dupre (whom Cleary has never met) to illustrate the books with collagelike artwork that sprawls across facing pages. The illustrations give each pun a double-page spread of sight gags that sometimes help explain the verse, and sometimes are simply indulgent. Each volume contains only about 14 pages, and 35 or 40 puns and wordplays.
Cleary said he aimed the books not at beginning readers, but at youngsters with a footing in read-ing, with enough sophistication to appreciate Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Yet some of the jokes, he concedes, are arcane enough that few kids below fifth grade will get them -- and even at that level, many children may be either bored or bewildered by the puns they don't understand.
But Cleary said that disparity is all right, even desirable. The books have such a range of complexity that some kids might un-derstand and laugh at 20 or 30 puns, while others grasp only five. But all will come away with something, he said.

Criticized in print

The few published reviews the books have generated have been mixed. In a June 1996 review of "Reindeer" in School Library Journal. Baltimore librarian El-len M. Riordan called Cleary's humor forced, described the book's premise as heavily con-trived and derided Dupre's art-work, calling it obtuse. In the same publication, a Minnesota li-brarian reviewing "Jamaica Sandwich" was more understanding, saying the book would appeal to kids who like silly puns.

And while Publishers Weekly praised the "zesty, imaginative rhyme" in "Jamaica Sandwich" last February, it described Dupre's artwork as cacophonous and chided the book for not locat-ing its geographic subjects on a map.

Cleary said he has heard criticism about the books' lack of story lines. He is unabashed about that. Asked if the books are excuses to string puns together rather than storybooks, he unhesitatingly replied, "You bet they are.

"You want a story? Read 'Gone With the Wind,'" he said. "These aren't stories. They're joke books. The whole thing of a beginning, a middle and an end has been done to death."

Cleary claims he was a so-so student while growing up in Rocky River, with a mind more prone to wandering and day-dreaming than to studying.

He fared well enough to get ac-cepted at St. Ignatius High School (as "part of the control group," he joked) and, later, to earn a com-munications degree from John Carroll University.
In school he felt inadequate. Cleary said. But, he added, "In writing I found something I could do at least as well as my peers, if not better."

One of nine

As one of nine brothers and sis-ters, Cleary was at Carroll while some of his younger siblings were only beginning to read. Big brother read to the little ones, and Cleary rediscovered his love for children's books.

But he didn't much consider the notion of writing kids books himself until a few years ago, when he felt a bit of a midlife cri-sis.
But, he said, he found himself in his mid-30s --"on the 50-yard line as far as life goes" -- feeling unfulfilled.

Only half-joking, Cleary said he despaired upon realizing that by the time they were his age, Fidel Castro had taken over Cuba and Bobby Kennedy was attorney general of the United States. In his speech to the teachers and li-brarians, Cleary said he looked at himself and saw "a true renaissance man when it came to incompetence."

He decided to write something funny.

He isn't related to Beverly Cleary, and his books haven't brought him the legendary status of that famous children's author. But Cleary and his books have gotten some attention. When a program host on Minnesota Pub-lic Radio read "Give Me Bach My Schubert" on the air last year and coaxed readers to pen their own puns, the stunt generated 147 responses.

Cleary speaks six or seven times a year to groups of children and educators, and has done book signings at bookstores. Marilyn Daniels, manager of children's and youth services at the Lakewood Public Library, said home-town readers have checked out Cleary's books 10 to 20 times per copy since the library added them to its collection last year, meaning they get snapped up nearly upon return.

Though Cleary didn't discuss sales figures, he said the four vol-umes have sold well enough at $11 to $15 -- mostly to libraries and schools, but also through ma-jor retail outlets -- to make the work financially rewarding, and well enough for Lerner Publica-tions to ask for the three others now being illustrated. The experi-ence, he said, has been encourag-ing enough that he may write more.

"If I have a talent for making some fourth-grader who hates school and reading to hate it a little less, then I have to do the most with what I've been issued," Cleary said.